¡Adios, America!

by Ann Coulter

  In 1997, Christoffer Burmeister, a twenty-seven-year-old musician, was shot in the head and killed by Palestinian immigrant Ali Hassan Abu Kamal at the top of the Empire State Building.36 Burmeister’s band mate, Matthew Gross, also took a bullet to the head, but—after eight hours of brain surgery—survived. Gross now lives in a group home in Montclair, New Jersey, with other brain-injured men, taking daily medication for his seizures.37 The assailant, Abu Kamal, had immigrated to America with his entire family two months earlier—at age sixty-eight. It’s a smart move to bring in older immigrants well past their productive years, so we can start paying out Social Security right away.

  You might not have noticed the orgy of immigrant mass murder, unless you are a trained Kremlinologist, and can interpret headlines like this one from the Los Angeles Times about the Vietnamese immigrant who shot up the Binghamton Civic Center: “Truly an American Tragedy.”38 Between 2010 and 2012 alone, immigrants committed about a dozen mass murders in this country. The murderers were from Mexico, Afghanistan, South Korea, Vietnam, Haiti, South Africa, and Ethiopia. Curiously, none were from Britain, Australia, or Canada. English-speaking Westerners seem to fit in better and are less prone to erupt in murderous rages.

  Why were any of these people here? To quote the mother of the fifteen-year-old girl murdered by a Haitian immigrant in North Miami: “Because of immigration, my daughter is not alive.”39 We have no choice about native-born criminals. We can do something about the people our government chooses to bring here and set loose on the public. Murderous immigrants aren’t a naturally occurring phenomenon, like an earthquake. They are entirely a result of government policy.

  BEAVER CLEAVERS WITH CLEAVERS

  No one notices the immigrant crime wave because the media hide the evidence. These tribunes of the people sneer at white-picket-fence, Beaver-Cleaver Americans, but are obsessed with portraying immigrant criminals that way—especially terrorists, facilitated by the fact that the government keeps making so many of them citizens.

  According to the GAO, 27 percent of terrorism convicts in the United States were lawfully admitted immigrants, on their way to becoming citizens; 57 percent were citizens, naturalized citizens, or foreigners brought into the United States for prosecution.40 That last category—“brought into the United States for prosecution”—is especially fantastic. Attorney General Eric Holder transferred loads of Somali pirates to the United States—allegedly to stand trial. The ones convicted of piracy get life in prison, where they will have better lives than they would have had back in Somalia. But if they end up being acquitted or getting convicted of lesser offenses, they get asylum.41

  America has even granted asylum to participants in the Rwandan genocide.42 After having claimed refugee status to obtain U.S. citizenship, Beatrice Munyenyezi was exposed as an enthusiastic participant in the genocide that left 70 percent of Rwanda’s Tutsis dead. Contrary to her claim that she had been a victim of the genocide, she was a perpetrator, identifying Tutsis to be raped and murdered by the Hutu militia.

  She was convicted in federal court of procuring her naturalization unlawfully, and sentenced to ten years in prison, but Munyenyezi remains a lawful permanent resident. Only an immigration court can order her deportation, and first she must serve her criminal sentence. She may not be able to be sent home because conditions in the receiving country can change, for better or worse. (Except in Africa, which is only for the worse.) She will need a valid passport and some other country that will agree to take her, otherwise we can’t put her on a plane. Why would any other country take her? Consequently, as soon as she’s released from prison, the Rwandan murderess could end up living next to you, reader.

  In another few years, America will be granting asylum to the ISIS and Boko Haram butchers—and you’ll be reading searching articles in the New York Times wondering how those boys with the wide, goofy smiles went wrong.

  Our official policy is to turn away astrophysicists in order to make room for illiterate Afghan peasants who will drop out of high school to man coffee carts until deciding to engage in jihad against us. That was Immigration Success Story Najibullah Zazi, who pleaded guilty in a plot to bomb the New York City subway in 2010. Zazi had been born into a tribe in eastern Afghanistan and came to America in his teens. He dropped out of high school and had an arranged marriage to his cousin in Pakistan. His ticket to entry was his father—whose ticket was, in turn, a brother living in Queens. Zazi’s own uncle described him to the New York Times as “a dumb kid, believe me.”43 Our immigration officials said, WELCOME, ZAZI! . . . Sorry, Scottish scientists—no room for you. Instead of immigrants who could help America, we have to take entire villages of illiterates from Afghanistan, thanks to Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act.

