Know Your Right-Wing Speakers: Jim Gilchrist
By Joseph Peha, University of Denver
Tuesday October 31, 2006
It takes more than 60 seconds to understand the Minutemen, especially their founder, Jim Gilchrist. Gilchrist launched the Minutemen Project on April 1, 2005 by calling for volunteer border watchers along Arizona’s border with Mexico. Right-wing radio happily obliged in spreading the word. Hundreds showed up.
 Gilchrist and his binocular-toting cohorts love to be seen as regular guys defending the interests of the United States by helping to implement existing immigration laws and decrease competition for American workers. As Gilchrist writes in his book, “we do not want to see the American middle class brought to its knees.” He even advocated economic justice for the developing world on the Colbert Report: “At some point we will be able to raise the standards of third world countries so that they will not engage in this economic exodus into the United States.”
Gilchrist’s good intentions, however, are perverted by his ethno-centric, scapegoating solutions. Gilchrist envisions the United States flanked by a wall fortifying the southern border with Mexico, coupled with the mass deportation of all undocumented immigrants—including their native-born children who are legal citizens. In the meantime, he and his Minutemen patrol the border armed with folding chairs, cell phones, and an eagle-eye for immigrants. When they see someone trying to cross the border, they call the Border Patrol to detain and invariably deport him.
After founding the Minuteman Project, Gilchrist ran in a special election for the U.S. House of Representatives. The fulcrum of his political platform was, of course, immigration. Gilchrist didn’t win in Orange County, California, but he garnered a startling 25 percent of the vote as an independent in the general election. When running for office, Gilchrist toned down his past rhetoric. Gilchrist has said the country risks having “100 tribes with 100 languages,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. “I see neighborhood armies of 20 to 40 going out and killing and invading one another,” he said, adding that unless the U.S. incites a revolution in Mexico, a second American civil war could develop because of tensions between ethnic groups.
If you think all this sounds vaguely white supremacist, you aren’t alone. While Gilchrist was leading the Minutemen, numerous members of the National Alliance, the largest neo-Nazi group in the country, joined the organization’s ranks.
Gilchrist’s inflammatory rhetoric recently caused a fracas at Columbia University, where chanting protestors rushed the stage as he delivered a speech sponsored by the Columbia College Republicans, cutting the event short. This was hardly an effective way of countering Gilchrist’s message, seeing as it generated much negative coverage of the protestors, who came across, whether fairly or not, as narrow-minded and bullying. Although Campus Progress encourages students to engage and question right wing speakers, we also always support our opponents’ right to speak without harassment.
In July, Gilchrist published Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America’s Borders. The book demonstrates that like many xenophobes, Gilchrest’s paranoia is endless. For instance, he somehow ties together Marxists, the Ford Foundation, and undocumented immigration in a dark plot to annihilate the country. “[R]adicals on the political Left, including Marxists, have openly embraced illegal immigration as a strategy to destroy the U.S.,” he writes. “Thus, the Left began to support unrestrained illegal immigration calculating that an open-borders policy would bring into the country a vast underclass that would serve as the new proletariat necessary to destroy the U.S. from within, accomplishing through immigration what had never been accomplished by war or revolution.”
Apart from these ridiculous arguments, Gilchrist flagrantly spins his facts. He insists throughout the book that there are about 30 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., although the Pew Hispanic Center estimates the number is around 12 million. But even when he confronts Jeffrey S. Passel, senior research associate at the Pew Hispanic Center, Gilchrist asks, “How accurate is our estimate of 30 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S. today?” The reply isn’t exactly what he was hoping for. “ Mexico would be empty if that were the case,” Passel says. But that’s no deterrent. Even though Gilchrist confronts yet another authority on the subject who says his number is inflated, he still continues to use it throughout the book.
And where does this “30 million” number come from in the first place? It’s easy when you know where to look, especially when you’re armed with binoculars! According to Gilchrist, “If you add in the number of amnesties that have been given since 1986 and the number of children who are not illegal because they were born here, but they are still in families where the parents are illegal, you begin to get close to an estimate of 30 million illegal immigrants.” Even though they’re Americans by law, Gilchrist counts the children of undocumented immigrants as non-citizens!
