by Ann Coulter
15
SHUT IT DOWN
THE ONLY THING THAT STANDS BETWEEN AMERICA AND OBLIVION IS A TOTAL immigration moratorium. There’s no possibility of quick fixes. The entire immigration bureaucracy has to be shut down. It’s evident that the government can’t be trusted to use three brain cells in admitting immigrants, so its discretion has to be completely revoked. No matter how clearly laws are written, government bureaucrats connive to confer citizenship on people that a majority of Americans would not want to let in as tourists, much less as our fellow citizens. Instead of trying to do the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” thing, mopping the floor while the water is still pouring in, we need to stop the inflow, then take time to assimilate the immigrants already here.
No other fix will work. Congress could just insist that immigrants pay taxes, learn English, not collect welfare, and have good moral character, except the problem is: It already has. All those laws were swept away by INS officials, judges, and Democratic administrations. Doing it again won’t produce a different result.
We trusted the government, and it screwed up.
We can’t even expect our immigration officials not to make citizens of convicted felons.1 Tens of thousands of immigrants have been granted citizenship after being convicted of crimes in the United States. And, no, you can’t see their names or read about their crimes.
A year before the 1996 presidential election, the Clinton White House worked feverishly to naturalize 1 million immigrants in time for Clinton’s reelection. Criminal background checks were jettisoned for 200,000 applicants, so that citizenship was granted to at least 70,000 people with FBI criminal records and 10,000 with felony records.2 Murderers, robbers, and rapists were all made our fellow Americans so the Democrats would have a million new voters by the 1996 election. In 2013 alone, the Obama administration released 36,007 convicted criminal aliens with about 88,000 convictions among them—including 426 for rape and 193 for murder.3 They’ll soon be your fellow citizens, too.
Usually, we only find out about all the convicted felons our government is making citizens when there’s a political scandal. But it’s a daily practice. Consider this small news item from 2011: Twice in one day, the border police arrested Mexicans who had previously been convicted of sex offenses against children in the United States. Neither of the men’s original child sex convictions made the news. The truth came out only when the border patrol accidentally mentioned the convictions in press releases about their rearrests.4 One was illegal alien Eduardo Rodriguez-Lopez, who had been convicted in the United States for sex with a child and deported. The other, Antonio Batista, was a U.S. citizen. He had previously been arrested for human smuggling, sex assault on a minor, and sex abuse.5
What does it take to be turned down for citizenship in the United States?
SEND THE LEFTISTS BACK TO PERU
Even if we could trust the government on immigration—and again, we can’t—there are the legions of immigration lawyers, lobbyists, nonprofits, and general miscreants whose single-minded mission is to turn America into the Third World hellhole of liberal fantasies.
Everyone in the entire immigration apparatus is working frantically to bring the hardest cases to our shores. Left-wing traitors, who used to honeymoon in Cuba and fight with peasant revolutionaries in Peru, bring endless lawsuits to ensure every genocidal Rwandan can get on the American gravy train. Immigration lawsuits are decided by judges who come from the same nonprofits, and Democratic-appointed federal judges issue lunatic rulings to ensure that there will never be a pause in the transformation of America.
The country won’t be safe until the following outfits are out of business:
The ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Freedom Network; the National Immigration Forum; the National Immigration Law Center; the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild; the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights; the Office of Migration and Refugee Services; the American Immigration Law Foundation; the American Immigration Lawyers Association; the Border Information and Outreach Service; Atlas: DIY; the Catholic Legal Immigration Network; the Clearinghouse for Immigrant Education; the Farmworker Justice Fund; Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees; the Immigrant Legal Resource Center; the Immigrants Support Network; the International Center for Migration, Ethnicity, and Citizenship; the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Taskforce; the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service; the National Association for Bilingual Education; the National Clearinghouse on Agricultural Guest Worker Issues; the National Coalition for Dignity and Amnesty for Undocumented Immigrants; the National Coalition for Haitian Rights; the National Council of La Raza; and the National Farm Worker Ministry.
Look at that list and ask yourself if it is possible that anything short of a total immigration moratorium can save this country. And that’s just a fraction of the anti-American immigration groups.
The billion-dollar immigration industry has turned every single aspect of immigration law into an engine of fraud. The family reunifications are frauds, the “farmworkers” are frauds, the high-tech visas are frauds—and the asylum and refugee cases are monumental frauds.
WHY DO WE ALWAYS GET LAST PICK IN THE GLOBAL REFUGEE DRAFT?
The biggest scams in immigration law are the humanitarian cases. One hundred percent of refugee and asylum claims are either obvious frauds or frauds that haven’t been proved yet. The only result of our asylum policies is that we get good liars. Taxpayers subsidize sleazy immigration activists who coach immigrants to lie to immigration officials. Document mills produce phony passports, school records, and medical reports. Often, asylum applicants know nothing about the country they claim as home.
As the New York Times described the asylum con: “West Africans claim genital mutilation or harm from the latest political violence. Albanians and immigrants from other Balkan countries claim they fear ethnic cleansing. Chinese invoke the one-child policy or persecution of Christians, Venezuelans cite their opposition to the ruling party, and Russians describe attacks against gay people. Iraqis and Afghans can cite fear of retaliation by Islamic extremists.”6 (Don’t worry: Carlos Slim’s money stream is not affected by the asylum cases!)
