Book Review:
¡Adios America!
The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country
into a Third World Hellhole
By Ann Coulter
Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2015
392 pp., $27.99 hardcover
The publication of a book on immigration by Ann Coulter is a significant event, given the size of her audience: within two days of its release, ¡Adios America! was sitting at number ten on the Amazon.com bestseller list. Since the firing of Pat Buchanan from MSNBC, Coulter is the last sound spokesman on the immigration issue still ensconced in the mainstream media, and the SPLC already has her in their sights (see “Ann Coulter—a White Nationalist in the Mainstream?,” Hatewatch Blog, 28 May 2015). Yet she doesn’t seem to be flinching; in her new book, she notes that “without the white settlers, what is known as ‘America’ would still be an unnamed continent full of migratory tribes chasing the rear end of a buffalo every time their stomachs growled.”
The peculiar merit of her book is to help ordinary readers see through the euphemisms, insincerity, and outright dishonesty which characterize debate on immigration more than any other issue in American politics. A few examples:
Amnesty isn’t “comprehensive immigration reform,” “an earned path to citizenship,” or, as Obama calls it, “steps to deal responsibly with the millions of undocumented immigrants who already live in our country.” It’s amnesty.
Catholic Charities may enjoy taking in immigrant families so they can feel like the Harriet Tubman of Uganda, but they don’t have a right to do it on the taxpayers’ dime. It’s not “charity” if we have to pay for their good works. It’s charity if they pay.
The idea that the mass importation of poor people is good for the economy [is based on] the size of the entire economy, which inevitably expands the more humans we have living here. [But] a breakdown of costs and benefits shows that college-educated Americans pay an average of $29,000 more in taxes than they get back in government services. Legal immigrants, on average, get back $4,344 more in government services than they pay in taxes. Those with only a high school degree net about $14,642 and those without a high school degree collect a whopping $36,993.
And an estimated three quarters of illegals fall into these last two categories.
Last May, a journalist on a nationally televised program was shocked, shocked, at a Republican politician’s suggestion that Democrats support immigration in order to gain votes. Coulter reminds us of a little recent history:
A year before the 1996 presidential election, the Clinton administration undertook to make 1 million immigrants citizens in time to vote. The White House 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.
Marco Rubio’s assurances that illegals amnestied under his Gang of Eight bill will “pay back taxes” actually meant that they would receive earned income tax credits. Rubio’s assurances that his amnesty would not qualify them for any federal benefits meant they were already receiving every imaginable federal benefits as illegals, so there were no new ones left to grant once they were amnestied. Oh, and by the way—Rubio campaigned for the Senate seat he now holds on a pledge to oppose amnesty.
What ordinary working American can keep ahead of so much dishonesty and subterfuge without a guidebook such as Coulter has provided?
Coulter also makes clear that immigration is the quintessential issue that pits ordinary Americans of all sorts against the power of entrenched elites. She reports that “more Americans have a favorable opinion of North Korea (11 percent) than desire more immigration (7 percent).” But “every single elite group in America is aligned against the public—the media, ethnic activists, big campaign donors, Wall Street, multimillionaire farmers, and liberal ‘churches.’” The fight is unequal in another way: “The anti-amnesty side has to be perfect every time; the pro-amnesty side only has to win once.”
Coulter devotes a lot of space to the quaint customs of recent immigrants. A man in Fresno, California, “looked out his window and saw his Hmong neighbors clubbing a German shepherd puppy to death. The police arrived and found out the Hmong were practicing a ritual slaughter to appease the gods because the woman of the house was sick.” An American doctor had diagnosed her with diabetes, but she was not satisfied with the white man’s medicine, so the family bought a puppy for the express purpose of clubbing it to death. The head of the Fresno Human Society helpfully explains that complaints about such practices are “racism, pure and simple.”
While the media entertain us with lurid stories about frat-boy gang rapes that never happened, a very large number of immigrant sex crimes are going underreported or wholly unreported. In 2013, for example, “the government busted up a child pornography operation in Illinois being run out of the home of three illegal aliens from Mexico.” The headline in the Peoria Journal Star read: “Bloomington Men Plead Guilty to False Documents.”
A Chinese immigrant in New York, Dong Lu Chen, bludgeoned his wife to death with a claw hammer because she was having an affair. Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Edward Pincus let Chen off with probation after an anthropologist testified that, in Chinese culture, the shame of a man being cuckolded justifies murder. Judge Pincus admitted that if the exact same crime had been committed by an American, “the Court would have been constrained to find the defendant guilty of manslaughter in the first degree.”
Dominican immigrant judge Ramona Gonzales presided over the criminal trial of Hmong immigrant Sia Ye Vang. Convicted of habitually sexually molesting his stepdaughters, aged ten and eleven, Vang faced up to eighty years in prison. Instead, Judge Gonzales sentenced him to...English lessons! The child molester’s lawyer had argued that sex with girls is accepted in Vietnam, the defendant’s native country.