Instead of hunting for immigrants, some of Gilchrist’s fellow Minutemen need to turn their sights on his intellectual integrity. By exaggerating the consequences of his issue, he’s also overstating the need to resolve it. The core of Gilchrist’s argument is rotten.
Such gross misrepresentations may result from his skewed view of reality. Although he acknowledges that undocumented immigrants often live in dire conditions, Gilchrist somehow comes to this conclusion: “At the high end, an immigrant family could conceivably package together the equivalent of $80,000 annual after-tax revenue, or even more. This is especially true if we look at the extended family unit and combine multiple-person incomes, adding in ‘free’ education, plus any welfare or medical benefits that some in the extended family unit may receive.”
Economics aside, Gilchrist deludes himself about the political ramifications of undocumented immigration. “Sadly, our politicians also think they will gain from illegal immigration. Both political parties cater to undocumented immigrants, hoping to win their support.” That sounds like a reasonable hypothesis—except that non-citizens can’t vote. But hey, maybe they can lavish their favored political cronies with money from their $80,000-plus salaries.
The crux of the matter, though, is the extremism of Gilchrist’s beliefs. His thinking is grossly simplistic. Suffering from political bulimia, Gilchrist thinks that vomiting out the nation’s undocumented immigrants will be an American-style panacea, when the true problem really lies elsewhere. Does he honestly believe that building a border fence will solve Islamic terrorism? Does he truly think America’s middle class would suddenly flourish if all the undocumented were abruptly “escorted” out of the country? The troubles of the United States cannot be solved by deporting immigrants.
Gilchrist’s fixation on undocumented immigrants as America’s fountain of misery points to his frightening irrationality. His fragile worldview is propped up by numerous paranoias. Gilchrist’s own countrymen frighten him. “The Minutemen are confronted at every rally by the radical supporters of illegal immigration, many of whom appear to be nothing more than anarchists whose goal is to tear down the United States,” he asserts.
Gilchrist’s sense of reality—not the United States—is what’s in danger of fracturing beyond repair. “Is this invasion the beginning of a new civil war, where the United States will Balkanize into various ethnic regions?” he wonders in his book. “Will the American southwest secede to form the Mexican state of Aztlán?”
But who can blame him, really? The United States is in an ever growing state of disrepair. It’s certainly true, as Gilchrist contends, that the middle class is being brought to its knees. But the culprit isn’t immigration—it’s the increasing costs of health care and higher education. Gilchrist, like his Minutemen, feel compelled to do something to solve the problems encroaching upon their lives. It’s too bad their approach is so misguided. Although the Minutemen may feel inadequate (hence the name), turning undocumented immigrants into whipping boys is nothing more than a sixty-second solution.
Illustration: August J. Pollak
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Comments
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Just what part of increasing costs, and subsidizing another countries’ people in education? They are using money from tax-payers to educate, but The People were never asked for their permission…that alone is enough to impeach…
— Nancy - Nov 4, 11:19 AM - #Illegal immigration is one issue that could sway me to vote republican. As much as I agree with the left on most issues, they have it wrong on immigration. I think this is an issue that both dems, and repubs agree on. As much as the leftist pundants have tried to socially engineer the minds of left leaning Americans to turn a blind eye to the degeneration of our country, I think we all would like to see an end to the flood of the uneducated, peasantry of 3rd world, Latin American countries, streaming across our border.
— John - Oct 8, 08:51 PM - #“But the culprit isn’t immigration—it’s the increasing costs of health care and higher education.”
What a load of BS!! You can tell a college age punk by what defines their world. I certainly don’t give a flyng F*CK what you think! Control our borders, or expect a civil meltdown in the very near future. Roll that up and smoke it!
— Stupid CollegeAgePunks - Jun 17, 07:43 PM - #