by Ann Coulter
14
EVERY SINGLE IMMIGRATION CATEGORY IS A FRAUD
THE VAST MAJORITY OF ALL LEGAL IMMIGRANTS—TWO-THIRDS—GET IN ON “family reunification” policies each year. In other words, America has no say about the single largest category of immigrants and we end up with gems like Octomom, the Boston Marathon bombers, and one hundred thousand Somalis in Minnesota. Entire villages from Pakistan are dumped on the country, based not on their expertise in nuclear engineering, but because everyone in the village is related to the first guy who got in. If they’re not, in the strict sense, related, they’ll lie. In 2008, the State Department suspended the family reunification part of the African refugee program because DNA testing showed that only 20 percent of “family members” were actually related.1 We’ll still take as many refugees from Africa, but they won’t have to lie about being related anymore.
The government can’t even police marriage fraud. It’s a felony to engage in a sham marriage with an immigrant, but no one ever gets caught. In 1997 a thirty-year-old, down on her luck, two-time divorcée married an eighteen-year-old Ethiopian man—and was suddenly $5,000 richer! That seemed totally believable to our immigration officials. The immigration “marriage” was exposed as a scam only when the woman turned up in Oregon fifteen years later as the Democratic governor’s “first lady.”2 By then it was too late to prosecute, forget revoking the Ethiopian’s citizenship.
MUSLIM TERRORIST FARMWORKERS
The special agricultural amnesty of 1986 is a good example of how even the most reasonable-sounding immigration law will inevitably be turned into a pipeline for criminals, welfare cases, and terrorists. As Congress debated the amnesty bill, newspapers were full of stories about “beleaguered” farmers with crops rotting in the fields who were “sick with worry” that the law would “rob” them of “the migrant workers who are the backbone of the field labor force,” as the Los Angeles Times put it.3
Coming to the rescue was then-Representative Chuck Schumer! (Words that should chill you to the bone.) Illegal alien farmworkers who could prove they had done seasonal farmwork for a total of ninety days between May 1, 1985, and May 1, 1986, would be granted temporary legal status. What could go wrong?
In the first three years of the program, 888,637 agricultural amnesty applications were identified as fraudulent—but only 60,020 of those were denied.4 Overwhelmed with amnesty applications under just this one provision, the INS found it to be a big time-saver to simply ignore fraud.5 As one longtime INS employee explained, “Since documentation wasn’t required, the burden was on the government to prove the aliens were not farmers. Fraud was widespread and enforcement virtually impossible.”6 Consequently, more than eight hundred thousand deceitful applications for amnesty were granted.
Among the fraudulent farmworker amnesties approved by the INS was one from Egyptian Mahmud Abouhalima,7 or—as he was known in the terrorist community—“Mahmud the Red.” Mahmud had come to the United States as a “tourist” from Germany—where he had been denied political asylum, but got around that by marrying an emotionally disturbed alcoholic, and then married another German woman after divorcing the first when she objected to his taking a second wife.8 At the end of 1985, Mahmud and his second wife took a “three-week” trip to the United States on tourist visas and promptly settled into an apartment in Brooklyn.9 Luckily for Mahmud, just as his tourist visa was expiring six months later, Schumer’s farmworker amnesty became law. So Mahmud submitted an application, claiming to have worked on a farm in South Carolina, despite having never left New York, except one short visit to the Michigan Islamic community.10
Mahmud was approved. Otherwise, crops would rot in the fields! And what a wonderful agricultural worker Mahmud was. He became a limo driver in New York, where he repeatedly had his license suspended for ripping off customers and speeding through red lights because he was busy reading the Koran. But exhibiting that can-do spirit we so admire in immigrants, Mahmud simply drove without a license, delighting his customers with the Arabic sermons blaring from the car’s tape player.11
Two years after receiving his “farmworker” amnesty, Mahmud was granted temporary legal residence in the United States. For the next few years, he repeatedly flew to Pakistan for combat training. In 1990, Mahmud became a U.S. permanent resident. That was a big year for Mahmud. In 1990, Mahmud busied himself:
driving Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the terrorist known as “the Blind Sheikh” (who managed to stay in the United States by repeatedly applying for asylum);
