Editorial: Immigration reform should be left up to Washington
By Daily Bruin Staff
April 4, 2005 9:00 p.m.
A hundred self-proclaimed “minutemen” have
congregated on the Arizona-Mexico border in a reckless attempt to
protest and stem the flow of illegal immigration.
The leaders of the minutemen say the federal government has
failed to protect U.S. borders and has forced them to go out and do
it themselves. They insist they are not vigilantes and are
nonviolent.
But the United States already has approximately 10,000
well-trained officers who work full time on the border ““ and
hundreds of thousands of migrants successfully cross the border
every year.
The minutemen are accomplishing nothing more than endangering
themselves and others. Many of them are equipped with firearms, and
even if they have no intention of taking aggressive action, they
are untrained and unprepared to handle themselves in a potential
conflict with migrants.
Immigration reform is an issue Washington needs to tackle, but
vigilantism will create more problems than it will solve.