Mexicans and other Latin Americans appear to make something of a specialty of underage sex. According to CNN, 318 ten-year-old-girls gave birth in Mexico in 2011. The youngest ever verified Mexican mother was eight. Seventy-seven percent of reported sexual assaults in Lima, Peru are against children. One survey of Latin women revealed that eight percent had been sexually assaulted as children. The corresponding percentage in America is 0.1, and a significant number of Americans would be prepared to support the death penalty in such cases. But under the influence of mass immigration, attitudes are softening.
An American police detective says he gets lots of calls from hospitals alerting him to thirteen year old girls giving birth. “He’d show up at the girl’s home, expecting to find parents ready to string up the guy. Instead, he said, “the family will say it’s a blessing and we’re so happy. I’ll explain it’s illegal, they cut me right off.” Police departments report they are learning to “be understanding” and keep an “open mind” about such cultural differences. Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, has given up prosecuting child rape cases altogether because it would demand too large a share of the county government’s time and attention.
One immigration policy Miss Coulter can get behind is that of Israel:
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? 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.
While American politicians refuse to authorize a fence on the Southern border on the grounds that Mexicans will simply buy ladders, Israel actually built a fence on its border and saw the number of “illegal infiltrators” drop to zero. The opposition supports Netanyahu’s policy. Our politicians are quick to proclaim their love for Israel, but cannot be brought to explain why we cannot adopt a policy on illegal entry similar to theirs.
The American media have been excited recently on the subject of beheadings in the Middle East. Few Americans have any idea how common this practice is right next door to us in Mexico:
Between 2007 and 2011, 1,300 people were beheaded by criminal gangs in Mexico—in addition to the 100,000 murders by other means. In a search of all transcripts in the Nexis archive in the first eight months of ISIS’s existence...“beheading” was used in the same sentence as ISIS or ISIL 1,629 times. During that same period, it was used in the same sentence as Mexico or Mexican twice.
Among the oddest and most widely exploited weaknesses of our immigration system is “birthright citizenship,” the practice of granting citizenship according to one’s place of birth. An anecdote: in September, 2011, the wife of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, head of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel and the man who replaced Osama bin Laden as the FBI’s most wanted, left the cartel’s hideout long enough to get to California and give birth to twin American anchor babies. She then returned to Mexico.
Coulter reports that automatic citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants only became “law” in 1982 at the whim of a Supreme Court Justice:
Out of the blue, Justice Brennan slipped a footnote into a 5-4 decision in Plyler v. Doe asserting that “no plausible distinction” could be drawn “between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.”
One wonders how anyone who found the distinction between lawful and unlawful implausible could function as a United States Supreme Court Justice, but Brennan did not explain himself. Newspapers, including the Mexican-owned New York Times, are now campaigning to outlaw the term “anchor baby”—as they have previously done with “amnesty” and “illegal alien.”
Coulter entitles one chapter “Every Single Immigration Category is a Fraud.” Here she recounts stories of Muslim terrorists who claim to be agricultural workers while living in New York City, and foreign tech workers brought in to fill fictional shortages as the higher-wage Americans they have replaced are laid off. Worst of all is the refugee racket: immigration enthusiasts coach applicants on inventing sob stories. “How are U.S. officials going to investigate claims of gang rape in Nigeria? They don’t: they just grant asylum.”
Coulter’s final chapter reviews the immigration records of leading 2016 Republican presidential candidates, but the discussion is already out of date: the best record belongs to Romney, who has since stated that he will not run. Next best are Ted Cruz and Scott Walker, who have recently flip-flopped to the right side of the issue. Unmentioned is Donald Trump, who announced his candidacy two weeks after ¡Adios America! appeared. Trump asked for and received an advance copy of the book, and it undoubtedly influenced his announcement speech:
The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everyone else’s problems. When Mexico sends us its people, they’re not sending us their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems. And they’re bringing those problems with us [ sic]. They’re bringing drugs; they’re bringing crime; they’re rapists.
Trump quickly soared to the top of the polls, where he remains as of this writing. He faced a strong backlash for his remarks, but counterattacked rather than going on the defensive. This has only increased his popularity with voters.
Ann Coulter has correctly pointed out that Trump is still too weak on the immigration issue: thus far, he has carefully limited his criticisms to illegal immigration, and it is unclear what reductions, if any, he would make in legal immigration if elected President. Still, Trump has made it impossible for his rival candidates to avoid the subject of immigration altogether, as most would clearly prefer to do.
Like Trump, Coulter has been the subject of attacks for her plain speaking on immigration. At a California book signing for ¡Adios America!, she was met by a braying band of Latin American immigrants tearing up copies of her book and shouting “Adios, Ann Coulter” and “Go back to Europe!” Unintimidated, she remarked to a journalist:
You have to understand, screaming and defacing things is how Latin Americans express disagreement. At least as long as they were destroying books and screaming in a book store, they weren’t molesting any 4-year-olds.