Guest Post by Morbo
If you’re like me, you probably lose a lot of sleep at night over fears that crazed residents of Quebec are going to swoop down into the country and steal your job, abduct your children and run off with your significant other. They may be bearing strange forms of cheese.
Thankfully, the Minutemen are on the case. I know: You thought they just hated Spanish-speaking people. But these self-appointed border patrol vigilantes are branching out. As detailed in The Washington Post recently, the Minutemen have sent a contingent to tiny Derby Line, Vt., to look out for illegals slipping into the United States via the Great Frozen North.
This new patrol does present certain logistical problems. The United States and Canada share a border thousands of miles long that is largely unprotected. The Vermont section currently being patrolled by a handful of Minutemen is 295 miles long.
Smugglers do work the area, but they usually slip people in via heavily wooded areas on snowmobiles. Deborah Meyers, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., summed up the Minutemen’s dilemma politely: “The odds of them seeing anyone are pretty slim.”
Plus, members of the group seem to be having trouble actually finding the border. Asked to point it out, Minuteman Jeffrey Buck pointed vaguely and said, “That’s west, so I believe the border is that way. It’s not really clear to me.”
Cell phone reception isn’t so great in the middle of nowhere, so even if the Minutemen did find an illegal, it’s unlikely they would be able to summon help. Plus, the people of northern Vermont don’t seem too fond of these interlopers sticking their nose in the state’s business. Protestors greeted them upon arrival, and at one point the contingent, most of whom are from places like New York and Massachusetts, got lost and had to ask a local resident for directions.
The Minutemen have pretty much admitted that their foray into the Green Mountain State is a public relations stunt. Their real beef, they say, is that they are tired of Spanish-speaking people who slip into the country to steal our jobs.
I have a suggestion: These Minutemen clearly have too much time on their hands if they have nothing better to do than sit out in the cold and watch squirrels run around in the woods. They seem to need real work, so let’s give them the jobs the illegals are supposedly yanking out of the hands of deserving Americans: cleaning rich people’s swimming pools, doing their lawn work, picking fruit in the hot sun and working as day laborers, nannies and housekeepers for pay that doesn’t even begin to approach the minimum wage. (Benefits include: none).
Let the Minutemen spend a week doing that — if they can last — instead of sitting around on their cans. Personally, I doubt it they’ll make it.