As Republican presidential debates and primaries approach, we can expect almost all candidates to sound tough on illegal immigration, regardless of their record or actual beliefs. This tough talk usually begins and ends with lofty rhetoric about how Republicans support legal immigration, just not illegal immigration.
But the 2016 candidates have a surprise in store, thanks to Ann Coulter’s new book, Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole. Coulter forcefully dismantles both left wing clichés and Republican bromides.
Instead of bringing a knife to a gun flight in typical Republican fashion, Ann Coulter brings a howitzer. To use a baseball analogy, Republican candidates better be prepared for fewer softballs in the upcoming debates. Immigration is not going to be a “side issue” in 2016, it is THE issue.
Coulter does not fall for the trap that the only problem with illegal immigration is that it’s illegal. If this were true, then why not just abolish borders and make them all legal? That’s pretty much the “fix” espoused by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Coulter explains why massive legal immigration is also a big problem – for American workers, for our schools, our health care system, public welfare and just about every facet of our culture.
Adios, America! reveals how the sheer number of immigrants and the criteria we use to select them — which prioritizes family reunification, refugees, and even a lottery over highly skilled immigrants– ensures that the legal immigrant population creates almost as many social problems as the surging illegal alien cohort.
- The majority of the 9-11 hijackers were here legally—and all of them entered legally.
- More than 52 percent of immigrant households have someone on welfare.
- Low-skilled immigrants depress the wages of the most needy Americans, while country clubs prosper.
- “Birthright citizenship” cheapens the value of American citizenship for everyone—and no, it is not mandated by the 14th Amendment, no matter what your congressman’s form letter reply tells you.
Where did immigration policy go wrong? Coulter rightfully blames Ted Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration Act for this devastation. The law lifted limits on legal immigration and replaced it with chain migration based on family reunification. The bill’s proponents insisted that it would not radically change our country’s immigration patterns or ethnic make up. In Kennedy’s words, it would “not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia.”
Contrary to those promises, the 1965 Act resulted in a radical shift away from limited immigration from primarily European countries to more than a million immigrants a year, the large majority from Mexico and Third World countries.
After observing that you’ll get called a racist for saying “immigration is changing America’s ethnicity,” she asks, “Why wasn’t it racist for supporters of Kennedy’s 1965 bill to boast that it wouldn’t?”
Coulter further notes that now many liberals gloat that the increased non-white immigrant population has made the country less conservative, which coincidentally also means less Republican. For example, Democratic consultant Patrick Reddy said the 1965 Act “has resulted in a wave of immigration from the Third World that should shift the nation in a more liberal direction within a generation. It will go down as the Kennedy family’s greatest gift to the Democratic Party.”
Coulter also debunks the myth that America is a “nation of immigrants.” If a country is a nation of immigrants because its original inhabitants came from somewhere else, then every country would be a “nation of immigrants,” including Mexico.
Like the late Harvard scholar Samuel P. Huntington, Coulter differentiates settlers who create a new society from immigrants who arrive in an established state. “There was no America until the British and Dutch arrived. They were not ‘immigrants’ because there was no established society for them to move to. Without the white settlers, what is known as ‘America’ would still be an unnamed continent full of migratory tribes.”
After exposing just how disastrous and dysfunctional our current immigration policies are, Coulter’s policy prescriptions are almost an afterthought. She calls for a total moratorium on legal immigration to let the current legal immigrants assimilate and then suggests something the New York Times will call both radical and un-American: that immigration reforms be based on America’s interests, not accommodations to the dreams of millions of poor migrants or the plans of ISIS jihadists.
As for the present illegal population of 12 to 20 million, Coulter rejects the argument that we cannot deport everyone so we must give all of them amnesty. Using the proven E-Verify program to crack down on employers will encourage many to “self-deport,” which means, to go home. However, she does not concede that deporting all illegals is impossible.
We all know enacting such new policies is easier said than done. Yet clearly, the first step is to end the pseudo-debate where establishment Republicans defensively concede 95 percent of the open borders agenda in a fruitless quest for the “Hispanic vote.” Coulter reminds us that since the mid-1970s, newly naturalized citizens register and vote Democrat by a 4-to-1 margin, and another “bipartisan amnesty” will not change that.
After one week, Adios, America! is already the #1 political book on Amazon, and the book’s powerful arguments are national news. Coulter deserves every patriot’s thanks for setting the proper framework and terms for an authentic immigration debate. Let the fireworks begin!
Will Republican candidates follow her lead in 2016? There are some hopeful signs, but I am not betting the farm on it. What I do know is that Rubio, Walker, Huckabee, and the other candidates will get more intelligent and probing questions about immigration thanks to Ann Coulter.