murdering Omar’s chief rival, Mustafa Shalabi (suspected, crime unsolved);
providing the getaway car for El Sayyid Nosair, after he assassinated Rabbi Kahane in Brooklyn, although Nosair ended up jumping in the wrong Arab’s taxi.12
Three years later, Mahmud was one of the main conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which blew a hole in the skyscraper five stories deep, cratered the ceiling of a PATH train, killed six people, injured thousands, and caused half a billion dollars in property damage. Mahmud then fled the country—leaving crops to rot in the field! He was captured by the Egyptians, tried in the United States, and convicted. Without her husband’s terrorist income to support her, his German wife now lives on welfare in the United States.13
Mohammed Salameh, another terrorist convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was also in the United States because of Schumer’s special agricultural worker amnesty. The unskilled nineteen-year-old first came to the United States on a tourist visa because, as the U.S. consulate later explained, someone in the office “took a chance” on Mohammed.14 Mohammed not only had never worked on a farm, but he was not even in the country until 1988, two years after the special amnesty became law, though it was explicitly limited to those who had worked on farms in the United States in the year before May 1, 1986.
By the most basic definition of the law, Mohammed was not eligible, but he was allowed to stay in the United States and obtain a work visa—while the INS processed his petition. Moving with the lightning speed of a government agency, the INS rejected his petition for amnesty as a farmworker three years later. Then, Mohammed applied for a general amnesty, claiming he had been living continuously in the United States from 1982 to 1986. Actually, he was a teenager in Jordan then, but again, Mohammed was allowed to stay while the INS considered his request. As it was considering, Mohammed bombed the World Trade Center.15
Even if someone at the INS had promptly rejected his application, noticing that Mohammed only arrived in the United States in 1988—he still couldn’t have been deported. Schumer had included a provision prohibiting the INS from taking any action against any immigrant who merely applied for agricultural amnesty. That might discourage fraudulent applications! No matter how laughably fictional, Mohammed’s request for a farmworker amnesty immunized him from deportation. He would still be setting off bombs as a frustrated farmworker had he not returned the van used in the bombing to the Ryder rental agency to get his deposit back.16 Gosh, we really are getting the smartest immigrants.
The ringleader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was Ramzi Yousef. He came to the United States without a visa but claimed asylum and was released into the country. He got a free immigration lawyer from the white-shoe law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher.17 With pinpoint timing, one year before the World Trade Center bombing—committed by a couple of “farmworkers,” an asylum seeker, and several “tourists”—the New Republic published an indignant screed about the heartless storm troopers at the INS, who see their jobs as “enforcement” rather than “providing public services and immigration benefits”—in the words of Ignatius Bau of San Francisco’s Coalition for Immigration Reform.18
NOT-SO-HIGH-TECH WORKERS
What about all those brainy, high-tech H-1B immigrants that Senator Orrin Hatch keeps telling us about?
The media gush about the legions of star-performer immigrants, but, suspiciously, they always list the exact same ones—all white, all male, and of British, Dutch,
German, and Russian stock: Peter Thiel of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, etc. (born in Germany); Elon Musk of X.com, Tesla, etc. (born in South Africa—to a Canadian mother and a South African–born British father); Sergey Brin of Google (born in Russia). None of them came to the United States on H-1B visas.
For an objective view of high-tech immigrants, the New York Times turned to Vivek Wadhwa, who boasted that “over half of Silicon Valley tech start-ups and a quarter of those nationwide were founded by immigrants from 1995–2005.” It’s probably not a coincidence that Wadhwa did not say what fraction of these “start-ups” were either successful or original. There are lots of me-too startups ripping off investors and adding nothing to the economy. Wadhwa excitedly added that a “majority” of Indian and Chinese immigrants who go home “want to start a company.”19 Yes, and a majority of girls who go to Hollywood “want to be movie stars.”
