¡Adios, America!

by Ann Coulter

  Even Republicans who pretend to want a secure border are always telling us fences won’t work. The NEW WAY of stopping tubs from overflowing is to use mops and blow-dryers. Sure, we can always turn the water off, but that won’t work because it could always spring a leak. Let’s just keep mopping. Responding to an increasingly annoyed public, Congress has repeatedly voted to build a border fence. But somehow, the fence never gets built—and Congress does nothing. In January 2011, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security announced that it had “ended the Secure Border Initiative Network” on the grounds that “it did not meet cost-effectiveness and viability standards.”16 And if there is one thing the Obama administration absolutely insists upon, it’s cost-effectiveness and viability!

  The steadfast refusal of the amnesty crowd to agree to a fence tells us that Americans should not budge on the point. In addition to being the only sane, logical thing to do, demanding a fence forces amnesty proponents to admit that they have no intention of ever sealing the border. The surge of ninety thousand poor Central Americans across the border in 2014 proved that. Obama pretended his hands were tied. It’s the law! It wasn’t the law. So either Obama is stupid or he was deliberately lying, and the smart money is on “deliberately lying.” But Democrats—and some Republicans—insisted there was some mysterious “loophole” in the law that prohibited this country from stopping illegal aliens at the border. If politicians really believed that, why didn’t they close the loophole?

  Instead, amnesty supporters tried a surprise argument: To stop illegals pouring across the border, Congress had to pass amnesty. They were hoping to stun us into silence with the stupidity of their argument. No one was prepared for it. I’m sorry, Your Honor, we didn’t bring our notes on that. We were ready for “It’s wrong” or “What about the children?” We weren’t expecting: To stop the surge at the border, we need to reward the people surging across it.

  Everyone knows that one amnesty begets more illegal aliens, which begets another amnesty. It’s called an “incentive.” There’s less of an incentive if the gate is locked. First lock the gate, then figure out what to do with the people already here. Any amnesty is an inducement to illegal aliens. If you choose to argue it’s not, I refer you to history. This is not the first time Americans have been promised secure borders in return for amnesty. The 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli Act, also known as “The Charlie Brown and Lucy with Football Act,” was supposed to end illegal immigration forever: Give us amnesty one time, then: Never again.17

  As with all laws that combine the bitter with the sweet, such as tax hikes and spending cuts, we got one and not the other. The amnesty came, but the border security never did. Illegal immigration sextupled. There have been a half dozen more amnesties since then, legalizing millions more foreigners who broke our laws.18 Perhaps we could have trusted Washington’s sincerity thirty years ago, but Americans have already been fooled once—then, six more times. They aren’t stupid.

  The two parts cannot be done simultaneously. A border fence must be started first—and completed first. Only after all the ACLU lawsuits and INS rulings have run their course, and the border is still secure, do we move to Step Two. I happen to think we don’t do the amnesty part ever, but it’s tendentious even to discuss what to do with illegal aliens already here until we can prevent more from coming. We’ll talk about legalization as soon as it’s as hard to get into the United States as it used to be to get out of East Germany.

  To review:

  Step One: Secure the border.

  Step Two: Discuss what to do with illegals already here.

  AMNESTY IS GOODBYE, AMERICA

  Contrary to everything you’ve heard, the only options are not: Amnesty or deporting 11 million people. There’s also the option of letting them stay in the shadows—or the same thing we’ve been doing for the last thirty years. Americans are under no moral obligation to grant amnesty to people who have broken our laws. “The moral thing to do” is usually defined as “following the law.” The fact that Democrats want 30 million new voters is not a good enough reason to ignore the law and screw over American workers, as well as legal immigrants already here. How about Republicans try this: We’re not giving you anything—not even half—because there’s no reason to do so.

  The demand for amnesty is not going away. Nothing ever gets struck from the Left’s “To Do” list. Democrats had been angling for national healthcare since the FDR administration. Conservatives thought they killed it with the ignominious defeat of Hillarycare in 1994, but the very next time Democrats controlled both Congress and the presidency—we got Obamacare. To paraphrase what President Bush used to say about terrorists: The anti-amnesty side has to be perfect every time; the pro-amnesty side only has to win once. And then the country is finished. There won’t be any reason to care about politics, anymore. At least I can finally clean out my attic.

