by Ann Coulter
It’s bad enough that illegal immigrants are taking African Americans’ jobs, but they’re trying to take black Americans’ history, too. As you may have heard, blacks were brought to America as slaves, freed by Republicans, then discriminated against for another century—mostly by Democrats—until Republicans finally got the Democrats to stop. Because of that, blacks can tell the rest of us to stop using certain words. Immigrants can’t. They don’t get to piggyback on the black experience in America. Immigrants: You’re not black. If your ethnic group has been aggrieved, go back and address the perpetrators. You don’t get to make demands on Americans, and you certainly don’t get to control our language. Just because immigration cheerleaders want to avoid a debate doesn’t give them the right to label random words the equivalent of the “N-word.”
Amnesty is not “comprehensive immigration reform,” “an earned path to citizenship,” or, as Obama calls it, “steps to deal responsibly with the millions of undocumented immigrants who already live in our country.” It’s amnesty. Illegal immigrants broke this nation’s laws to be here. Any law that forgives an illegal act, in whole or part, is an amnesty. What we mean when we say “illegal alien” is “illegal alien,” not “undocumented migrants,” people “staying” here, “Dreamers,” “people without papers”—or “undocumented citizens,” as Senator Rand Paul calls them.1
In April 2013, the Associated Press formalized existing practice by banning the phrase “illegal immigrant” from its stylebook. Instead, AP instructs:
illegal immigration Entering or residing in a country in violation of civil or criminal law. Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant. Acceptable variations include living in or entering a country illegally or without legal permission.2
It’s sort of like saying Charles Manson was guilty of “ending people’s lives without legal permission.” Illegal alien activist groups demanded a ban on the words used to describe them, and the media happily complied. It would be as if child molesters demanded an end to the phrase “child molester.” Please describe only the act of molesting children, but do not label the person. And don’t say “rapist.” That will be “people who enter a woman’s vagina without permission.” Call the crime “rape,” but don’t label people “rapists.” It’s also wrong to use the word “reporter” to describe a person, but unfortunately, we’re unable to replace it with “a person who reports the news” because no one does.
There are so many things we can do with “undocumented.” Polluters should denounce insinuations that they engaged in illegal dumping. It was undocumented dumping. Bush critics will have to start referring to his “undocumented war in Iraq.”
WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA
The campaign to ban the phrase “illegal immigrant” was launched in 2010 by an illegal immigrant advocacy group, Race Forward. The group claimed that the term was always considered an “epithet,” but had been recently revived by anti-immigration groups intent on “dehumanizing” illegals. This assertion was repeated, without correction, by the New York Times in a November 2014 article that objectively reported: “the term ‘illegal immigrant’ is a tactical term promoted by anti-immigration groups starting in the mid-2000s.”3 Like everything else printed in the Times about immigration, this is a lie. The first use of “illegal immigrant” in the Nexis archives is from August 29, 1969—in, of all places, the New York Times. That’s as far back as the Nexis archives go. The Times alone used the phrase “illegal immigrant” more than three thousand times before 1990—three thousand being the number at which Nexis stops counting. It took approximately sixty seconds to run that search, and I paused for a drink of water. But Times reporter Julie Turkewitz blandly repeated the absurd statement that the phrase “illegal immigrant” was popularized by anti-immigration groups in the mid-2000s as a dehumanizing “epithet,” without considering whether Times readers might remember what happened yesterday.
At least the AP and the Times try to shut down debate with words—albeit lies. Illegal immigrants from the Third World prefer to make their point with violence. Any newspaper that dares use the term “illegal alien” can expect to have its offices vandalized, as happened to the Santa Barbara News-Press’s offices in January 2015.4 Local police had been “braced” for an attack on the News-Press’s offices because illegal immigrants don’t like being called “illegal immigrants” and tend to express themselves with mob protests—in the grand tradition of John Stuart Mill.
WHAT WORDS CAN WE USE?
The media also render discussion of anchor babies beyond the pale by banning all words necessary to discuss the phenomenon. Quoting a California nurse who told the Times she had delivered “hundreds of anchor babies,” the New York Times quickly added that she was using “a derisive term to describe children whose parents did not hold citizenship.”5 This is how the Times treats all subjects it would frankly prefer that we not discuss. The paper has an auto-key for “partial birth abortion,” for example, reading: “a procedure referred to by its opponents as ‘partial birth abortion.’” Okay, the Times doesn’t like that name. What name does the Times like? It won’t tell us. And what would the Times call a baby whose birth in America allows all the child’s relatives to stay? It’s not “birthright citizenship”—that would include legal aliens, who don’t need a baby to stay in the country, but whose U.S.-born children are automatically citizens.
