The status of Operation Minutemen

Just about every self-identified smart person in this country - college professors, New Yorker subscribers, everyone who lives in my neighborhood - disapproves of the Minutemen, those citizen volunteers who two weeks ago began patrolling the Mexican border in Arizona. Liberals promptly and predictably attacked the Minutemen as racists. President Bush himself called them "vigilantes."

Maybe so. But here's something you may not know: The Minutemen have been remarkably effective. The number of would-be illegal aliens attempting to cross the border in areas where they are patrolling has dropped by half in recent days.

Surprised? You shouldn't be. The biggest lie told about illegal immigration is, we can't control it. But of course we can. Tomorrow morning, we could militarize the border, replacing the Minutemen with armed federal agents. Tomorrow afternoon, the government could begin forcing businesses to stop hiring illegal immigrants. By this time next week, the immigration problem would look a lot different. Not solved, but much closer.

So the question isn't, can we do it? The question is, do we want to? Do we care enough about the effects of illegal immigration - the threat of terrorism, the assaults on our common culture - to do something about it? On that question, the Minutemen speak for most of us.

--- Tucker Carlson Unfiltered, PBS, April 15, 2005