  One of Zazi’s coconspirators, Zarein Ahmedzay, arrived from Afghanistan willing to do a job no American would ever consider doing: drive a cab. A third accomplice, Adis Medunjanin, was born in Bosnia, prompting the New York Times to begin an article on his convictions: “An American citizen was convicted of a host of terrorism charges on Tuesday . . .”44

  AS AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE

  News accounts would have us believe that the one hundred thousand Somalis collecting welfare in Minnesota while resting up for the next jihad are just as Minnesotan as the characters in Fargo. A close examination of the names of “homegrown Americans” who have joined ISIS and other terrorist groups suggests otherwise. In 2008, the New York Times announced “the first known American suicide bomber.”45 Go USA! It was Shirwa Ahmed, Somali immigrant to Minnesota. Who could have guessed “Shirwa Ahmed” would be America’s first suicide bomber? My money had been on a guy named “Jim Peterson.” In addition to the first suicide bomber, other “Americans from Minnesota” participating in terrorism included Mahamud Said Omar, Cabdulaahi Ahmed Faarax, Abdiweli Yassin Isse, Ahmed Ali Omar, Khalid Mohamud Abshir, Zakaria Maruf, Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan, and Mustafa Ali Salat.46

  Pakistani terrorist Daood Sayed Gilani conspired with the Pakistani military to carry out four days of terrorist attacks on hotels, movie theaters, and hospitals in Mumbai in 2008. But as far as the media were concerned, he was John Wayne. The New York Times called him “David Coleman Headley,” a “United States citizen who lived in Pakistan but recently was mainly a resident of Chicago.”47 What constitutes “mainly”?

  Although born in America, Gilani was brought up in Pakistan, raised by his Pakistani Muslim father in a strict Muslim culture from infancy until age seventeen. At seventeen, Gilani moved to the United States to live with his mother in Philadelphia and adopted the name “David Coleman Headley.” He failed out of a community college, became a heroin addict, and was soon busted for importing heroin from Pakistan. In 1999, Gilani was released from prison to go back to Pakistan for an arranged marriage. He moved that wife—one of two—to live in Chicago.48

  Why, he seems to have stepped right out of a Norman Rockwell painting!

  A lengthy Times profile of Daood laid it on thick about his American roots: “Mr. Headley felt pulled between two cultures and ultimately gravitated toward an extremist Islamic one.”49 It might help readers understand the strange attraction of Islamic extremism to an “American citizen” if they were told that Mr. Headley’s real name is “Daood Sayed Gilani,” that he was raised in a backward Muslim culture in Pakistan, and that his American citizenship was only that of an anchor baby. The Times fooled Senator Bob Casey, then the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on South and Central Asia, who said of Gilani: “It’s really disturbing—Americans becoming radicalized.”50

  Of more than fifty articles mentioning Gilani in the New York Times, only five so much as mentioned his real name—dismissing it as his “birth name”51 or “the Urdu [name] he was given at birth.”52 Similarly, the Associated Press called him: “David C. Headley, an American formerly named Daood Sayed Gilani.”53

  It is not the Times’ consistent practice to use aliases acquired in adulthood. In the rare case w
hen an actual American becomes a Muslim terrorist—usually after meeting one of our Muslim immigrants making America more vibrant—the media exclusively use the terrorist’s birth name. Michael Finton abandoned that name when he became a Muslim and began calling himself “Talib Islam.” After Finton attempted to bomb a federal building in Chicago, the Times used his “birth name”—the opposite of its practice with Daood. The Times even managed to work in a reference to Finton’s “red hair” by the second paragraph.54 It was the same with Suleyman al-Faris, whom absolutely every newspaper refers to exclusively by his birth name: John Walker Lindh.