  Any other bad law can be repealed. Roe v. Wade can be overturned. Obamacare can be repealed. Amnesty is forever.

  2

  TEDDY: WHY NOT THE THIRD WORLD?

  HOW DID IMMIGRANTS BECOME A SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP MORE POWERFUL than Americans? I’m not a high-priced political consultant, but shouldn’t politicians be more concerned with what citizens think of them than what foreigners do? It’s a measure of how out of whack public dialogue is on immigration that it comes as a startling concept to even ask if our laws should help our country rather than help other countries solve their problems. Wouldn’t any sane immigration policy be based on the principle that we want to bring in only immigrants who will benefit the people already here? Why not take immigrants who are better than us, instead of immigrants who are worse than us?

  A good-for-America immigration policy would not accept people with no job skills. It would not accept immigrants’ elderly relatives, arriving in wheelchairs. It would not accept people accused of terrorism by their own countries. It would not accept pregnant women whose premature babies will cost taxpayers $50,000 a pop,1 before even embarking on a lifetime of government support. It would not accept Somalis who spent their adult lives in a Kenyan refugee camp and then showed up with five children in a Minnesota homeless shelter.2 An immigration policy that benefits Americans would not result in news items like this one: “After arriving from Kampala, Uganda, Ayan Ahmed and her nine children, ages four to eighteen, spent six months in Phoenix. There, Catholic Charities had lined up a furnished four-bedroom home for the family and a neurologist for Ahmed’s eldest son, who is blind [emphasis added].”3

  If our government were in the international charity business, they’d be doing a fantastic job. America takes in half the refugees of the entire world.

  In fact, however, taking in refugees is not even in the top hundred jobs we want the government doing. At what point will Americans remind their government that it has a responsibility to us, not to every sad person in the world? We can’t solve everyone’s problems—and that’s not what we’re paying taxes for our government to do. Catholic Charities may enjoy taking in immigrant families, so they can feel like the Harriet Tubman of Uganda, but they don’t have a right to do it on the taxpayers’ dime.4 It’s not “charity” if we have to pay for “their” good works. It’s charity if they pay. But I notice that we always end up paying, while they go to all the awards dinners at the Ugandan-American Society.

  Try calling another country’s embassy and asking to immigrate there.

  Consulate: What do you do?

  You: Well, I can’t read or write, I have no skills, and I’ve got nine kids. Oh and by the way, if I can’t make it in your country, would you mind cutting my family a check once a month?

  Consulate: Click.

  Other countries must be laughing their heads off at us. Our “family reunification” policies mean that being related to a recent immigrant from Pakistan trumps being a surgeon from Denmark. That’s how we got gems like the “Octomom,” the unemployed single mother on welfare who had fourteen children in the United States via in vitro fertilizati
on; Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who bombed the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring hundreds, a few years after slitting the throats of three American Jews; and all those “homegrown” terrorists flying from Minnesota to fight with ISIS. Family reunification isn’t about admitting the spouses and minor children of immigrants we’re dying to get. We’re bringing in grandparents, second cousins, and brothers-in-law of Afghan pushcart operators—who then bring in their grandparents, second cousins, and brothers-in-law until we have entire tribes of people, illiterate in their own language, never mind ours, collecting welfare in America. We wouldn’t want our immigrants to be illiterate, unskilled, and lonesome.

  LIVING IN THE SHADOWS—COLLECTING GOVERNMENT BENEFITS IN BROAD DAYLIGHT

  We’re told—as if it’s good news—that immigrants use welfare only at 18 percent above the native-born rate.5 No, the fact that any immigrants are on welfare proves we’re not taking the right immigrants. It’s like saying, Only 18 percent of our cars burst into flames when you start them. We don’t want any cars bursting into flames. These aren’t native-born citizens who are poor. Aren’t immigrants who immediately go on government assistance, by definition, immigrants we don’t want? We can’t pay for our own poor people, but now we have to be the welfare ward of the world?

