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Minutemen make stop in Nashville
By Christine Buttorff, News Correspondent
May 09, 2006

Midway through a two-week tour of 13 cities in the South and Southwest, the Minutemen Caravan Project stopped at Nashville’s War Memorial Plaza Monday night. The group aims to stop illegal immigration, and has been patrolling the Arizona/Mexico border periodically for over a year.

Nearly 200 people attended Monday’s rally.

“I bought my house 16 years ago and never thought I’d buy into the third world,” said Tim Williams, an auto mechanic from Madison. He expressed frustration at the number of immigrants in Madison, who, he said, have their own “cash economy.”

The construction industry was fingered as a primary culprit by many attendees of the rally, because they accuse the industry of continuing to hire illegal immigrants. “Businesses should stop hiring them,” said another Madison resident, David Meister.

Raymond Herrera is one of the Minutemen who was on the border patrol and is now traveling with the tour. He was a carpenter until he lost his job 15 years ago, and his two sons are now carpenters in California. Herrera said neither of them could find jobs because the contractors would rather hire cheap, illegal immigrant workers.

“They’ve destroyed my life and now they’re destroying my sons’,” Herrera said. He said the federal congressional proposals to give amnesty to illegal immigrants is a “smokescreen,” and that the laws on the books need to be enforced.

While most of the crowd was sympathetic to the cause of the Minutemen, a few hovering in the background were not. Raymond Casares, a spokesman for the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, agreed that particular industries seem to be feeding the cash or underground economies: “Construction trades have been rife with that practice.”

But Casares said that America needs to “bring [illegal immigrants] out of the shadows so they can contribute.”

The Minuteman Caravan Project began May 3 in Los Angeles and will end May 12 at a rally in Washington, D.C.