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Borderline

Joao Canziani

The U.S.–Mexico border is marked by a crude, 12-foot-high rusting metal fence that lunges into arroyos and climbs up hillsides but stops abruptly in places where the terrain is just too rough, leaving gaps that invite free passage to anyone who wants to walk through. Along this dusty, wind-raked stretch of what was, 160 years ago, the boundary separating Upper and Lower California in the Mexican Republic, the 21st-century Minutemen have staked out a promontory that offers an unobstructed view to the south, into a valley of scrub brush and irrigated farmland that has been traversed regularly by the enemy—Mexicans headed for illegal entry into the United States. None are visible at the moment, on a sun-blasted midday in late June, but Jerome Corsi is making sure, his eyes fixed to a pair of binoculars scanning the mountain valley as he hunches beneath a flagpole where the stars and stripes flap in a stiff breeze.

Corsi passes me the binoculars with instructions to examine a house that must be at least a mile away, a stuccoed Spanish colonial–style structure surrounded by green fields. “Look at that hacienda,” he says. “There’s no economic hardship there.” Noting a semi truck kicking up dust in the far distance, appearing as tiny as a toy from this vantage point, he says, “They’re probably running drugs out of there.”

A pink-faced, doughy man in jeans and a polo shirt, Jerome Corsi is 59 years old and dour as the day is long, notwithstanding the cap plopped on his white-haired head that says “Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville.” He has deployed himself here, far from anyone’s idea of tropical fun, to make the case for his latest political diatribe, Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America’s Borders (World Ahead Publishing). Corsi wrote the book with Jim Gilchrist, a decorated Vietnam veteran and founder of the Minuteman Project, a two-year-old volunteer effort to help monitor the historically porous border with Mexico. Corsi appends a Ph.D. to his name on the book’s cover. The Ph.D. is from Harvard (political science, 1972). It lends weight to Corsi, who uses his facility with words and ideas to ferociously market right-wing ideology. The scholarship (and language skill) sets him apart from Harvard MBA George W. Bush, whom Corsi has lately come to see as insufficiently conservative.

“Bush has never been here except for a photo op on a dune buggy,” Corsi says tartly a few minutes later as he climbs down an embankment to identify another obvious point of entry: the 2 1⁄2-foot-wide mouth of a drainage pipe that crosses the border under the fence and extends some 15 yards onto the U.S. side. He sticks his head inside the opening and then turns back to say, “It’s a joke. Look at these footprints. Hundreds of people are coming though this pipe every night.”

Corsi is brimming with such unverifiable certainties. His numerous books include the notorious 2004 bestseller Unfit for Command (written with John O’Neill), which fragged John Kerry with questions about his patriotism and combat record in Vietnam. He insists that there was no connection between the book and the Bush campaign. He voted for Bush but has since turned against the president on the immigration issues, particularly his failure to adequately police the border. Once described by a writer as a “jack of all tirades,” Corsi now says he believes that Bush is behind a plot to scuttle the sovereignty of the United States in favor of an open-border, multicultural North American union made up of the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

Corsi_3 “Do you want to take a firearm with you?” the Minuteman on duty, Scott Paulson, asks Tim Bueler, the 19-year-old in charge of PR for the Minuteman Project, who is escorting Corsi and Gilchrist along the border today. We’ve stopped at the makeshift lookout dubbed Patriot Point. Paulson, who installed floor coverings in Orange County “until I got pushed out by illegals six months ago,” has driven here in his Dodge truck with flag decals on both sides. He wears a .45 automatic on his hip.

“There are bounties on some of us up here,” he says, alluding to how unpopular the Minutemen might be with criminals trying to smuggle drugs and people across the border, as well as with immigrants-rights groups on both sides.Bueler, who gave up a scholarship to Patrick Henry College to serve the Minuteman cause, declines the offer of a weapon even though he has strongly implied to a reporter and photographer that danger looms.

"Some of our members are armed," Bueler says later. "[Officially] we don’t support that." Many are Vietnam vets, 55 and older, who are not shy about defending themselves. When the violent Hispanic gang MS-13 made threats against the Minutemen in March 2005, Gilchrist responded, "We’re not worried, because half of our recruits are retired, trained combat soldiers, and those guys are just a bunch of punks."

Gilchrist, 56, Corsi’s latest co-author, is a retired CPA who joined the Marines right out of high school in Providence, R.I., and within six months was in heavy combat in Vietnam. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Orange County, south of Los Angeles, as an independent in 2005, taking illegal immigration as his main issue. A tanned, plainspoken man, friendly and guileless, Gilchrist provides an instant contrast with the heavy-breathing polemicist at his side.

