by Ann Coulter
8
WHY CAN’T WE HAVE ISRAEL’S POLICY ON IMMIGRATION?
WHAT DO YOU THINK ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU WOULD do if tens of thousands of Israelis were being murdered by Palestinians? If heroin deaths in Israel suddenly tripled and 90 percent of the heroin was coming into Israel through the Palestinian territories—some of it through a tunnel the length of six football fields?1 If ISIS butchers were on Israel’s border?
If you guessed, “Give them in-state college tuition, driver’s licenses, and free medical care,” you would be wrong.
In 2012, Israel had sixty thousand illegal aliens, which would be the equivalent of a mere 2 million illegals in America. Warning that the illegals would overwhelm Israel and destroy the nature of the country, Netanyahu vowed to complete a border fence. Even opposition leader Yair Lapid supported a fence, as well as “the arrest and deportation of infiltrators.”2
Israel responded to the influx of illegal aliens by arresting them and putting them on buses out of the country. This is in contrast to our policy, which is to put them on buses into our country and enroll them in U.S. schools. The Times quoted an Israeli bystander, observing the arrests, saying: “It must be done or tomorrow we will have no country and we will have to look for another one.”3 For refugees who could not be deported under international law, Israel built detention facilities on the border, where they were to be held until conditions in their countries improved. Netanyahu unsentimentally responded to protests over the detentions, saying, “The infiltrators who were transferred to the special detainment facility can either stay there or go back to their home countries.”4
I admire Israel’s policy and wish we could adopt it. Show me in a straight line why we can’t do what they do. If Israel’s ethnicity changes, the idea of Israel changes. If America’s ethnicity changes, the idea of our country changes, too.
YOU KNOW WHERE HISPANICS ARE OVERREPRESENTED? U.S. PRISONS
When did Americans get together and decide we want 30 percent of all immigrants to be from a single country and that country should be Mexico? If we’re going to take almost all our immigrants from a single country, why not Denmark? There appears to have been only one Danish prisoner in New York State in decades—and, again, that was a Muslim.
Sixty-six percent of the criminal aliens imprisoned in the states in 2009 were Mexican.5 In the federal prisons, 68 percent of the criminal aliens were Mexican and nearly 90 percent were from one of eight countries: Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Jamaica, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.6 Even in the beautiful mosaic of New York State, where prison inmates come from 124 different countries, the vast majority—75 percent—are from the Caribbean or Latin America.7 Doesn’t something kind of stick out like a sore thumb here? What other country on earth would be this stupid? Not Israel!
For every category the media care about, we get obsessively detailed reports on Hispanic percentages. We have studies showing Hispanics are underrepresented in Hollywood,8 at top colleges,9 in the federal government,10 and in the national media.11 We’re told there are too few Hispanic veterinarians in Texas12 and not enough Hispanic cops in Utah.13 (An unseemly number of these reports were authored by Hispanics themselves, so one area where Latinos are definitely not deficient is self-esteem.)
You know where else Hispanics are underrepresented? In the U.S. military. You’d never know it, with the media showcasing every Hispanic troop,14 but Hispanics are half as likely to enlist in the military as either whites or blacks. The recruit-to-population ratio for whites is 1.06. For blacks it is 1.08. For Hispanics, it’s only 0.65. The media not only neglect to highlight this particular underrepresentation, they lie about it. An article published by the Population Reference Bureau—subsidized by taxpayers—is titled: “Latinos Claim Larger Share of U.S. Military Personnel.” To the untrained eye, this would seem to be saying that Latinos claim a larger share of U.S. military personnel. In fact, however, by “larger share,” the headline means “larger” compared with the past—not compared with other groups. The actual article admits that Hispanics constitute less than 12 percent of all enlistees, compared with 16 percent of the civilian workforce. Moreover, despite their machismo culture, a majority of Hispanic troops are women.15
Here’s a category where Hispanics are overrepresented: Prisons. There are about four times as many whites as Hispanics in the United States, according to the census, so let’s assume there are actually three times as many.16 And yet Hispanics commit 90 percent as many assaults as whites, nearly as many violent robberies (thirty-seven thousand Hispanics to thirty-eight thousand whites), and 84 percent as many murders (thirty-eight thousand Hispanics to forty-five thousand whites).17 Hispanics are only half as likely to be in prison for rape as whites, probably because white women in the United States are more than twice as likely to report rape as Hispanics.18 In fact, American women will report rapes that didn’t even happen. (See, e.g., University of Virginia, Columbia Mattress Girl, and Lena Dunham.) Hispanic males in the United States are more than three times as likely to spend time in prison in their lifetimes than white males are.19 In 2010, 1,258 of every 100,000 Hispanic males were in prison, compared with 459 per 100,000 white males.20 Evidently, the dream of many “Dreamers” is to rob, assault, and murder Americans.
