Corsi and Gilchrist want to have it both ways: They refer to the trafficking of illegal Mexican immigrants as “the 21st-century slave trade,” but they focus on its sinister outcomes rather than the immigrants’ exploitation by American business interests. There are chapters on gangs and drug cartels and the murder of a California patrolman by a Mexican hoodlum. They even summon the specter of 9/11 and suggest that Middle Eastern terrorists are coming through those drainpipes from the Mexican side.

Few deny that the estimated 250,000 to 400,000 Mexican nationals coming across the border annually (as many as 7,500 a week), constituting perhaps the largest voluntary cross-border migration in history, are changing America. It’s hard to doubt the demographics or to ignore everything from the growing presence of Spanish on the radio dial to the population’s proportion of the unskilled and semiskilled U.S. labor force.

Even Robert Pastor, the director of the Center for North American Studies at American University, whose 2001 book, Toward a North American Community, Corsi treats as enemy propaganda, says, “There’s no doubt that illegal immigrants help the middle class but hurt the people with whom they’re competing.” Pastor, who also has a Harvard Ph.D. in political science but hasn’t heard of Corsi, says, “I chose the word ‘community’ for the title very deliberately. The two most important markets for U.S. goods are Canada and Mexico. And I do propose ways to relate the three countries to each other.”

As the U.S. Congress struggled this summer with competing immigration bills and Mexico showed little evidence of addressing the gross inequities of its own society, a visiting reporter for the British newspaper the Independent put the immigration dilemma in a fresh perspective by asking what would happen “if Canada introduced a minimum wage of $70 an hour, and then tried to keep out U.S. citizens.” For that is roughly the equation confronting impoverished Mexicans who know that the prospect of even $5 an hour in the United States could represent more than 10 times what they are earning in Mexico. This geo-economic reality would seem to loom larger than all the proposed increases in Border Patrol personnel and the plan to build a bigger, better 700-mile fence. But Corsi and the Minutemen contend that this disparity is Mexico’s problem to solve, not ours.

Others, like Pastor, say the United States could be doing more to help mitigate the exodus by assisting Mexico’s economy with greater investments and foreign aid. Sergio Muñoz, the Mexican-American contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times and former executive editor of the Los Angeles Spanish-language daily La Opinión, has been writing about immigration for the last 20 years and favors the current U.S. Senate bill that proposes easing the conflict through a guest-worker program.

“Any thought that the Minutemen could bring a solution to this situation is lunatic,” Muñoz says. “It’s an illusion that you can solve this for once and for all. I feel sympathy for everyone who is doing a low-skilled job, but if someone is losing out to cheaper labor it’s because some greedy capitalist wants that cheap labor to begin with.”

Still, U.S. hospitals and schools, especially in the Southwest, have been stretched thin trying to cope with the estimated 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants drawing on their services. Consequently, racial tensions have escalated, stoked by the sight of Mexican flags waving in the streets of American cities during immigrants’ rights marches last spring. Not long ago, the billboard for the Spanish-language newscast on KRCA-TV in Los Angeles listed the station’s location as “Los Angeles, Mexico,” which some took as an ominous sign of reconquista, the dream held by some Chicanos that this land that once belonged to Mexico will be reconquered and returned one day, officially or unofficially.

All of which is ammunition for the Minutemen, however unlikely the success of their campaign is. “They say they’re going to push us back across the ocean,” Scott Paulson told me. He also told me he had “nothing against Mexicans,” only illegal ones, and had spent weekends in Tijuana with a church group building houses for the poor.

When Corsi and Gilchrist finally come across a border patrol agent, his Jeep parked just off the rutted road, they stop and introduce themselves. Pleasantries are exchanged under the 100-degree sun. Agents of the United States Border Patrol are not allowed to give interviews, but I ask the officer, who is Latino, if the Minutemen are making a difference. He thinks about this, then says flatly, “They’ve got spotters in the hills,” referring to the other side: those who charge immigrants thousands of dollars for assisted passage across the border and monitor the presence of the Border Patrol and the Minutemen. “They’ve got more high-tech equipment than we have.” He smiles and says no more.

We continue, seeing no more agents or illegals, yet ever vigilant. Near the end of the day we reach the VFW post that has been a staging area for the Minutemen. It is a forlorn little building with a dark bar inside and a screened patio, where a waitress brings us three beers. I start to ask Gilchrist about Vietnam. The opening chapter of Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America’s Borders revisits Gilchrist’s harrowing combat duty there in an effort to draw a link between the war and what he is doing here at the border. But even Gilchrist, who says he thinks about Vietnam every day, does not share his co-author’s Cold War political correctness, I discover.

Corsi listens as I ask Gilchrist how he felt when, in the mid-1990s, former Secretary of Defense Robert S. Mcnamara came out with his book In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, saying, in effect, that the war in which Gilchrist had risked his life was a tragic mistake. “I hated him for what he did,” Gilchrist answers. “It’s sad. They literally created a war where almost 60,000 Americans died, three million Vietnamese died, on both sides, because McNamara and Johnson were on an ego trip to prove their point and rally around the flag. It’s disgusting, despicable, and I’ll never forgive them.”

Stop, hey, what’s that sound? I know that the rogue intellectual sitting next to him, the one who once fretted so about the violence of the anti-war movement and the dissent of its veterans, would not want Gilchrist to go on like this. Sure enough, Corsi stands up, pulls out his cell phone to make a call, and as he gets up to go outside, he says, “This book is not intended to re-fight the Vietnam War.”

I can’t tell if his remark is directed at me or at Gilchrist. Maybe at both of us. We are off message, and to a marketer that is not a good thing, not a good thing at all. There are new villains to be discussed and pilloried. That is why we are here, is it not?

Jerry Corsi will be back soon enough to see that the job is getting done.

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Sean Mitchell is a reporter, critic, and essayist whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, New York magazine, and The Guardian, among other publications. He is a native of Dallas and lives in Los Angeles.

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