by Ruth Scalpone

Created on: July 06, 2010   Last Updated: July 08, 2010

The Minuteman organization is patriotic because its members watch the U.S.A. border with Mexico.  It began in 2002, when the editor of the Tombstone (Arizona) Tumbleweed, Chris Simcox, called on American citizens frustrated by the Federal government's lack of security on the border to watch the border themselves. It was called the Civil Defense Corp. In 2004, Simcox and James Gilchrist organized the Minuteman Project. Minutemen are not vigilantes watching out for people from other countries, as long as those people are legally crossing the border.

The Constitution for the United States of America states:

“We the People of the United States, in order to . . . provide for the common defence (sic). . .and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.  .  . do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”  www.constitution.org/cons/constitu/txt

The Federal government of the United States is required by the Constitution to protect U.S. citizens, as shown above.  It has failed to do that for many years.  That failure has left the Southern border open to anybody who wants to get into the U.S.A., whether to find jobs to send money to their families, sell drugs, buy weapons, or commit acts of terrorism or other crimes.  How many illegal immigrants already are in the U.S.A. is unknown because, of course, no records can be kept on people who enter the country illegally.  Estimates usually start at ten million.

Many illegal immigrants had guest visas, but they did not leave when those visas expired.  A nation that can track taxes owed by individuals would be able to maintain records of those people.    Unemployed American citizens could get jobs tracking them.

An onrush of illegal immigrants hoping to qualify for amnesty came to the U.S.A. in 1986 after President Reagan announced that illegal immigrants already living in the country would receive U.S. citizenship.  It did not end illegal immigration, as had been hoped  The number of border crossings leaped again in 2004 when President Bush proposed amnesty for illegal immigrants already living in the U.S.A. That Bill was not passed in the U.S. Senate.

In 2010, President Obama called for a mass amnesty to bring an estimated 11 million to 18 million illegal immigrants “out of the shadows." A Bill proposed in the United States House of Representatives, that not only would give amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants already in this country, would also increase the annual number of immigrants legally allowed in the U.S.A.

The Minutemen groups, named after the original Minutemen in the Revolutionary War, watch the border with Mexico, and report to the Border Patrol when they see anybody crossing into the country illegally.  Legal immigrants cross the border at legal entry points; the Minutemen do not do anything to these people because they are legal.  Minutemen are only concerned with illegal border crossings.  They watch the border because the Federal government does not.

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