LOST A FRIEND TO DRUGS? THANK A MEXICAN
The vast majority of all drugs in America—heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and, increasingly, methamphetamine—are brought in from Mexico. Most of the heroin sold in the United States is grown south of the border, and Mexican cartels transport nearly all of it.21 Justice Brennan’s invention of birthright citizenship has been a bonanza for the drug trade. Now the cartels have Mexicans on both sides of the border to complete the distribution chain. Two of the Sinaloa cartel’s major American distributors, Pedro and Margarito Flores, were “Americans,” born to a family of cartel members in Chicago and raised in the Mexican part of the city. We have to make Mexican drug traffickers U.S. citizens so that Arianna Huffington can have cheap gardeners.
In 2012, the U.S. government estimated that 660,000 Americans were using heroin and more than 3,000 dying of it every year because Mexico was boosting the supply.22 About a quarter of all people who try heroin will become dependent on it, according to government estimates,23 and the precise appeal of methamphetamine to Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel was that it was “ragingly addictive,” according to the New York Times.24 Forbes reports that there is “little doubt” that the heroin that killed Philip Seymour Hoffman came from Mexico.25 These aren’t “big city” problems: They’re Mexico-is-on-our-border problems.
Missouri had 18 heroin overdose deaths in 2001; ten years later, there were 245.26 Heroin deaths in Minnesota shot from 3 to 98 between 1999 and 2013.27 Michigan saw fatal heroin overdoses surge from a few dozen a year in 2002 to more than 100 a year starting in 2009.28 In just one year, heroin-related fatalities in Connecticut nearly doubled, to 257 in 2013.29 Between 2007 and 2012, heroin use in the United States is estimated to have increased by almost 80 percent.30 And that’s just heroin. More than 40,000 Americans were killed from all illegal drug use in 2010, surpassing car accidents and shootings as a cause of death.31
The addicts who die may be the lucky ones. In 2001, a seventeen-year-old boy in New Jersey who scored 700 on the math SAT took a heroin overdose that left him unable to stand, walk, or bathe himself. His mother, a globetrotting executive with Citibank, was forced to quit her job and become his full-time caretaker. After a year of hospitalization and more than a decade of therapy, he still needs his mother to carry him to the toilet. He has no recollection of taking an overdose, but packets of heroin and marijuana were found stored in a secret compartment in his bedroom.32
That’s what happened to one of America’s brightest young men because the head of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel discovered tunnels. As the New York Times admiringly put it: “[Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman’s] greatest contribution to the evolving tradecraft of drug traffi
cking was one of those innovations that seem so logical in hindsight it’s a wonder nobody thought of it before: a tunnel.”33 El Chapo is married to Emma Coronel: American anchor baby.34 In September 2011 Emma left the cartel’s hideout long enough to get to California, and give birth to her own American anchor babies.35 As soon as the twins were delivered, Emma went right back to Mexico to rejoin the man who replaced Osama bin Laden on both the FBI and Interpol’s Most Wanted list.36
America: Do you have any respect for yourself?
HERE ARE SOME FENCES THAT WORK!