  Dropping subtlety, about a year after the explosion of articles on “American citizen” “David Coleman Headley,” the Times ran an article titled “The Jihadist Next Door.” The article noted with alarm that “[i]n the last year, at least two dozen men in the United States have been charged with terrorism-related offenses,” leaving intelligence operatives “scurrying for answers.”55 The “Americans” who left government officials “scurrying for answers,” were:

  Najibullah Zazi, Afghan

  Daood Sayed Gilani, Pakistani

  Umer Farooq, Pakistani

  Waqar Khan, Pakistani

  Ramy Zamzam, Egyptian

  Ahmed Abdullah Minni, Eritrean

  Aman Hassan Yemer, Ethiopian

  It makes no sense—it’s the freckle-faced boy next door!

  The media’s weird obsession with billing immigrant terrorists as apple-pie Americans leads to comical results, such as the panelists on MSNBC’s The Cycle puzzling over how Aafia Siddiqui, a “U.S.-trained scientist” could have become radicalized.56 Here’s a tip for MSNBC: When you can’t pronounce the terrorist’s name, the rest of America isn’t sitting in slack-jawed amazement. Siddiqui wasn’t an American by any definition. She wasn’t even an anchor baby. Rather, Siddiqui was born and raised in Pakistan and came to the United States as an adult via our seditious universities. After an arranged marriage over the phone with another Pakistani, who—luckily for America!—joined her here, she divorced and married the nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Who could have seen Siddiqui’s radicalism coming?

  Not only have our post-1965 immigration policies increased America’s welfare, criminal, and terrorism caseloads, but now all Americans are being asked to give up their civil liberties to fulfill Teddy Kennedy’s dream of bringing the entire Third World to live here in America. When Rand Paul carries on for thirteen hours about Obama using a drone to kill “American citizen” Anwar al-Awlaki, the term “American citizen” has lost its essential meaning. The National Security Act of 1947, creating the CIA, expressly prohibited the agency from engaging in domestic operations. But now we have to spy on “Americans” because of all the al-Awlakis, Tsarnaevs, and Zazis. We have created two huge problems where none existed before—domestic terrorism and government spying—all so the Democrats can win elections and Mark Zuckerberg can underpay his employees.

  7

  IMMIGRANTS AND CRIME: WHY DO YOU ASK?

  YOU WILL SPEND MORE TIME TRYING TO OBTAIN BASIC CRIME STATISTICS ABOUT immigrants in America than trying to sign up for Obamacare. The facts aren’t there. Those of us who want to know if a murderer is an immigrant are treated as if we’re trying to keep blacks out of the country club. What difference does it make?

  Here are some ways it might make a difference: Knowing how many criminals are immigrants might affect our opinion of our current immigration policies. It would help us evaluate Marco Rubio’s proposal to legalize 20–30 million illegal immigrants, en masse. It could tell us how much money an immigration moratorium would save the taxpayers by reducing the number of police, missing persons operators, hospital emergency room doctors, surgeons, prosecutors, judges, court clerks, prison guards, and rape counselors made necessary by criminal aliens. It would be extremely relevant to the debate about whether to build a fence on our southern border.

  SO TELL US!

  The government doesn’t collect data about immigrant crime, and the media wouldn’t report it, anyway. This allows liberals to sneer at anyone else’s estimate of the number of criminal immigrants: “We found no such data. This statement is both incorrect and ridiculous. Pants on Fire! The statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.” That quote comes from PolitiFact’s evaluation of Texas Governor Rick Perry’s statement: “I think [there were] over 3,000 homicides by illegal aliens over the course of the last six years.”1

  Asked by PolitiFact to supply a source, Perry’s spokesman cited the Texas Department of Public Safety’s webpage, which states: “From October 2008 through July 1, 2014, Texas has identified a total of 203,685 unique criminal alien defendants booked into Texas county jails. Over their criminal careers, these defendants are responsible for at least 642,564 individual criminal charges mostly consisting of Class B misdemeanors or higher, including 3,070 homicides and 7,964 sexual assaults. . . .”

  That looks like “over 3,000 homicides” to me.2

  But PolitiFact turned to its own expert, Northeastern University professor Ramiro Martinez Jr., who said that if Perry were correct, then illegal immigrants would have committed 46 percent of all murders in Texas—and that “boggles the mind.” Strictly speaking, boggling the mind of a professor is not data. Martinez asked how so many illegal immigrants could be committing murder and “nobody noticed.”3 It might be easier to “notice” if we weren’t prohibited from noticing.

