At the Naco Border Patrol detention center, I interview Jose Andres Perez, 21. He is bewildered and wide-eyed and covered in dirt. He tells me his story through a translator, and then is put back in a cage with a dozen other young men, all as filthy but not so innocent-looking.

Perez lived in Puebla, 1,200 miles south of the border, in a three-room hut that he rented with his mother and father and 13 others. They together worked a lemon farm but the money wasn't enough -- 300 pesos or $30, a week -- and his parents became ill. So Perez made the trek north -- a 20-day journey -- moving day and night, mostly on foot, but sometimes, if he was lucky, on hitched rides. At the border, before crossing, banditos robbed him at gunpoint of 500 pesos, along with his backpack and food -- everything he had. In the dusty, broken-down border town of Naco, he found a coyote to guide him over the desert into the towering Huachuca Mountains.

Coyotes, like their animal namesake, prey on pollos -- chickens -- like Perez. When a coyote gang leads pollos north, they march their cargo fast and cruelly. Families are often separated, wives from husbands, mothers from children, to keep them scared. Sometimes the coyote feeds his pollos pills, a mix of ephedrine, caffeine and aspirin. Ironically, the pill slows people up because of its diuretic effect -- migrants literally piss their lives away in the desert.

Perez crossed with a group of 16 others, after midnight, in cold winter, so he wore three torn layers -- a plaid button-down shirt, an orange vest, a blue windbreaker -- to keep warm. His dusky face was covered in dirt, his jeans -- he wore two pair, one over the other -- soaked in red mud. The group labored up the ridges, through the spiny cactus, to 7,000 feet, and snow fell as they climbed. Then they dropped, exhausted, into a sheer valley called Ash Canyon, where the coyote told them to sleep. As Perez lay in the snow, he thought of Los Angeles, where his two brothers had a job for him, sewing pants at a few dollars an hour. The next day, Perez was captured by Border Patrol after his coyote abandoned him while he slept.

Many border officials, like Simcox, say they don't fault people like Perez for trying to flee the poverty of Mexico. Instead they blame current American laws that punish immigrants but do little to penalize the businesses that profit from cheap labor. One U.S. park ranger, formerly with the Border Patrol, tells me that "border policy is clinically insane. It's schizophrenic." The ranger doesn't want to get on the wrong side of his boss, he tells me, so he won't let me use his name. To begin with, he says, "Stopping the flow at the border is a small part of the issue. Because they all make it through. I'm catching the same guys the next day, the same day, a week later."

Beyond that, the park ranger says he is frustrated because he can do nothing about an American economy that demands workers like Perez. "We can't go in and take 10,000 aliens from the tomato harvest because of the huge economic impact," he says. "We would cause a political uprising. People want their cheap lettuce, man."

Today, immigration observers point out that more than a billion dollars a year is sunk in keeping illegals out, and once they're in, billions of dollars depend on them staying. Without illegals, a great many industries -- agriculture, meat-packing, restaurants, hospitals, construction, landscaping -- would be thrown into chaos. It is no stretch to say that the hand of the Mexican migrant feeds the United States. He picks the food in the fields, stocks it on the shelves in the supermarkets, cooks it in the restaurants, and cleans the dishes afterward.

"Our economy depends on a robust influx of immigrant labor," says immigration scholar and author Jacoby. "Our workforce is more and more educated and middle-class. People don't want to work outside in the fields. So we have whole industries that rely on international smuggling cartels to get their workers." However, Jacoby says, "Illegal immigrants are not stealing jobs from American workers. They're doing jobs most Americans don't want to do."

In the meantime, "interior enforcement" -- raids on farms and construction sites that employ migrants -- has declined by 80 percent since 1998. In 1992, the Immigration and Naturalization Service fined 1,063 employers for illegal labor violations. By 2001, that number had plummeted to a piddling 78. A senior agent with the U.S. Border Patrol, who spoke honestly and therefore anonymously, tells me, "Well, why not hire the illegal? He works just as hard, if not harder, than an American, and for half the money. That's the big magnet. If you're ever gonna stop this, you gotta start fining employers. You gotta demagnetize the job pull."