China went to war to stop Britain from addicting its people to opium. On the eve of the Opium Wars, China’s drug czar said: “If we continue to allow this trade to flourish, in a few dozen years we will find ourselves not only with no soldiers to resist the enemy, but also with no money to equip the army.”37 Today, China is once again battling drug smuggling because, like America, it also has a poor, corrupt nation with a massive humanitarian crisis on its border: Not Mexico, but North Korea. Guess what China did? It built a fence! Despite stern warnings from the New York Times, China put a thirteen-foot barbed wire fence on its border, patrolled by armed guards. And you know what, New York Times? It’s working!38 But America can’t have a fence because a fence on the border would be a crime against diversity.
You know who else has a border fence? The only democracy in the Middle East: Israel. In 2013, the New York Times’ Latitude blog reported the “good news” about how well Israel’s fence was working: “The good news came in the form of statistics: In the last days of December, the number of illegal immigrants entering Israel dropped to zero for the first time in more than half a decade. The new fence that Israel is constructing along its border with Egypt, coupled with enhanced border-security measures, seems to be working.”39 Of the 10,365 illegal aliens who entered Israel in 2012, “9,200 were sent out.”
No one tells Netanyahu, “Show me a fence, I’ll show you a ladder.” But that’s all we hear from government officials about a fence on the U.S.-Mexican border. Give politicians a quip and they think they’re Pythagoras.
Former Homeland Security Secretary and Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano: “Show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder at the border.”40
California Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee: “And I know that you’ve heard this quote often, and that is that you build a fence 10 feet and they will get a ladder 11 feet.”41
Texas Governor Rick Perry: “If you build a 30-foot wall from El Paso to Brownsville, the 35-foot ladder business gets real good.”42
Rick Perry, again: “The 15-foot ladder business is going to get good on that 14-foot fence.”43
And again—Perry: The only thing a border-wide wall “would possibly accomplish is to help the ladder business.”44
Why doesn’t Rick Perry say that to Israel?
AT LEAST MEXICO DOESN’T BEHEAD PEOPLE LIKE ISIS—WAIT, WHAT?
In 2014, the American media exploded with news of ISIS beheadings in Syria—six thousand miles away from the United States. Meanwhile, the beheading capital of the world is just to our south, a stone’s throw from American homes, businesses, and ranches. When the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria first began posting videotaped beheadings online, it was as if no one had ever heard of such barbarity. In fact, decapitation porn was an innovation of the Mexican drug cartels.45
One “ISIS” video circulating in 2014 showed a man being beheaded with a chain saw. Then it turned out the video wasn’t an ISIS beheading, at all: It was a Mexican video from 2010.46 After American David Hartley was shot and killed by Mexican drug cartel members while jet skiing with his wife at a lake on the Mexican border, the lead investigator on the case was murdered and his head delivered in a suitcase to a nearby military installation.47 In 2013, there was a huge outcry over Facebook’s video-sharing policy when an extremely graphic video of a man beheading a woman appeared on the site. That, too, was a product of Mexico.48
Where is the 24-7 coverage for these champion beheaders? If it seems like you never hear about all the dismemberments in Mexico, you’d be right. In a search of all transcripts in the Nexis archive in the first eight months of ISIS’s existence as a jihadist group, “beheading” was used in the same sentence as “ISIS” or “ISIL” 1,629 times. During that same time period, it was used in the same sentence as “Mexico” or “Mexican” twice. Indeed, in the previous five years Mexican beheadings were mentioned only sixty-six times.49 If a tree falls and beheads a woman in Mexico, does anyone hear it?
The main difference between decapitations in Syria and Mexico is that Mexicans also behead women, children, and innocent bystanders.50 In addition to pioneering videotaped beheadings, Mexicans specialize in corpse desecration, burning people alive, rolling human heads onto packed nightclub dance floors, dissolving bodies in acid, and hanging mutilated bodies from bridges.51
Why are the media obsessed with ISIS’s beheadings but not the more frequent head-chopping right next door? It would be as if French newspapers in 1930s obsessively covered the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay, while relegating news about Germany to the back pages. While the Chaco War was important—the bloodiest South American conflict in the twentieth century—Hitler’s increasing militarism was arguably of more immediate concern to France.