One Russian woman claimed asylum on the grounds that she had been persecuted because she was gay. When her lawyer asked her to elaborate, she huffily told him, “I’m not gay at all. I don’t even like gay people.”7
To weed out the frauds we’d need a Pulitzer prize–winning journalist to investigate each individual asylum claim. Someone like, say, the Times’ Nicholas Kristof. A few years ago Kristof wouldn’t shut up about Somaly Mam, a Cambodian victim of sex trafficking. Mam claimed that as a child she had been beaten and prostituted by her abusive grandfather and sold to a brothel, where she was tortured with electrodes hooked up to a car battery. But in a testament to the human spirit, Mam escaped from the brothel and went on to found a multimillion-dollar organization to combat child sex-trafficking—all of which is recounted in Mam’s international bestseller The Road of Lost Innocence.
After a decade of tributes, honors, awards, and gobs of donations, Mam turned out to be full of crap. Her childhood friends, contacted by Newsweek, described her as “a happy, pretty girl with pigtails,” who was “well-known and popular in their small village.” She lived with her parents and attended village schools all the way through high school.8
At least Long Pross, one of Mam’s rescued Cambodian child prostitutes, was real. As Kristof described her in a column titled “If This Isn’t Slavery, Then What Is?”: “Glance at Pross from her left, and she looks like a normal, fun-loving girl, with a pretty face and a joyous smile. Then move around, and you see where her brothel owner gouged out her right eye.” Then it turned out she had lost her eye during eye surgery on a nonmalignant tumor. Newsweek even had the medical records.
It took a decade of Mam touring the world as an internationally recognized celebrity for her deceptions to be exposed. She had been one of Time’s one hundred most inf
luential people, interviewed by Oprah, feted at Manhattan and Beverly Hills soirees, and embraced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, actress Meg Ryan, and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg.
How is a U.S. immigration judge supposed to do better? How, specifically, are U.S. officials going to investigate claims of gang rape in Nigeria? They don’t: They just grant asylum. Knowing full well that asylum is the most fraud-ridden of all immigration programs—which is saying something—immigration judges approve 92 percent of all “credible fear” asylum applications.9
NAFISSATOU DIALLO
The only cases that ever get disproved are the ones where the asylees somehow become famous. Hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo became an international sensation when she accused the head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, of raping her at the Sofitel hotel in New York. That turned out to be just another immigrant get-rich-quick scheme,10 but her rape claims brought unwanted attention to her asylum application.
It turned out Diallo had cooked up the yarn about being gang-raped in her native Guinea in order to win asylum in the United States. The whole thing was a fairy tale she had memorized by listening to a tape given to her by an American immigration activist.11 If Diallo hadn’t made a spectacle of herself by trying to shake down the IMF chief, no one would have ever been the wiser. Diallo, of course, is still in the United States, collecting welfare.
AMADOU DIALLO
Another Diallo whose asylum application was exposed as a pack of lies only after he became famous was Amadou Diallo, shot by four New York City police officers. While looking for a violent Bronx rapist one night in 1999, the cops shouted at Diallo to put his hands up, but he didn’t obey because he didn’t speak English and he wasn’t sufficiently familiar with American customs to know that when police officers are shouting and pointing guns at you, the best practice is to show them your hands.
Only because Diallo got himself killed for not speaking the language12 did we find out about all the immigration frauds he had committed to be here. He first got to America by falsely stating he was a “student,” though he never attended any school in the United States. After arriving on a student visa, Diallo was granted asylum based on his claim that he was from Mauritania and his parents had been murdered by the government.
In fact, he was raised in a well-to-do Guinean family and had lived in Bangkok and Singapore as a child, traveling with his father’s job. After Diallo’s death-by-lack-of-English-skills, his allegedly murdered parents suddenly materialized and demanded $61 million from New York City taxpayers. The city gave them $3 million—at that point the largest wrongful-death settlement in New York history for a person earning less than $10,000 a year.13
Why were hardworking New Yorkers forced to bear the cost of a problem that was caused entirely by incompetent federal immigration officials? Four cops’ lives were nearly ruined because an immigrant who didn’t speak English scammed the system to stay in the United States. Even before the shooting, Diallo wasn’t a major boon to the country. He eked out a living selling baseball caps, tube socks, and bootleg videotapes on East 14th Street in Manhattan,14 clogging up the sidewalk and engaging in intellectual property theft.
No American media outlet would ever admit it, but any legal immigrant making less than $10,000 is collecting food stamps as well as other government benefits. With the money they received from New York taxpayers, Diallo’s parents built a computer lab—in rural Guinea.15 Despite the pain it must cause them to be reminded of their son’s death in America, both his parents now live here, too,16 the better to denounce American police officers.17 Federal officials, whose salary you pay, give away American citizenship like a consolation prize.