  Somebody’s noticing the immigrant crime wave: Google illegal alien crime and you’ll get more than 2 million hits. Google immigrant crime and you’ll get 40 million. Only our government and media refuse to notice. Then they turn around and denounce anyone else’s estimate, saying: You don’t know that.

  So tell us! We “don’t know that” only because the people in a position to know have decided to keep it secret.

  THE FACTS ABOUT CRIMINAL ALIENS—WITH SEVENTEEN CAVEATS

  Every time you think the government has finally produced a real number of immigrants convicted of crimes in America, there’s a catch. Legal immigrants will be excluded, convicted criminals whose country of birth is unknown are left out, Hispanic criminals will be classified as “white”4—but Hispanic valedictorians are celebrated as another illegal immigrant “success story!” In 1991, the Department of Justice produced a detailed report on the racial characteristics of inmates in both state and federal prisons from 1926 to 1986. Hallelujah! Facts! But then you notice a tiny asterisk: Mexicans are counted as “white” every year except 1926. Thanks, government!

  I would prefer to have the actual numbers of legal and illegal aliens arrested and convicted of crimes. I would like that information much more than I wanted to know how many residents of American Samoa have no battery-powered radios in their homes. Unfortunately, the government won’t tell us how many immigrants commit crimes—much less what their crimes were. It will, however, give us an exact count of Samoans without battery-powered radios (2,651 in 2010).5

  The most extensive information on criminal aliens collected by the federal government is a bare-minimum estimate of the number of immigrants in American prisons and jails. This is not information the government automatically collects: It had to be expressly requested by Congress. In 2011, the Government Accountability Office reported that America was incarcerating at least—the absolute minimum estimate—351,000 criminal aliens: 55,000 immigrants in federal prison and 296,000 illegal aliens in state and local facilities.6 In the understatement of the century, the GAO admitted that its figures included only “a portion of the total population of criminal aliens who may be incarcerated at the state and local levels. . . .”7

  The GAO’s estimate of 351,000 incarcerated aliens excludes:

  1.All legal immigrants in state or local prisons;

  2.Convicted illegal aliens for whom the states did not submit reimbursement requests to the federal government;8

  3.Prisoners whose country of birth could not be determined;9

  4.Immigrants who have bee
n naturalized;

  5.Children born to illegal aliens on U.S. soil;

  6.Immigrants without at least one felony or two misdemeanor convictions;

  7.Immigration detainees;10 and

  8.Illegal immigrants who committed crimes after being amnestied by Reagan in 1986.

  To be extra opaque, the GAO counted all immigrants in federal prisons—legal and illegal—but counted only illegal immigrants in state prisons and local jails.11

  Why exclude legal immigrants? Isn’t that worse? Only certain Republicans get excited about the difference between legal and illegal immigrants. The rest of America is trying to understand the point of the last thirty years of legal immigration. Why was this necessary? While it’s nice to know a little more about the people Marco Rubio is so anxious to make our fellow citizens, why can’t we be told how many rapes and murders legal immigrants commit? To paraphrase the line about families, you can’t choose your native-born Americans—but you can choose your immigrants. Our immigration system will be working when the number of immigrants who commit crimes is zero.

  Why would any country import other countries’ criminals? What could possibly be on the plus side of the ledger, with “criminal” on the minus side? Since the United Nations isn’t yet demanding that America allow everyone in the world to immigrate here, couldn’t we at least discriminate on the basis of felon vs. non-felon? Maybe we could do a triage:

  1.Helpful to country;

  2.Not helpful to country, but not a felon;

  3.Felon.

  Here’s another idea: Instead of the Census Bureau collecting detailed information about how many rental units have “broken or missing stair railings” (382,000 in 2010) or have had mold in their bathrooms in the last twelve months (1.1 million in 2010),12 how about the government tell us how many immigrants have committed crimes? Determining the number of foreign born in the criminal justice system doesn’t rely on taking surveys, trusting Americans to accurately report on their stair railings, and hiring teams of statisticians to spend years analyzing the data. We just need the government to count. Unlike mold in private homes, criminals have come into significant contact with the government—cops, prosecutors, judges, and prison guards. And we’re already paying those guys’ salaries. As important as the number of carports in America is, it’s also important to know how many immigrants are committing crimes.