The Minutemen Have Invaded Northern Virginia

Yes the people who want to protect us from Canadians slipping across the border to take jobs without health insurance away from Americans are in Northern Virginia. Yes, they want to do the job that local law enforcement cannot do, which is monitor "illegal" aliens, i.e. daylaborers who work day to day for extremely low paying jobs. See, local law enforcement can't do the job because immigration law is federal law and is the responsibility of federal law enforcement.

Of course, anti-immigration cranks such as the Minutemen know that, so what they are really up to is simple harassment. They train their still and video cameras on day laborers with families to feed and rents to pay and on the employers that pick them up for work. They jot down license-plate numbers and talk to each other with walkie-talkies. They convey the information they collect to the Internal Revenue Service, which, to put it mildly, has bigger fish to fry.

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the Minutemen and their ilk say they are plugging enforcement gaps that the federal government has left open. In fact they are underemployed amateurs more interested in posturing than problem-solving. In Vermont one such group got lost in the woods while hunting for undocumented infiltrators and had to ask for directions, the Boston Globe reported. Some spent their Saturday "patrol" sitting in lawn chairs in a field, staring at a tree line. People like these would dearly love to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Of course, one has to wonder about how the Minutemen earn money since they are all volunteers. Maybe instead of harassing hardworking poor people, maybe they should get into the daylabor line and get a job.