The Daily Show slyly lets child-immigrant repellers make their best case

On Thursday night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart turned back to one of the summer's big stories, the large influx of young immigrants, mostly from Central America. He started out with the TV-pundit panics about these children bringing disease into U.S. schools. The children are screened before being released, but "let's not worry about the facts — immigrant children are scary, and we'll figure out why," Stewart said, handing the show over to correspondent Michael Che.

Che talked with Amila Merdzanoic of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, who advocates for the child immigrants. But he spent most of his report speaking with Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, who calls the arrival of these children a covert "Trojan horse–type of invasion into the United States." Next spring he's organizing a massive armed operation all along the Mexico-U.S. border, called Operation Normandy. ("Wouldn't that make us the Nazis?" Che asked.)

Mostly, Che let Gilchrist make his case for why America should be afraid of these youths from Central America, and why it's fine to let them live in danger in their home countries: "We're all going to die someday — we can't stop that." This is true, but watch his expression as he grapples with that thought in this context. --Peter Weber

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