“Minuteman 6 to Patriot Point,” Gilchrist barks into a walkie-talkie, testing the frequency before joining Corsi and Bueler in an SUV headed down the promontory’s steep dirt incline and then off in search of more holes that have been blowtorched in the fence and for Border Patrol agents, who tend to be scarce. The back of Gilchrist’s Minuteman T-shirt sums up the mission at hand: “American Citizens Doing the Job Congress and the President Refuse to Do.”

If a Minuteman spots any trespassers, he whips out a cell phone and speed-dials the Border Patrol office in the hope that an agent is available to respond. If a party of immigrants can get past this lookout, it’s only a half-mile to Highway 94, where they can jump into a waiting car and be gone. At night whoever is stationed here lights up the area with two 500-watt spotlights, run off a generator. They are also equipped with infrared binoculars. “There’s someone here 24/7,” Paulson says.

Most of the patrolling Corsi does is in spirit only; he’s here today because he’s not above the occasional photo op himself. He lives in northern New Jersey, near Morristown, and the immigration issue is just his latest cause in a literary career spent trying to protect America from world government, Marxism-Leninism, and “the Left,” a term he often invokes in Minutemen to suggest a vast collusion of wayward academics, anti-American subversives, and Hispanic activists who aid and abet the Mexican invasion.

A contributor to the conservative websites Human Events Online and WorldNet.com and a frequent guest on Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy’s national radio show, Corsi comes across as one part patriot, one part philosopher, one part huckster. He likes to trace his belief in strong nation-states back to Aristotle while blaming Locke and Rousseau for the ungodly humanist views (Corsi is Roman Catholic) that have spawned socialism and the United Nations.

He has also written books with Ohio’s secretary of state and current Republican gubernatorial nominee J. Kenneth Blackwell (Rebuilding America: A Prescription for Creating Strong Families, Building the Wealth of Working People, and Ending Welfare); Christian financial advisor Craig R. Smith (Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil); and evangelical Christian minister Michael D. Evans (Showdown with Nuclear Iran: Radical Islam’s Messianic Mission to Destroy Israel and Cripple the United States).

“I’m a writer; it is predominantly what I am,” he tells me as we sit in the backseat of the SUV, driving down the dirt road that hugs the border fence on the California side.

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He started out as an academic, but after teaching stints at the University of Denver and the University of New Mexico he headed for the private sector, eventually founding four different companies in the 1980s and ’90s that partnered with major banks and insurance companies to market annuities, investment counseling, and health care to their clients.

About his subsequent career as a co-author of topical screeds, he says, “I can’t have Jim Gilchrist’s experience of founding the Minutemen, but I figure if I can work with a guy like Jim, I can try to capture it the way Jim has lived it. I knew he had been in Vietnam and figured that was an important part of the subject.” Vietnam is also an important part of Corsi’s resume—he participated not as a soldier but as a true believer in the rightness of our anti-communist commitment of 500,000 troops and the perfidy of the anti-war movement at home, which came to include returning veterans like John Kerry. Corsi was exempted from military service because of hereditary eczema. “My skin wasn’t good enough to kill the Vietcong,” he says.

As an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University, Corsi was less concerned with the tons of bombs being dropped on the Vietnamese by U.S. B-52s than he was with the violence associated with the anti-war and civil-rights movements. He wrote a research study, “Shoot-Out in Cleveland: Black Militants and the Police,” that was published in 1968 by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. That same year he was accepted into graduate school at Harvard. He says James Q. Wilson, the Harvard government professor famous for the line “There are no more liberals . . . they’ve all been mugged,” was one of those most responsible for bringing him to Cambridge.

While it is not news that conservatives can be found at Harvard, where influential professors such as Harvey C. Mansfield and Samuel P. Huntington hold sway, Corsi might be pushing the horizon on just how far to the right a Harvard Ph.D. can fly. He has accused Kerry of consorting with the communists in North Vietnam and reportedly hurled the “C” word at President Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and Katie Couric.

In 2004, on the conservative website FreeRepublic.com, he unleashed a stream of invective that raised his public profile in a most unacademic fashion, calling Islam a “worthless, dangerous, Satanic” religion, calling Hillary Clinton “a fat hog,” and referring to Kerry as “John F-ing Commie Kerry.”

