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)(Book review)

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.