Minutemen at the Polls

    Last week California State Representative James Campbell won a special election to fill the U.S. House of Representatives seat vacated when Chris Cox was appointed to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission this summer.

    (However,) Jim Gilchrist, founder of the volunteer border-watching group known as the Minutemen, ran as an independent on a border-security platform, and garnered about a quarter of the vote. In fact, Gilchrist actually won among voters who cast ballots on election day; Campbell needed absentee ballots to put him over the top.

    Lawmakers in Washington are taking this political signal very seriously. Before the election, Bob Novak reported that the sense among Republicans on Capitol Hill was that "a strong showing by Gilchrist -- anything above 20 to 25 percent" would doom the guest-worker program favored by President Bush. After the election, an anonymous congressman told John Fund that "members will be spooked at the thought of primary challengers or third-party candidates draining votes from them with an immigrant-bashing platform."

    the Minutemen have a 54% percent favorable rating and only a 22% unfavorable rating, according to Rassmussen Reports.

    The Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, led by Tom Tancredo of Colorado, issued a staff report in June titled "Results and Implications of the Minuteman Project" indicating that during a month-long period of intense activity in Arizona, the volunteers demonstrated some important facts about border enforcement.

    For one thing, adding manpower at the border is quite effective: "An average six additional personnel on station per border mile proved effective in dramatically reducing illegal crossings." For another, adding manpower at the border does not require the two years of training that the Border Patrol officers receive: "[T]he Minutemen demonstrated that auxiliary personnel can be trained and deployed in three days. The lesser duties of supporting higher-trained Border Patrol and other state and federal law enforcement agencies does not require the full legal skills of Border Patrol agents."

    It would take 36,000 additional personnel to seal the Southern border. Tancredo and Gilchrist favor using the National Guard for this purpose, but that would be a dubious use of military resources: The permeability of the Mexican border, while dismaying, is not the national security emergency that many immigration hawks portray it as. As Richard Miniter persuasively argues in Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror, it is very unlikely that terrorists would enter the U.S. through Mexico. Canada has Muslim communities that radicals can blend into and move through freely; Mexico does not. (The Canadians, thankfully, have been cooperative in helping beef up border security.)

    But a new force to support the Border Patrol along the Minuteman model, which could be built up relatively quickly, is well worth pursuing.

    The Minutemen don't just operate at the border, and their work in the interior can guide policymakers, too. Minutemen in Virginia, according to a Washington Post report last month, have been photographing day laborers and the contractors who hire them with the intent of creating a database to turn over to the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS should be able to use this information to determine whether employers are following employment-tax laws. It's not a bad strategy for the feds themselves to try out, and may even appeal to liberals who fret over the treatment of "undocumented" workers: As Michelle Cottle put it in an online New Republic column, "why not go after the demand for [illegal] labor at least as vigorously as the supply? In the best cases, these employers are cheating the system by hiring dirt-cheap workers on whom they won't pay taxes. In the worst, they are abusing some of our society's most legally vulnerable members."