Minutemen rally against illegal immigration
WILLIAM PETROSKI
www.desmoinesregister.com
Oct 16, 2006
About 50 people rallied against illegal immigration on Saturday at an event in Des Moines sponsored by the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a citizen-watchdog group that favors tighter controls on the nation’s borders.
“Illegal aliens are coming into this country, and they are taking your jobs away,” said Craig Halverson, western Iowa leader of the Minuteman group. He and others strongly disagreed with the pro-immigration view that immigrants only take jobs that American workers don’t want.
People attending the event on the west steps of the Iowa Statehouse carried signs which read, “Stop the illegal invasion,” “No amnesty for illegal aliens,” and “Secure our borders.”
U.S. Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican, was the keynote speaker, and he thanked the crowd for taking a stand on the issue. He said the United States needs to make changes so this nation is no longer a “job magnet” for millions of workers who cross the borders illegally. He also called for an end to “birthright citizenship,” in which thousands of pregnant women come into the U.S. illegally, giving birth to children who immediately become American citizens.
King said the concept of a fence across the U.S.-Mexican border was dismissed as a “fringe idea” in the past, but recently won approval from Congress because of grass-roots support from Americans who are unhappy about illegal immigration. He attributed much of the problem to an “unholy alliance” between American businesses that want to hire cheap labor, and left-wing liberals.
There were no counter-protesters at the rally. Pro-immigration activists in Iowa have said they consider the Minuteman group to be ill-informed, and that Iowa’s economy has benefitted from immigrants.
Experts have said it is difficult to estimated the number of undocumented immigrants, but Mark Grey, director of the Iowa Center for Immigrant Leadership and Integration at the University of Northern Iowa, has estimated that 50,000 to 75,000 Latinos in Iowa are here illegally.
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