The behavior “anchor baby” refers to is the fraud of illegal aliens giving birth at U.S. hospitals, thus anchoring an entire extended family to the United States by virtue of the child’s auto-citizenship. There’s no logical reason for the whole family to come here, but we get wails of You’re trying to separate us from our American citizen child! No one ever considers the possibility that the family could also stay together by going back to their own country. This is the way immigration law is abused with “family reunification” policies, also known as “chain migration”—or as the Times would put it, “a derisive term” to describe remote villages relocating to America on the basis of a single villager’s U.S. citizenship.6
JUSTICE BRENNAN’S FOOTNOTE GAVE US ANCHOR BABIES
Anchor babies are “citizens” only because of a phony constitutional principle cooked up by Justice William Brennan in 1982. Just like abortion, sodomy, gay marriage, and unicorns—it’s in the Constitution! If Americans want to be generous enough to provide for millions upon millions of illegal aliens, they ought to at least be asked. Instead, the taxpayers are forced to support foreign-born poor through a legal fiction, and are called racists if they ask any questions.
Americans are smugly informed that the Fourteenth Amendment confers U.S. citizenship on anyone who is born in the United States. Liberals act as if this amendment was added to the Constitution in an early burst of multicultural sentiment, so that La Raza could come along a century later and make millions of foreigners citizens without the consent of the people. Look, we’ve got to make sure that no matter how people get here, their children will be American citizens. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THAT’S NOT ALREADY IN THE CONSTITUTION? Most people are too cowed to ask the obvious question: Why would Americans have done that?
They didn’t. Automatic citizenship for anyone born in the United States was invented out of whole cloth by Justice William Brennan and slipped into a footnote in a 1982 Supreme Court case. It’s so crazy that even Nevada Democratic Senator Harry Reid knows it’s crazy. In 1993, Reid introduced a bill that would clearly end citizenship for the children of illegal aliens. As he explained:
If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant? No sane country would do that, right? Guess again. If you break our laws by entering this country without permission, and give birth to a child, we reward that child with U.S. citizenship and guarantee full access to all public and social services this society provides—and that’s a lot of servi
ces. Is it any wonder that two-thirds of the babies born at taxpayer expense in county-run hospitals in Los Angeles are born to illegal alien mothers?7
Noting that the false promise of citizenship was luring “pregnant alien women to enter the United States illegally,” Reid said his bill simply “clarifie[d]” that anyone born in the United States to an illegal alien mother “is not a U.S. citizen.”8 But then Democrats discovered that parents of the anchor babies were voting for them! Suddenly Senator Reid decided it wasn’t insane to give citizenship to children born to illegals, after all. To the contrary, it was racist not to do so.
Appellate court judge Richard Posner, the most-cited federal judge, wrote a concurring opinion in a 2003 case for the sole purpose of asking Congress to rethink “awarding citizenship to everyone born in the United States.” Justice Brennan’s invented constitutional right, he said, was luring “illegal immigrants whose sole motive in immigrating was to confer U.S. citizenship on their as yet unborn children.” Referring contemptuously to the idea that citizenship by birth is compelled by the Fourteenth Amendment, he asked Congress to pass a law and “put an end to the nonsense.”9
ABRAHAM LINCOLN FREED THE MEXICANS
Just so everyone knows the facts, the Fourteenth Amendment was part of the Reconstruction amendments after the Civil War, passed in response to the South’s sleazy attempts to deny freed blacks their rights, over which a bloody war had just been fought. To get a constitutional amendment passed, there has to be a mass feeling about a big problem. It isn’t a secret trap door put in the Constitution for fun. The sole and exclusive purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to stop Democrats from nullifying the entire Civil War by continuing to deny citizenship rights to newly freed slaves.
The idea was not to ensure that every pregnant Mexican who runs across the border would win citizenship for a child born here. That’s weird that women who are eight and a half months pregnant suddenly want to go on an arduous trip to another country. Wouldn’t you rather wait until you have the baby? Oh . . . I see. Even the former Ku Klux Klanner on the court, Justice Hugo Black, admitted that the sole purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to protect freed slaves.10
In a widely ridiculed 1898 case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court ruled that the children born to legal immigrants in the United States were citizens. As the dissent, legal commentators, and the Yale Law Journal pointed out at the time, the majority opinion had based its ruling on British feudal law, forgetting America had pretty forcefully rejected Britain’s ideas about a king.11 As ridiculous as it was for the Wong Kim Ark Court to grant citizenship to the children of legal immigrants, that’s how the law stood for eighty-four years. And then, out of the blue, during the Reagan administration, Justice Brennan slipped a footnote into a 5–4 decision in Plyler v. Doe asserting that “no plausible distinction” could be drawn “between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.”
I can think of a few “plausible distinctions.” For one, there’s the lawful versus unlawful part. Also, legal immigrants, in theory, have been looked over by the country’s immigration officials and approved for permanent residency. Legal immigrants—all of whom will now have access to taxpayer-funded Obamacare—have been checked for contagious diseases, insanity, mental defects. (Again, this is “in theory.”) The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons reports that “many illegal aliens harbor fatal diseases that American medicine fought and vanquished long ago, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy, plague, polio, dengue, and Chagas disease.”12
Brennan’s only authority for the drivel about there being no “plausible distinction” between the children of legal immigrants and illegal aliens was a 1912 book written by Clement L. Bouvé. Bouvé was not a senator, nor an elected official, and certainly not a judge. He was just some guy who wrote a book. So on one hand we have the history, the objective, the plain meaning, the authors’ intent, and more than a century of law on the Fourteenth Amendment. On the other hand we have the idle ramblings of Clement, who, I’m guessing, was too cheap to hire an American housekeeper.