Diallo’s cost to America: Millions of dollars in immigration and criminal court costs, judges’ salaries, welfare payments, a $3 million settlement, in addition to the cost of government attorneys to work out the deal, and the loss of four good officers to the New York police force.
Benefits to America: $0.00.
EDWIN BULUS
Another asylum applicant became famous only because the New York Times decided to champion his cause. In 1997, the New York Times ran a Pulitzer-bait story about Nigerian political refugee Edwin Bulus, who said the Nigerian government “is bent on genocide against my entire family. I’m afraid that, like others, I will be killed.”18 He said he became a target of Nigerian political authorities after his brother, Happy Bulus, attempted a military coup. Edwin himself was part of the pro-democracy movement at the University of Lagos, having become “very inquisitive about political ideologies like those of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson.”19
Somehow Edwin managed to escape and flee to America, using documents he admitted were fake. When he arrived, he said, he found out both his parents had died. Dr. L. Hankoff, a government psychiatrist, diagnosed Edwin with depression. “He sits with his hands in his lap and his head bent,” Dr. Hankoff observed, “making some eye contact, but often apathetic and appearing dejected.” Edwin blamed himself for his parents’ deaths, saying, “I just pray they rest in peace.”20
But instead of finding sanctuary in the United States, the Times said, Edwin had ended up in a “Kafkaesque” web of INS bureaucracy. Guards at the detention facility had thrown out his papers—the very papers he needed to make his case! Not only that, but they had “stomped on him, forced him to kneel naked for hours, pushed his head in a toilet, left him to sleep naked on a bare mattress and subjected him to racist invective.”21
Still, Edwin’s many supporters had high hopes! Edwin was going to receive another hearing as soon as his cousin could send a photo ID card and affidavits attesting to the fact that Edwin was Happy Bulus’s brother. His asylum application was supported by everyone—Amnesty International USA, the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, a government psychiatrist, and a law firm in Nigeria. An immigration official who had interviewed Edwin for two hours found him credible. And, of course, it had to help that the Newspaper of Record was broadcasting his story.
Alas, instead of shaking up the INS, the Times inadvertently shook out the truth. The Nigerian acting consul in New York read the Times article. So did a businessman visiting from Nigeria. And so did Nigerians living as far away as Australia and Oregon. It turned out that Happy Bulus did not have a brother named Edwin. Edwin had never attended the University of Lagos. Edwin’s parents were alive and well. Happy’s parents were alive and well—and none too happy about this imposter using their family’s name. Edwin’s name wasn’t even “Edwin,” it was “Muhtaru.”22
The only reason Edwin’s lies were exposed was because the Times believed every word he said. Of course, anyone could have been fooled by a wily deceiver like Edwin. When confronted with the discrepancies in his story, Edwin claimed that there must be two lieutenant colonels named “Happy Bulus” who were arrested for plotting military coups against the Nigerian government. “The issue before me,” he said, “is a double identity clash.”23 His immigration lawyer believed him.
In the end, Edwin probably got asylum. As his lawyer explained, Edwin had actually bolstered his case for asylum by lying because, while he might not have been wanted by Nigerian officials before, since defaming them in his application, “he’s in danger. He’s been targeted.”24 Most likely, Edwin is currently engaging in credit card schemes from a housing project in Staten Island.
OSCAR FOR PLAYING A GANG-RAPE VICTIM
In 2001, the New Yorker described the dramatic performance of one immigrant during her asylum interview. The applicant, Caroline, wept, closed her eyes, and whispered as she told her story of being repeatedly arrested, beaten, sodomized, and raped by soldiers in her country. They “took me by the head and they put my head against their penis,” she said. “They spat on us. They wanted us to do things. . . . They beat us up and did horrible things to us. . . . They forced us to do fellatio and they put objects in our genitals. They stamped on us, they trampled us for three days. I suffered many infections because of the rape. My kid
neys got infected.”
Although Caroline claimed she had been repeatedly hospitalized on account of these barbarities, she could produce no evidence “because of all the riots and the pillages.” She had no proof of her abortion because “I don’t want any documentary evidence of this abortion because it happened as a result of a rape.” If she were sent back, she said, “I might be killed on the road, because I am a member of the opposition.”
The immigration officer interviewing Caroline was notoriously tough-minded, but after hearing a tearjerker like that, he granted her asylum.
The truth, Caroline admitted to the New Yorker, was that she had come to the United States with her family for a wedding the previous summer and decided to stay. The “immigrant community” in the United States provided her with fake identity cards and Social Security numbers and those heinous rape stories. They had initially suggested she claim genital mutilation, but female circumcision is not practiced in her country, so she went the rape/torture route. “I have never been raped,” she laughingly told the New Yorker.25
Asked about the lenient approach of our immigration system toward asylum claims, Dana Marks, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said she always errs on the side of granting asylum because the “mistake of granting a fraudulent asylum case is far less disastrous than denying a genuine one.”26 Disastrous for whom?
AUTOMATIC ENTRY FOR THE WORST CULTURES IN THE WORLD
The entire world outside of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Western Europe is a humanitarian crisis. We’re not even rescuing the real victims, who are either dead or can’t catch an international flight to the United States. In any event, that’s not our job.