In late April 2006, Charles Birkman was listening to his usual blaring dose of conservative talk radio when he says he saw the “writing on the wall.’’ In voices angry over the upcoming immigrants’ rights marches planned across the country that May 1, he heard people like himself who feel squeezed as the middle class and who wonder where the concern is for those who play by the rules.

A one-time Green Party member and “hard-Left, anti-Christ Marxist,” Birkman found his activist streak kicking into full gear. He called his own May 1 rally in downtown Fremont to defend a Congressional bill calling for a 700-mile wall and making illegal immigration a felony. Seventy people showed up. A few weeks later, he co-founded what has since sprouted into a grassroots anti-immigration movement in the heart of the Bay Area, known for its progressive politics.

“The problem with today’s immigration is its magnitude. It’s huge. The American harmed by open borders could even be the illegal alien,” says the 37-year-old Fremont native. “In the end, we all suffer together.”

The group, which has since become the Golden Gate Minutemen in affiliation with Jim Gilchrist’s more famous Minuteman Project, focuses on education and street activism rather than physically patrolling borders.

But for Birkman, it marked an evolution in his beliefs from one political extreme to another. And now he finds himself drifting again as his fellow minutemen focus on the argument that illegal immigration is about social services and jobs. Birkman, who joined the Orthodox Presbyterian Church a year ago, says Americans need to close the borders as stewards of the land and resources God gave them. Loose borders to him symbolize Americans’ neglect of both their Christian heritage and civic responsibility.

“I think we’re wasting away our great inheritance in this country pretty rapidly,” he said.

Birkman, who assembles radar equipment in Livermore by day, has been the Golden Gate Minutemen’s evangelizer, spreader of the secure-border gospel to media and anyone who will listen.  Initially, when the group called itself the East Bay Coalition for Border Security, he told the media his name was Charles Dirkman. Alarmed by violent counter-protests, he soon altered it to Birkman. In fact, both surnames are aliases for his real name, which he asked not be published to protect family and friends uninvolved in what he calls the “populist” movement.

Under his real name, he was quoted in the media back in 1992 protesting President George Bush Sr. for being soft on the environment.

“I’ve been in a lot of causes, but have never been in anything more intense than immigration politics,” he said. “People may have various reasons for being scared. My only fear is it takes just a single wacko to hurt somebody.’’

Birkman was raised in Fremont in a middle class family and made his first appearance in the local news as an Eagle Scout. He started his college career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he traveled in anarchist and Marxist circles.

“I was very excited about the legacy of the ’60s, the highly politicized environment and was very concerned about ecological issues,’’ he said, noting that his political pursuits led to him to drop out because he fell behind in his classes. “After Berkeley, I decided to go to a less political school so I could get a degree without losing focus.’’

His next stop was San Jose State, where he completed his degree in history. One day in 1999, Birkman was stepping off a bus when he hit his head on a tree branch. Right there on the sidewalk, he broke down and cried for an hour.

“It wasn’t the tree branch that I cried about,” he said.

Birkman realized then how deeply unhappy he was. Eight years as a Marxist and anarchist left him out of touch with the core values of his country – and the working class. He turned to what he called “honest work” with his hands, becoming a carpenter and mechanic and eventually earning a second degree in electrical engineering. Four years later, he completed what he calls a “180” and became a Christian.

He says in all his causes he’s been about rational debate. He speaks in soft yet self-assured tones, with the steady cadences of a professor in jeans, work boots and a plaid Chaps shirt buttoned over a thermal. His hands move in time with his measured phrases, periodically motioning toward a hefty stack of materials for emphasis. At the top, The New American magazine, published by the John Birch Society, depicts a clay-mation American family crushed in the cogs of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which opened trade between the United States and Mexico and has been decried on all political sides for killing jobs in both countries.

Birkman says parts of the anti-immigration platform are too extreme, including deporting an estimated 12 million undocumented people in the U.S. But drying up immigration incentives would trigger waves of “self-deportation.”

“My personal goal is to help draft an immigration law enforcement initiative that city councils can adopt,” he said, similar to the one in Hazleton, Pa., that barred people who couldn’t prove legal residency from housing, social services and jobs. It was struck down by a U.S. district court as unconstitutional.

Mary Worthington of Union City has known the mild-mannered scholar from the beginning, when the minutemen called her home their headquarters. A former labor organizer, she prides herself in recognizing talent and nurturing it, and she sees a Senate seat in Birkman’s future.

“He’s well-educated and informed. I’d love to see him run for office,” she said. “He’ll say, ‘No, no – I’m not the leader. I’m not the jefe.’ But he’s the man.”

But Birkman ardently insists he doesn’t want to be the man. Whenever the subject arises, he quickly shifts the conversation back to his conviction that only the church and the family – not faith in politicians – can get America back on track.

While he plans to remain active in the anti-immigration movement, he’s grown discouraged by its secularism. At one point in March, when the group was rallying in support of raids by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the former INS, he brought hymns and his favorite Psalms for the minutemen to sing. No one knew them.Even American standards drew a blank.

“We tried singing ‘America the Beautiful’ and the national anthem, but most people were either apathetic or just didn’t know the words,” Birkman said. “We trudged along nonetheless with patriotic music. But afterwards, I thought how much the world has changed and despaired the loss of this heritage.”

Dave Salaun, a retired cop and member of the local affiliate, Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, wasn’t marching that day, but he said his faith doesn’t have much to do with his activism – and he plans to keep it that way.

“It’s an ‘our country’ issue,” Salaun said. “To me, it would be really wrong to bring religion in on it, as any reason for or against it.”

For that reason, Birkman finds himself shifting again. The church, he says, needs to reassert itself – to shake up the culture of apathy and change citizens from the inside out.

"That's my concern,’’ he adds. “I have only so much time in life, and must make choices."

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