Minutemen answers the call: in Minutemen: The Battle To Secure America's Borders, authors Gilchrist and torsi thoroughly analyze the dangers of uncontrolled immigration and provide workable solutions.

Minutemen: The Battle To Secure America's Borders, by Jim Gilchrist and Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D., Los Angeles: World Ahead Publishing, 2006, 375 pages, hardcover. (For ordering information, see the ad on the inside front cover.)

Minutemen is far more than a recounting of the volunteers who have been helping to fill the gap at our still wide-open southern border. Jim Gilchrist and Jerome Corsi have written a comprehensive survey of the horrific effects of uncontrolled immigration. In addition, they have outlined the incredibly subversive goals of current government leaders who refuse to take proper action. The authors also offer sensible and workable recommendations about what should be done to protect our nation.

Other than intense love for their country, Gilchrist and Corsi are a somewhat unlikely pair. Gilchrist, a decorated Marine Corps Vietnam veteran who grew up in tough circumstances, found himself totally angered when he learned that many of the 9/11 hijackers had overstayed their visas and were living in the United States illegally. From his home near San Diego, he was already well aware that our southern border was "almost irrelevant," and he soon became intensely energized about the problem. Corsi is a professor and accomplished journalist who earned his Ph.D. in political science at Harvard and has taught at various colleges. He coauthored Unfit For Command, the uncomplimentary recounting of Senator John Kerry's military career that had significant impact in the 2004 presidential election. Our nation's porous border and the unwillingness of the authorities to meet their responsibility to guard it brought the two together.

Mustering the Minutemen

Gilchrist launched the project he dubbed the Minutemen. On April 1, 2005, after sending out a call for help, Gilchrist placed his first contingent of a thousand civilian volunteers at the border. All they had for equipment were binoculars, cellphones, and lawn chairs. Their assignment consisted simply of reporting what they saw to the Border Patrol. Immediately, crossings over what was once a heavily traversed 23-mile stretch of the Arizona-Mexico border dwindled to nothing. These thousand unarmed civilians, who had come from all across the nation, had proved the point Gilchrist set out to demonstrate: "Americans could be effective simply by having a physical presence at the border." But they were rewarded for their sacrifice of time and personal expense by President Bush's totally unfair designation of them as "vigilantes."

According to the two authors, there are at least 30 million illegal immigrants in America today with a likely total of 100 million by 2025 if nothing more than current policy is followed. Gilchrist pulls no punches in summing up the situation for fellow Americans:

As far as I can figure, President Bush is delusional, lying, or completely clueless as to the crisis this country is facing. Whatever the situation is, the president and most members of the U.S. Senate are wrong and, frankly, criminally incompetent on this issue. When it takes some average Joe Citizen like me, who comes out of some remote suburb like Aliso Viejo, California, to bring national awareness to this crisis, there is something incompetent or corrupt within your government. This is an invasion, not a visit by neighbors asking for a cup of sugar. It's a raging invasion by illegal immigrants who are pouring unchecked into America. It could not be more obvious or more serious.

Throughout the book, Gilchrist and Corsi rely on interviews with experts whose testimonies about various aspects of the immigration invasion buttress their claims. Dr. Jeffrey S. Passel at the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Hispanic Center confirmed that "approximately 10 percent of the people born in Mexico are in the United States." Figures supplied by Dr. Steven A. Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies tell of the huge costs to taxpayers for medical care, prison incarceration, court costs, aid to highly impacted school systems, etc. His estimate of the cost to the state of California alone is $60 billion annually.

An entire chapter in the book challenges the widespread notion given credence by President Bush that there's a need for the immigrants to fill jobs because "Americans won't do them." Carrying the heading, "The 21st Century Slave Trade," this portion of the book indicts greedy businessmen paying sub-standard wages, and ambitious labor leaders who seek to swell their membership rolls with illegal immigrants.

Importing Crime, Exporting Fugitives

Next comes heart-rending details about the murder of Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff David March and his killer's immediate escape to Mexico. We are given the chilling awareness that "today, over three thousand Mexican nationals are fugitives from United States law enforcement and hiding in Mexico." Without doubt, Mexico is disinterested in extraditing known criminals, even March's murderer who has fled the United States on three other occasions while being pursued for drug smuggling and gangster activity. The March family sought in vain for help in apprehending their son's killer from President Bush and California Senator Dianne Feinstein.

The activities of Mexican-led street gangs, drug cartels, and human traffickers fill another chapter. Let no one presume that all those coming to the United States from Mexico are poor job-seekers trying to find a better life. Some, as we are told in this important book, have been classified as "Other Than Mexicans," a total of 119,192 in 2005 alone. Many are from the Middle East, some with ties to Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. Gilchrist and Corsi note that the situation at our northern border poses another threat made obvious by the March 2006 arrest in Canada of a "human cargo smuggling ring that was bringing illegal aliens from Pakistan into the United States through British Columbia." Yet, America's porous border situation finds defenders in the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Double-duty Danger

Displaying complete awareness about where our own leaders are taking the nation, Minutemen's authors note that "a serious plan is well advanced to replace the United States with a North American Union and to have a North American currency, the 'Amero,' replace the dollar." They report about the March 2005 creation by George Bush, Vicente Fox, and Canada's Paul Martin of the Security and Prosperity Partnership, identified as "an extension of NAFTA." And further demonstrating their knowledge of the overall scheme to compress the three nations into a single entity, they point to the May 2005 task force report Building a North American Community, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, and the CFR's 2001 book Toward a North American Community, authored by Robert Pastor.

Readers will be angered to learn that militant pro-Mexican groups operating in the United States receive funding from large tax-exempt foundations such as the Ford Foundation, and even from the U.S. government. According to U.S. Rep. Charles Norwood (R-Ga.), the National Council of La Raza, one of the most anti-American of several groups, received over $15.2 million in federal grants during 2005 alone. Aiming a well-deserved blast at pro-amnesty Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), the authors correct his notion that the cause of the Mexican immigrants is no different from the struggle to gain civil rights by African-Americans: Kennedy conveniently ignored the fact that the African-Americans were already U.S. citizens.

Residents of our southwestern states are well aware of the movement known as Reconquista, the determined plan to regain for Mexico the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, as well as portions of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. Yet nothing is being done by federal authorities to counter this growing movement. Instead, in the United States, illegals find encouragement to ignore existing laws that forbid the hiring and coddling of illegal immigrants.

So, what to do about this obvious threat to our nation's very existence? In rapid-fire order, Gilchrist and Corsi say: secure the border, even building a fence; do whatever is needed to secure our ports and the border with Canada; deport the illegals already here; and cease eligibility for federal handouts given to those who are here illegally. To the president of the United States, they say: "We reject the idea of a North American Union, like the European Union. We reject the giving up of American sovereignty to some type of international commission or global governing body." Bravo, Jim Gilchrist and Jerome Corsi!