Ann Coulter’s ¡Adios America! is a four-alarm siren aimed at alerting some still-drowsy conservatives that the Democrats’ hot pursuit of “immigration reform” is designed to blow up the Republican party and conservatism in general. It is an open conspiracy by the Left, but too many in the GOP appear indifferent or, worse yet, are suffering from Stockholm syndrome and are cooperating with those who seek the party’s demise.
Coulter lays all this out in specific, gruesome and verifiable detail in her customary lively and provocative style. It’s a tutorial on the immigration debate, which conservatives ignore at their peril. Here is the real clear politics of what’s happening. Except for Lyndon Johnson’s pummeling of Barry Goldwater in 1964, she writes, “Democrats have not been able to get a majority of white people to vote for them in a presidential election since 1948.” Their response was to “overwhelm” Americans with “new voters from the Third World.” And this they did by passing the historic 1965 Immigration Reform Act, which, in essence, allowed enormous numbers of Hispanics to legally pour across America’s borders, whetting the appetite for a massive invasion of illegal immigrants as well.
Democratic consultant Patrick Reddy let the donkey out of the bag in his piece for the Roper Center in 1998:
The reform act, he allowed, “promoted by President Kennedy, drafted by Attorney General Robert Kennedy and pushed through the Senate by Ted Kennedy, 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.” (My emphasis) And so it has.
The Democratic effort to jam pro-Democrat immigrants into voting booths is both cynical and notorious. Before the 1996 presidential election, the Clinton administration undertook a major initiative to give citizenship to one million people so they could vote by Election Day.
The White House, Coulter reminds us, “demanded that applications be processed twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Criminal background checks were jettisoned for hundreds of thousands of applicants, resulting in citizenship being granted to at least seventy thousand immigrants with FBI criminal records and ten thousand with felony records. Murderers, robbers, and rapists were all made citizens so that the Democrats would have a million foreign voters on the rolls by Election Day.” Even the Washington Post realized this was intended to create a “potent new block of Democratic voters.”
Now that millions of illegal aliens have flooded America and are siding overwhelmingly with Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats—with help from too many obtuse Republicans—keep pressing for amnesties which will entice even more illegals to cross the border and allow even more millions of Hispanics to cast their votes for the Clinton-Obama party.
The 1976 Simpson-Mazzoli Act was a disaster. The amnesty came, Coulter notes, but “the border security never did.” She documents the results: Illegal immigration quickly sextupled. And there have been at least “a half dozen more amnesties since then, legalizing millions more . . .who broke our laws.” The browning of America is working out just swell for the Left, especially in important electoral states, but why do Republicans, Coulter wonders, keep acting like Charlie Brown and embracing these suicidal policies?
Amnesty and voting rights for illegals aren’t even high on the Hispanic wish list. Rep. Steve Pearce, a rock-ribbed New Mexico Republican, for instance, keeps winning a substantial number of Hispanics, despite telling them there is only one path to citizenship as far as he’s concerned: Illegals will just have to return to Mexico and get in the back of the line.
In 2011, 73 percent of California Hispanics said they’d support a candidate who wanted to “secure the border first, stop illegal immigration, and then find a way to address the status of people already here illegally.” And these are California Hispanics. In a 2014 Univision poll, 58 percent chose “require border security first” over “pass immigration reform.” Even Republican Whit Ayres, a too eager pro-Latino pollster, acknowledges that among Hispanics “jobs and the economy lead by a mile” over amnesty.
In virtually every presidential election the Democrats scoop up at least 60 percent of the Hispanic vote—a whopping 71% in 2012. Why? Because Hispanics, as well as other groups in the lower economic brackets, are far more interested in government handouts. “That’s why,” Coulter writes, “Obama’s Spanish-language ads during the 2012 campaign didn’t say one word about amnesty. Instead, he promised Hispanics free healthcare under Obamacare.”
Coulter exposes dozens of deceptions surrounding this issue, which explains her firm rejection of “comprehensive immigration reform” solutions and supposed “fixes” coming from Republicans and Democrats alike. Like Lenin’s supposed observation that promises, like piecrusts, are made to be broken, solemn, bipartisan pledges to ensure border security never materialize. Under Simpson-Mazzoli, border security provisions in the law were ignored. Teddy Kennedy swore that his 1965 bill would never “inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area,” but more than half of all immigrants to the United States since 1970 are native Spanish speakers.
Is Obama really the Deporter in Chief, as some of his supporters claim, in order to lure Republicans into backing immigration “reform”? Not so, says Coulter, pointing out that he’s deported “far fewer” than Bush, but has just changed the definition to include illegals turned away at the border. Her evisceration of Marco Rubio’s 2013 “reform” proposal is done in devastating detail, as she also caustically describes how Rubio quickly abandoned his pledge on border security first.
New amnesties proposed by both Democrats and Republicans will, if approved by Congress and if history is a guide, almost certainly help swamp our welfare and prison rolls and lower the wages of our existing work force. And don’t believe there are only 12 million “illegals,” she says, since there are excellent studies—a very convincing one by Bear Stearns—which point to as many as 30 million.
Does Coulter have a solution? The only plan the Congress should push, she argues, is one that conservatives have been pushing for over a decade: Secure the border first. Once it is really accomplished, she remarks, we can then debate what to do with those “in the shadows.” Still seems a reasonable plan for many of us on the right.