It is these larger currents of business and politics that push the problems of illegal immigration far beyond the control of Simcox and company. Still, on their Web site, the Minutemen claim that their vigil on 23 miles (of the 2,000-mile border) reduced immigrant crossings by almost two-thirds over a year -- from about 12,000 in April 2004, to just under 3,000 this April. Spokespersons with customs and border patrol in both Washington and Arizona say the Minutemen skewed the numbers.

Barry Morrissey of U.S. Customs and Border Protection points out that apprehensions did decline in April 2005, but that's due to a new program, the Arizona Border Control Initiative, which deployed dozens of extra patrol agents along the border. The new program "was not done in conjunction with, or as a response to, the Minutemen," Morrissey says. Ultimately, he says, the Minutemen were more of a hindrance than a help with their reports: "In a number of cases, Border Patrol agents had to be deployed for no good reason."

Similarly, much of the Minutemen's rhetoric about illegal aliens sapping American services and burdening the tax system doesn't entirely stand up to the facts. As the New York Times reported in April, the Social Security Administration estimates that illegal immigrants, many of whom are Mexican, contribute as much as $7 billion annually in Social Security revenues and $1.5 billion to Medicare coffers. Illegal immigrants pay into both systems because they provide phony Social Security numbers and fake I.D.s to their employers, who then withdraw taxes from their paychecks. In this boon to the American social safety net, migrants don't reap the benefits. Studies show that when federal agencies contact employers about dubious Social Security numbers, employers fire the migrants or the migrants quit their jobs for fear of being deported. In the words of a Border Patrol officer, "That's an exploited worker."

Today, promising solutions linger on the horizon. This week, Sens. John McCain and Edward M. Kennedy will introduce an immigration bill that would make it easier for undocumented workers already in the U.S. to apply for visas or green cards after paying a fine. The migrants would receive three-year visas that could be renewed once. After working for six months, they would be able to apply for permanent legal residency. Last year, President Bush urged a "guest-worker" program that would be open to illegal immigrants and other foreigners. Bush supports giving workers legal status for three-year renewable periods, but wants them to return to their countries when their jobs are done.

Jacoby likes both plans. They "give the people already here a chance to earn their way in out of the shadows," she says. "And if all the jobs that Americans don't want to do are filled by authorized people, there's going to be much less incentive for other people to come walking across the border illegally."

For his part, Simcox endorses a guest worker program, but in a manner so demanding and far-reaching that it could never be implemented. "It would have to be all employer-paid," he says. "The employer pays for medical checkup and care, immunization, safe transport into the country -- so the worker can enter this country with dignity -- insurance, proper I.D., and a safe workplace. Anything that an American worker would have. All of a sudden employers are right back to paying $21 an hour. That's good capitalism."

I tell him this seems to refute his avowed distaste for government regulation and his self-styled image as a frontiersman. I point out, too, that millions of legal American workers do not have healthcare, safe transport, insurance or a safe workplace. But Simcox is not tripped up by his own contradictions. "No, it'll stop people from being exploited," he says. "It'll make employers think about hiring Americans again because they're gonna have to pay Mexicans the same goddamn wages."

This is the zealot's brand of twisted progressivism. You have to wonder whether Simcox even wants it to succeed. In the meantime, don't tell him that his Minuteman Project was a bust. It was nothing of the kind, he says. In fact, he has already roped in volunteers to monitor the California border in August. Simcox insists he will keep lobbying government to implement his guest-worker program and is determined to seal the border -- seal it utterly. "We, the Minutemen," he says proudly, "have modeled for the Department of Homeland Security what effective border security can be."

Additional reporting by Julia Scott.

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