The Minutemen: "anti-immigration cranks" in the D.C. 'burbs

the wapo dismisses the minutemen's operation in fairfax county as "simple harassment" with nary a mention of the simmering racial and ethnic bias undertones... it is precisely those undertones that place this self-proclaimed national illegal immigration enforcement movement in the potentially dangerous category...

[N]o amount of spying on, photographing or hassling undocumented day laborers and their employers will eliminate [an] irrepressible demand for labor.

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.

Reveling in self-importance, 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.

i have said many times that, if all the hispanic laborers in this country, documented, undocumented or otherwise, were to stop working at precisely the same instant, the country would shut down...

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