Wadhwa said it was “troubling” that “47 percent of all U.S. science and engineering workers with doctorates are immigrants.” If doctorates in science or engineering are so important, why don’t any of the stars in Silicon Valley have one? A lot of the biggest names—Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg—don’t even have undergraduate degrees.
As long as the media hide the details, it’s easy for Indian American Wadhwa to claim that “[t]he next Google could well be cooked up in a garage in Guangzhou or Ahmedabad.”20 Where are all the Indian Googles and Paypals now? This importation of cheap tech workers has been going on for decades.21 Already, 65 percent of all high-tech visas go to Indians. Sixty-five percent! The next-largest H-1B visa holders are the Chinese, filling 12 percent of the slots. We better be getting a few Asian geniuses.
But judging by the articles they write, Indians’ main talent is self-promotion. Ron Banerjee—another objective source—gloats in the Financial Post that “the wealth and success of Indian immigrants is undeniable.”22 In the International Business Times, Harichandan Arakali asks: “India’s Startup Scene: Will VC Dollars Create the Next Amazon?”23 The Washington Post’s Vinod Dham says, “Indian engineers on H-1B visas have . . . contributed significantly to advancing innovation in high technology.”24 Yet another article about how awesome Indians are—written by Neesha Bapat—is titled: “How Indians Defied Gravity and Achieved Success in Silicon Valley.”25
Apparently, Indians think they’re just peachy! If white Americans expressed this much regard for themselves, it would be “racist.” Here’s how such an article might read:
How White American Men Defied Gravity and Achieved Success in Silicon Valley
Did you know Twitter was created by four American white men? Yes, Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass defied gravity and achieved success in Silicon Valley. All white Americans!
How about these companies also created by white American men? Netscape (Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen), Mozilla Firefox (Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross), Netflix (Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings), Oracle (Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates), Apple Computer (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak [the adopted Jobs’s biological father was a Syrian immigrant, admitted under the pre-1965 immigration act], Pandora (Will Glaser, Jon Kraft, and Tim Westergren), Zillow (Richard Barton), Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales), Craigslist (Craig Newmark), Uber (Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick—technically a Canadian white man), Zynga (Mark Pincus), and Yelp (Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons).
This list goes on! Why, the next Google might well be cooked up in a garage in Ft. Benton, Montana, or Camden, Maine.
If you think about it, white men have actually accomplished quite a lot.
The cheap-labor advocacy group Partnership for a New American Economy excitedly tweeted that two—yes TWO (2)—of the five LinkedIn founders were, I quote: “born in Europe”!26 They were born in Germany and France. Here’s my counter-tweet: “98.7% of the founders of important Silicon Valley companies were born in America! 99 percent are white men!”
H-1B VISAS: INDENTURED SERVITUDE
One person to analyze H-1B visas who’s not in it for either cheap labor or ethnic chauvinism is Professor Norman Matloff, who has been writing about so-called high-tech visas for years. He says: “The vast majority of H-1Bs, including those hired from U.S. universities, are ordinary people doing ordinary work, not the best and the brightest. On the contrary, the average quality of the H-1Bs is LOWER than that of the Americans.” We’re not going to get the guys who designed the Indian nuclear bomb. They’re doing fine in India. Why leave?
The main advantage of foreign labor over native workers, Matloff explains, is that H-1B workers are indentured servants: They can’t quit without risking deportation, so American employers get to pay less for standard computer programming work. You can imagine what a huge cost-saver that is! Foreign workers go off in cubbyholes, type away at their code for twelve hours, then collapse. Tons of Americans could do the same work, but, the problem is, they want to be paid.
