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Minuteman rally cites a wave of support
Gaithersburg issues shelved in favor of national perspective
Wednesday, July 5, 2006

by Sebastian Montes

Staff Writer


At the first public meeting held by the state chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a panel of guest speakers rallied the audience at the Casey Community Center in Gaithersburg around what they described as a mounting tide of opposition to illegal immigrants.

‘‘Make no mistake about it: this anti-illegal immigration movement has effected nothing less than a revolution in American politics,” said Alan Tonelson, a research fellow with the U.S. Business and Industry Council and a consultant to the television talk show host Lou Dobbs. ‘‘It is astonishing to me. I’ve been involved in politics and public policy for 25 years now, and I have literally never seen anything like this.”

The Maryland branch of the national citizens group formed in earlier this year in opposition to what it sees as government encouragement of illegal immigration. While Minuteman chapters in California, Arizona and Texas focus on border patrols and security, the Maryland chapter focuses on the hiring of illegal immigrants, especially at county-funded day laborer centers.

The speakers, which also included the head of the Virginia Minutemen chapter and Chuck Floyd of Kensington, who is running for county executive as a Republican, spoke for more than two hours on what they described as the problems caused by an influx of illegal immigrants, putting the number in Maryland at 50,000.

Every few sentences drew cheers from the crowd, the litany of charges coming broadly in terms of their ‘‘burden on social services,” their failure to pay taxes — while also attempting to debunk several ‘‘myths” about illegal immigrants performing jobs Americans won’t do and helping the economy by providing cheap labor.

Day laborer centers, where illegal immigrants can go to find work, are only ‘‘a solution that makes the problems worse.”

‘‘Day laborer centers are clearly an example of subsidizing the presence of illegal immigrants in whatever area they’re in. it couldn’t be more obvious,” Tonelson said. ‘‘There is no doubt that if day laborer centers get created, they’ll draw a larger illegal immigrant population to that area.”

Michael Hethmon of the Federation for American Immigration Reform called for ‘‘an immigration time out.”

FAIR, a nonprofit citizens group that has brought numerous lawsuits against businesses and governments across the country, is working on 12 lawsuits, Hethman said. The most recent brought a roar of approval from the audience Thursday night: a suit brought against Casa de Maryland, which runs the county’s three day laborer centers, for its program to that steers its clients toward getting state drivers licenses.

‘‘Maryland is a little backward in that sense, and this drivers license suit is going to set the tone,” he said. ‘‘I can’t say a lot about it, but we’re working on hitching Casa’s wagon to a southbound train.”

Stephen Schreiman, director of the Maryland Minutemen, said that 52 people signed in at the front door. It was somewhat less than what he had wanted, but he is determined that the meeting was a success, not a disappointment.

‘‘We anticipated about 60 under good weather conditions. We were obviously hoping for a lot more. But given the weather, we exceeded our expectations.”

The meeting did not touch specifically on Gaithersburg, Schreiman said, because the idea was to focus on the overarching problems. Schreiman lives in Gaithersburg.

‘‘The problem is not really Gaithersburg,” he said. ‘‘The problem is the County Council and Casa de Maryland. We think the city is being politically manipulated into going in a direction that the people of Gaithersburg are against. The county holds the purse strings.”

The meeting did bear fruit in signing up ‘‘several” new members.

‘‘We’re not growing by huge leaps and bounds. The only people that we officially register are the guys in special operations. We have a huge following that we considered associate members, probably approaching 150.”

Casa did not send anyone to the meeting.

‘‘We’re not surprised that their attendance was low because we know that most people in Montgomery County do not share the same opinions as the Minutemen,” said Kim Propeack, a Casa spokeswoman. ‘‘We don’t need to attend a forum to hear their opinion. We hear their opinion all the time, and the forum was not going to be an opportunity to change anyone’s minds.”

But while Casa continues to hold that the Minutemen ‘‘are largely irrelevant,” the issue of immigration is increasingly becoming ‘‘highly relevant and hugely important.”

‘‘We believe that the public is very frustrated by the lack of movement by Congress. We certainly agree that the issue of immigration is much more on people minds. That does not mean that they hate immigrants more... They’re angry for legislators failing them, and that’s particularly true in great, diverse communities like Gaithersburg.”