  Our government does such a terrific job at choosing who gets to immigrate to America that 52 percent of legal immigrant households with children are on government assistance. In all, nearly 60 percent of immigrants—legal and illegal—are on government assistance, compared with 39 percent of native households.6 Why would any country voluntarily bring in people who have to be supported by the taxpayer?

  Immigrants from nineteen of the top twenty-five source countries are more likely to be in poverty than native white Americans, generally far more likely.7 Immigrants from Mexico and Honduras, for example, have a poverty rate three times higher than white Americans.8 The only immigrants less likely to be in poverty than white Americans are those from Canada, Poland, the United Kingdom, Germany, India, and the Philippines.9 Needless to say, we take fewer immigrants from these countries than from the neediest immigrant countries. Poland and Germany aren’t even in the top ten source countries, and Canada and the United Kingdom combined send us fewer immigrants than Mexico does.

  Business lobbyists have an irritating habit of dismissing the massive welfare use of immigrants by saying, Yes, of course, we have to get rid of welfare. First of all, their cheap labor wouldn’t be so cheap if not for all the goodies provided by the U.S. taxpayer, so this is a ruse. The immigrants get a taxpayer subsidy to work for the rich, and the rich get a break on the maid. This cozy deal is funded by the long-suffering middle class.

  Second, it would be easier to repeal the law of gravity than to prevent immigrants from accessing welfare. The Republicans’ 1996 welfare reform bill barred immigrants from receiving direct welfare payments for a mere five years. That turned out to be the single biggest cost savings of the entire welfare reform. Most people said, THAT’S NOT ALREADY THE LAW? But at the New York Times, needy immigrants are the most desirable immigrants. The Times hysterically attacked the immigration provisions as one of the “cruelest aspects” of welfare reform. Congress immediately restored welfare for immigrants who arrived before the law passed on the grounds that it would be unfair to take welfare away from immigrants who came here expecting to live off the American taxpayer. Subsequent Congresses restored welfare for elderly immigrants, immigrants with children, refugees, and immigrants who are hungry, get pregnant, or brought a wife-beater with them.10

  America should be choosing immigrants like the New England Patriots choose players. They don’t have a lottery system for their draft picks. No one guilts them into taking a blind kid with one leg over an All American—much less the blind kid’s cousin, to keep him company. But that’s America’s immigration policy. We’re in a seller’s market, but instead of taking the top draft picks, we aggressively recruit cripples, illiterates, and the desperately poor. A strange idea has taken hold that it’s unfair to get the best immigrants we can. Why should that top model be allowed to date only rich, good-looking guys? She should be forced to date poor, balding losers. Maybe Kate Upton should have a lottery system to decide whom she goes out with.

  Proposing an immigration policy that serves America’s interests should not require an apology.

  THIS IS ON THE KENNEDY HIGHLIGHTS REEL, RIGHT AFTER THE PART WHERE HE KILLS THAT GIRL

  It’s our current immigration laws that demand an apology. It was Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act that snuffed out the generous quotas for immigrants from the countries that had traditionally populated America—England, Ireland, and Germany11—and added “family reunification” policies, allowing recent immigrants to bring in their relatives, and those relatives to bring in their relatives, until entire Somali villages have relocated to Minneapolis and Muslim cabdrivers are refusing to transport passengers with dogs or alcohol.12 America has to take in all the poor people of the world, so that Ted Kennedy could get his face on commemorative plates. I’m sorry the Kennedy family felt awkward in Brahmin Boston, but that isn’t enough of a reason to wreck our country.

  Kennedy’s immigration law was enacted during the magical post-1964 period, when Congress had free rein to push through the craziest left-wing legislation since the New Deal. It was the most destructive period in American history. Anything the Left had ever dreamed of became law, in such profusion that it could have been a test to see if members of Congress were actually reading the bills. The premise of the 1965 immigration act sounds like the bizarre belief of a weird hippie cult: The poor of the world have the right to come to America, and we have to take care of them!

