May 22, 2006 9:19AM 

# The Minutemen: Modern-Day Abolitionists? 

By [Radley Balko](https://www.cato.org/people/radley-balko) 

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Astonishing quote from Wisconsin Rep. James Sensenbrenner [on *Face the Nation*](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/19/ftn/main1419437.shtml) yesterday:

> …we shouldn’t be very sympathetic to employers who are hiring large numbers of illegal immigrants and paying them very low wages and exploiting them. Those folks are the 21st-century slave masters, and what they’re doing is just as immoral as what the 19th-century slave masters did that we had to fight a civil war to get rid of.

Words fail.

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