“Employers know they have these workers over a barrel,” business professor Sankar Mukhopadhyay explains. “They aren’t going to demand a raise during those six years [of green card sponsorship], even if they deserve it, and they aren’t going to move on to another company, because they know doing those things will jeopardize their chances of getting their green cards in time.” As Benjamin Franklin said in 1751, the main advantage of slaves and indentured servants isn’t that their work is better—it’s worse. It’s that “Slaves may be kept as long as a Man pleases,” whereas “hired Men are continually leaving their Master.”27
CALLING JASON RICHWINE
Microsoft’s Bill Gates pleaded with Congress to give him more cheap foreign workers, claiming computer giants like Microsoft were just trying to bring in “smart people,” and that H-1B visa holders were so immensely qualified that their salaries started at $100,000 a year.28 Then it turned out that only 12.4 percent of Microsoft’s H-1B holders were paid as much as $100,000—mostly lawyers and other executives.29 Even worse, since the introduction of the H-1B visa, Microsoft has been laying off American workers by the bushel.30
Intel’s chairman Craig Barrett must have needed a thesaurus to write his op-ed on the brilliance of H-1B workers. He called them “the world’s top talent . . . highly educated workers . . . working in high-need jobs . . . in highly skilled professions . . . valuable foreign-born professionals—including badly needed researchers, scientists, teachers and engineers . . . scientists and engineers . . . highly educated graduates . . . the top minds . . . driv[ing] innovation and economic growth . . . professional talent.”31
Then Barrett used the H-1B program to fire American workers and replace them with underpaid foreign workers.32
If Gates, Barrett, and the rest of them really want “the world’s top talent,” where were they when Jason Richwine was being crucified for proposing that we do just that? Quite obviously, high-tech employers neither seek, nor desire, “smart people.” They want cheap people. Mass-immigration advocates push ethnic stereotypes about high-IQ immigrants, but then go crazy whenever anyone suggests we actually bring in high-IQ immigrants.
As long as we must be incessantly hectored about Indians as high-IQ computer whiz kids, let’s take a look at their IQs. You can’t play the high-IQ game when it suits your cheap-labor interests, then cry “racism” when those claims are examined. The average Indian IQ is staggeringly low: 82. That’s about the same as the average IQ in Afghanistan—84; Panama—84; Dominican Republic—82; Paraguay—84; Yemen—85; Pakistan—84; and Tonga—86.
Yet we take more immigrants from India than from Canada—in fact, we take more from India than from Canada and Great Britain combined. We take more immigrants from India than from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and the Czech Republic put together. Why are we discriminating against Canadians, British, Danes, Swiss, and Swedes? The answer is: Because those immigrants would tend to fill the kinds of jobs rich people have. Immigrants are always great—unless they might tak
e your job. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg isn’t looking to bring in people who will take his job; he wants immigrants to take his employees’ jobs.
It’s so obvious what employers like Gates, Barrett, and Zuckerberg are doing that even Public Radio International has noticed. In a story about H-1B visa workers abused by their American employers, PRI quoted one who said, “I’m being paid less, which sucks for me, and it also sucks for American developers because I am a threat to them. I am cheaper.”33
Indentured servitude was abolished in America in 1867, two years after the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified. Henceforth, all employees would have the right to quit. It didn’t matter if the employment contract was entered into voluntarily. If a worker couldn’t quit, it was serfdom, prohibited by the Peonage Act of 1867.34
The great abolitionist senator—Republican, of course—and future vice president Henry Wilson cited the example of New Mexico after it eradicated the “wretched system” of indentured servitude. “[P]eons who once worked for two or three dollars a month,” he said, “are now able to command respectable wages, to support their families, elevate themselves, and improve their condition.”35 Democratic Senator Charles Buckalew said the inability to quit resulted in conditions that were “always exceedingly unfavorable to” the employee, adding that the system “degrades all—both the owner of the labor and the laborer himself.”36
So more than a century ago, everyone agreed: No more indentured servitude. But today’s employers have conspired to bring it back with H-1B visas, then they strut around like they’re Martin Luther King by invoking the magical word “immigration.” Immigration covers a multitude of sins because we have all agreed to pretend mass immigration from the Third World is the same thing as black civil rights.
In the 1960s, leftists were at least self-destructive: They wanted to damage the country in ways that would hurt them, their parents, and their kids. The New Left has found a way to be self-righteous only after checking to make sure they’ve completely exempted themselves from the destruction they’re wreaking. Liberals will pull every string imaginable to prevent their own kids from having to compete with immigrants—and then demand cheap employees for themselves. The middle class and lower class take it in the shorts—and the elites get to feel noble.