The American media’s fixation on monsters twelve hours and several connecting flights away from the United States, while ignoring the savage butchery occurring in a country within walking distance, is so obvious that border fence advocates have taken to warning that Islamic terrorists might enter the United States through the wide-open Mexican border. It’s possible, but you know what’s even more possible? That Mexicans will walk across the border.
Iraqi terrorists may long to maim and rape Americans, get them hooked on heroin, burn down hundreds of acres of our national parks, and kill Americans in drunk driving accidents. But it’s Mexicans who are actually doing these things.
Even Newsweek complained about the media’s obsession with ISIS beheadings, to the detriment of beheadings in . . . Saudi Arabia!52 About eighty criminals suffer this punishment in Saudi Arabia every year, and while the legal proceedings might not meet Western standards of proportionality, those decapitations are administered only after a formal trial and conviction. Between 2007 and 2011, 1,300 people were beheaded by criminal gangs in Mexico—and that’s in addition to the 100,000 murders by other means.53
One of Mexico’s most notorious beheaders is now living freely in the United States because of Justice Brennan’s footnote. In 2010, fourteen-year-old Edgar Jimenez Lugo beheaded four men in the wealthy resort town of Cuernavaca, Mexico, and hung their corpses from a bridge over a busy road, their heads and genitals lying nearby.54 Although Lugo was raised entirely in Mexico, his illegal alien mother had given birth to him in San Diego. So after serving a quick three-year sentence in Mexico for four dismemberments, Lugo “returned” to America. This country was helpless to stop him—at least until someone notices that our anchor baby policy is based on the mental delusion of one Supreme Court justice. The U.S. embassy refused to say where the gruesome murderer would be living, or to discuss his case at all, due to “privacy considerations,” according to Britain’s Daily Mail.55
In a microscopic item on the case, the New York Times referred to Lugo as a “U.S. Boy.”56 So the Times believes a fourteen-year-old who was merely born here, but raised entirely in Mexico, is an American. But a fourteen-year-old born in Mexico and raised in the United States is also an American—a “Dreamer”! Show me the reasoning behind that, other than: We want as many Mexicans voting here as we can get!
HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN BORDERLESS COUNTRY
I take it that liberals would be dismayed if Mexicans began beheading people in America, based on their relentless mocking of Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s claim, in July 2010, that there had been beheadings in the Arizona desert. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank sneered: “Ay, caramba! Those dark-skinned foreigners are no
w severing the heads of fair-haired Americans? Maybe they’re also scalping them or shrinking them or putting them on a spike.”57 Salon.com cited Brewer’s remark to sneer that “as you can see, Jan Brewer is crazy.”58
Apparently, liberals considered it pretty far-fetched that Mexican cartel violence would ever, in a million years, cross into America. So if it ever did, that would be a big deal, right?
Three months after Brewer’s claim, Mexicans beheaded a man in Arizona.59 Within the next two years, a headless body turned up in the Arizona desert,60 and the dismembered body of a nineteen-year-old American girl was found in Oklahoma.61 All three dismemberments were believed to be the work of Mexican cartels—confirmed in the first Arizona case.62 At that point, liberals’ position was that it was no big deal, after all. In fact, Mexicans beheading people in the United States was of such utter insignificance that the media barely mentioned these beheadings and went back to the eye-rolling retort: Show me a fence, I’ll show you a ladder.63
The Mexican predilection for beheadings is not limited to drug cartels. In 2004, two Mexican men decapitated three children, ages nine to ten, in Baltimore, Maryland, over some obscure family dispute. Everyone involved was an illegal alien, all related to one another through a series of connections that would require a Talmudic scholar to sort out, but seemed to involve a lot of baby mamas. According to the Mexican government, the executioners, Policarpio Espinoza and Adan Espinoza Canela, were the children’s uncle and cousin, respectively, and the (three) parents were: Ricardo Espinoza, Mimi Quezada, and Maria Andrea Espejo. One child was completely decapitated, the other two partially decapitated. Even seasoned police officers were shaken by the grisly crime scene.64