Called to account, Corsi did not deny that he had said these things, but he explained then, and repeats now, that “they were written to be provocative” and were not intended for the general public but for a conservative chat room audience. He apologized to anyone who was offended and vowed never to do it again. “I’m not intending to make a career as a provocative writer like Ann Coulter,” he says. Still, one is left to wonder in what context his description of Senator Clinton might have sounded more circumspect.

Last year he threatened to move to Massachusetts and run for Kerry’s Senate seat in 2008. He has since decided against it, saying his wife exercised her veto. David Wade, Kerry’s spokesperson, refers to Corsi as “the Kim Jong Il of the right wing: a paranoid nut-job who makes increasingly bizarre assertions in a desperate grab for public attention.” Maybe Wade hasn’t seen him in the Jimmy Buffett hat.

Corsi_2 In fact, Corsi can be cordial as a pastor at a church picnic, but one who never gets off message. During the day I spend with him at the border he never allows himself to climb down from his temple of dire musings to let slip a casual remark about the weather, baseball, or his family. (He is married, with a 10-year-old daughter.) He is too hard at work, selling his version of history, long past and recent.

He grew up, interestingly enough, the son of a union man in Cleveland, Ohio. His father was PR director for the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen. “The Teamsters would come to the house for dinner,” he says. He got some early training in the powers of persuasion by going to work in his dad’s office as a teenager. But unions of the 1950s, though allied with the Democratic Party, were not necessarily liberal or anti-establishment, Corsi points out. “My father came from an era of labor people who today would be considered conservative. When I got accepted to Harvard, my dad said, ‘So, you’re going off to Harvard to become a communist.’ The union movement had been fighting communism and socialism since the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World],” in the 1920s. “The surviving strength of the labor movement in the U.S. was middle class—World War II veterans. Today they would be considered moderate conservatives.”

When he got to Cambridge, he was not put off by the political climate. “I was always more conservative than those around me. I liked the intellectual challenge.” He wrote his dissertation, “Prior Restraint, Prior Punishment, and Political Dissent,” which, he says, evolved from the Pentagon Papers case and the Nixon administration’s 1971 attempt to stop the New York Times from publishing a classified history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. “If you knew somebody was going to publish something that was going to endanger national security,” Corsi summarizes, “could you prevent publication?”

Far from succumbing to the liberal influences of Harvard, Corsi was jolted further to the right. “My intellectual tipping point was McGovern and [Eugene] McCarthy, when the extreme left got control of the Democratic Party. JFK and LBJ were social conservatives. But then there were more and more radical elements.”

And yet last year, speaking before the Harvard Club of New York City, he said his father had adored FDR and was friends with Lyndon Johnson, whose War on Poverty and attempts at “social engineering” so alienated the younger Corsi that he split with his father politically while still an undergraduate at Case Western.

In any case, Corsi is now after Bush, whom, it can be posited, he helped re-elect with Unfit for Command. The president has disappointed him. “Bush has essentially undertaken a liberal Democratic agenda in his second term,” he tells me. What about the war in Iraq? “That’s probably the one exception,” he says.

In a column published in Human Events Online in June, he asked whether the president might be in the process of pulling a coup d’état inside the executive branch by agreeing to a trilateral North American union with the leaders of Canada and Mexico without consulting Congress or informing the public.

Corsi says he believes that Bush privately wants open borders to grease the skids for this union. And he says illegal immigration is an issue that might sunder traditional political alliances the way the issue of slavery divided both the Whigs and the Democrats in the 1850s and led to the formation of the anti-slavery Republican Party.

Although many would say the Republicans today seem positioned to ride the wave of resentment toward illegal immigration indicated by opinion polls, Corsi is not convinced. “What remains to be seen is whether the Republican Party will survive,” he says. “Or if a more logical configuration is for Republicans like John McCain to move in the direction of becoming Democrats, and a new Republican Party will emerge—a conservative party that captures the true conservative factions that are disenchanted with the handling of immigration and will not reconcile on a compromise, any more than the Know-Nothings or the Republicans would compromise on slavery.”

It’s not every day that you hear a fond reference to the Know-Nothings—the super-nationalistic (and secretive) party that was spawned in the mid-nineteenth century by fears of Irish Catholic immigration but that joined the Republicans in opposing slavery. But then, after all, such references are what Corsi, the historian, is here for. His slavery analogy associates the anti-immigration effort with Lincoln, but his sympathy for the undocumented is often muted by his tendency to demonize them as “criminals,” even though illegal entry into the United States is classified as a misdemeanor (hence, the Minutemen cannot make citizen’s arrests; that right is reserved for witnesses to a felony).

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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.

Corsi_4 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.

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.