  Liberals had tried convincing Americans to vote for them, but that kept ending badly. Except for Lyndon Johnson’s aberrational 1964 landslide, Democrats have not been able to get a majority of white people to vote for them in any presidential election since 1948.13 Their only hope was to bring in new voters. Okay, fine. You won’t vote for us, America? We tried this the easy way, but you give us no choice. We’re going to overwhelm you with new voters from the Third World. As Democratic consultant Patrick Reddy wrote for the Roper Center in 1998: “The 1965 Immigration Reform Act promoted by President Kennedy, drafted by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and pushed through the Senate by Ted Kennedy has resulted in a wave of immigration from the Third World that should shift the nation in a more liberal direction within a generation. It will go down as the Kennedy family’s greatest gift to the Democratic Party.”14

  Since then, the Democrats’ insatiable need for more voters has continued unabated. A year before the 1996 presidential election, the Clinton administration undertook a major initiative to make 1 million immigrants citizens in time to vote. The White House demanded that applications be processed twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Criminal background checks were jettisoned for hundreds of thousands of applicants, resulting in citizenship being granted to at least seventy thousand immigrants with FBI criminal records and ten thousand with felony records.15 Murderers, robbers, and rapists were all made citizens so that the Democrats would have a million foreign voters on the rolls by Election Day.16 The Washington Post reported—after Clinton was safely reelected—that the citizenship initiative was intended to create “a potent new bloc of Democratic voters.” Even the INS had objected to “running a pro-Democrat voter mill.”17 Democrats didn’t care. Clinton’s reelection was more important than the country.

  The mass migration of the poorest of the poor to America is bad for the whole country, but it’s fantastic for Democrats. Ask yourself: Which party benefits from illiterate non-English speakers who have absolutely no idea what they’re voting for, but can be instructed to learn certain symbols? The foreign poor are prime Democratic constituents because they’re easily demagogued into tribal voting. A white person can vote Republican or Democratic without anyone saying to him, “HOW CAN YOU VOTE AGAINST YOUR RACE?” By contrast, every
nonwhite person is required to vote Democrat.18 Republicans’ whispering sweet nothings in Hispanic ears isn’t going to change that. Voting Democratic is part of their cultural identity. Race loyalty trumps the melting pot.

  Moreover, poor people are never opposed to big government because they’re exempt from all the annoying things that government does. They’re not worried about taxes: The government is not going to raise any taxes that they pay. They drive unlicensed cars, have no insurance, flee accidents, and couldn’t pay a court judgment anyway. The government doesn’t want to get in touch with the poor for any reason other than to give them things. So it’s lucky, in a way, that Democrats are the party of government workers. Unending immigration means we need rafts of government workers to educate non-English speakers, teach cultural sensitivity classes, arrest criminals, man prisons, clean up parks, distribute food stamps, arrange subsidized housing, and work in hospital emergency rooms to deliver all those premature babies.

  MSNBC is constantly crowing about Democrats sweeping every ethnic group. Could we see the party preferences of voters whose great-great-grandparents were born in America? Republicans would win that demographic in a landslide. The American electorate isn’t moving to the left—it’s shrinking. Democrats figured out they’d never win with Americans, so they implemented an evil, genius plan to change this country by restocking it with voters more favorably disposed to left-wing policies than Americans ever would be. Unfortunately, this scheme was implemented long before I was able to object.

  But that’s not how the story of the end of America will be written. Rather, it will be: THEN, FINALLY, PROGRESSIVE POLITICS SWEPT THE NATION! THERE WAS RESISTANCE, BUT, IN THE END, THE LEFT’S ARGUMENTS WON. No minds have been changed. Democrats just brought in a new group of voters whose minds don’t need to be changed. It’s as if the Democrats switched teams at halftime, from the worst team in the NBA to the best. We’ve got five NBA All-Stars guarding LeBron—Woo hoo! We won! Don’t pat yourselves on the back, Democrats. The country isn’t changing—you changed the voters.