AND WHAT A BOON ANCHOR BABIES HAVE BEEN TO AMERICA!
Combine Justice Brennan’s footnote with America’s ludicrously generous welfare policies, and America may as well have a sign on the border that says: “FREE MONEY.” Consider the cost of just one family of illegal immigrants attached to America by its anchor babies.
The Silverios from Stockton, California, are illegal aliens. . . . Cristobal Silverio came illegally from Oxtotitlan, Mexico, in 1997 and brought his wife Felipa, plus three children aged 19, 12, and 8. Felipa . . . gave birth to a new daughter, her anchor baby, named Flor. Flor was premature, spent three months in the neonatal incubator, and cost San Joaquin Hospital more than $300,000. Meanwhile, [Felipa’s oldest daughter] Lourdes plus her illegal alien husband produced their own anchor baby, Esmeralda. Grandma Felipa created a second anchor baby, Cristian.
Anchor babies are valuable. A disabled anchor baby is more valuable than a healthy one. The two Silverio anchor babies generate $1,000 per month in public welfare funding. Flor gets $600 per month for asthma. Healthy Cristian gets $400. Cristobal and Felipa last year earned $18,000 picking fruit. Flor and Cristian were paid $12,000 for being anchor babies. This illegal alien family’s annual income tops $30,000.
Cristobal Silverio, when drunk one Saturday night, crashed his van. Though he had no auto insurance or driver’s license, and owed thousands of dollars, he easily bought another van. Stockton Police say that 44 percent of all “hit and runs” are by illegal aliens. If Cris had been seriously injured, the EMTALA-associated entitlement would provide, as it did for the four-year rehabilitation of a quadriplegic neighbor illegal alien. Rehabilitation costs customarily do not fall under the title “emergency care,” but partisans clamor to keep paraplegics in America rather than deport them to more primitive facilities south of the border.13
In 2003, 70 percent of the 2,300 babies born in Stockton’s San Joaquin General Hospital’s maternity ward were anchor babies.14 By 2013, Stockton was bankrupt. Any politician who opposed our insane anchor baby policy would be smugly denounced by the New York Times—and wouldn’t lose a single vote.
Granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens has turned American citizenship into a game of Red Rover with the border patrol. The anchor baby foolishness takes this country’s immigration policy completely out of Americans’ hands and puts it into the hands of foreigners. It would make as much sense to allow Mexican migrant workers to decide when America goes to war.
As Chief Justice Fuller quaintly wrote in Wong Kim Ark: “Nobody can deny that the question of citizenship in a nation is of the most vital importance. It is a precious heritage, as well as an inestimable acquisition.”15 Not anymore. Now anyone can get American citizenship. The Somali warlord Hussein Mohammed Aidid was an American citizen. Muhamed Sacirbey, the foreign minister of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s, was an American citizen. Valdas Adamkus, the president of Lithuania, was an American citizen—and an employee of the U.S. government at the same time. The head of the Estonian army, Aleksander Einseln, was an American citizen. Iraq’s ambassador to the United States in 2003, Rend Rahim Francke, was an American citizen.16 A slew of Islamic terrorists are “American citizens,” such as al Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. You can read about the younger al-Awlaki’s “mop of curly hair” and “wide, goofy smile” in the New York Times op-ed “The Drone That Killed My Grandson” by Nasser al-Awlaki.17
The amnesty-pushers have beautiful homes, beachfront property, European vacations, Senate offices, vast portfolios, influence with the Harvard admissions committee, and powerful friends in the media and politics. What do they care about American citizenship? But for most Americans, our most precious possession is citizenship in this amazing country. That endowment is being bartered away by our elites in exchange for votes, for profits, or fo
r campaign dollars.
AMERICA TO POLLSTERS: WE SURRENDER
Although we’ve been authoritatively informed that a majority of Americans support a “pathway to citizenship,” approximately five hundred times in the last two years alone, according to a quick Nexis search,18 that is a lie. This is part of the media’s campaign to convince Americans they’re nuts for preferring not to turn America into Mexico. Polls are irrelevant if you lie to the people being polled.
Poll: Do you support commonsense gun safety or are you against it?
Headline: MAJORITY OF AMERICANS SUPPORT GUN CONTROL.
But I hate gun control!
Too late! You agreed to “commonsense gun safety”—that means gun control.
Similarly, polls purporting to show a majority of Americans supporting a “pathway to citizenship” invariably offer choices that are not on the table, that no one has proposed, and that do not exist in any piece of legislation. The amnesty option is always loaded up with imaginary hurdles that illegal aliens will have to clear—learning English, passing citizenship tests, and paying fines, fees, and “back taxes.” The non-amnesty option always seems to entail rounding up 11 million illegal aliens, putting them on buses, and deporting them. Neither of those choices describes the position of anyone on either side of the immigration debate. Amnesty proponents have no intention of making illegals jump through any hoops whatsoever to become citizens, and not a single amnesty opponent has proposed any program to round up and deport 11 million illegals. Maybe just one, if you count me.