Despite debuting at number two on the New York Times bestseller list, Ann Coulter’s latest blockbuster book Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole has received virtually no mainstream media attention outside of Fox News. This is not surprising, as the media does not want to have a real debate about immigration.
Instead, they prefer shadowboxing, where Democrats push for amnesty while Republicans quibble about the details. For example, after Obama issued his unilateral and illegal excutive amnesty, John Boehner criticized the president for “poison[ing] the well” against “immigration reform moving in this Congress,” as if legislative amnesty were desirable.
And virtually no one, including the top Tea Party candidates will discuss legal immigration. Rand Paul said “what we want is more legal immigration” while Ted Cruz believes “we should expand legal immigration.” This is to say nothing about outright amnesty peddlers like Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, and Jeb Bush.
Coulter turns this conventional GOP wisdom on its head. She indicts our entire legal immigration system for flooding our country with unskilled workers and often dangerous criminals.
The biggest culprit is family reunification, which she explains “isn’t about admitting the spouses and minor children of immigrants we’re dying to get in,” but allows immigrants to sponsor their parents, adult children, and siblings, who in turn can sponsor their family. Now, “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.”
The visa lottery, which we give 55,000 visas away with virtually no other requirements beyond the luck of the draw, is even more arbitrary. Coulter argues that instead of choosing them by chance, America should be choosing immigrants like the New England Patriots choose players. They don’t have a lottery system for their draft picks. No one guilts them into taking a blind kid with one leg over an All American — much less the blind kid’s cousin, to keep him company.
Chain migration and the visa lottery are the most obvious problems, but Coulter persuasively argues that “Every Single Immigration Category Is a Fraud.” Even seemingly innocuous visas for high tech workers are not what they seem. Contrary to the claims that Silicon valley would fall apart without massive third world immigration, she shows that “98.7% of the founders of important Silicon Valley companies were born in America! 99 percent are white men!”
The largest group of “high skilled” workers, H-1Bs, have lower skills than their American counterparts. However, businesses hire them because they cannot leave their job, which turns them into easily exploitable indentured servants.
Coulter’s solution: a total moratorium on all immigration for 10 years. Coulter compares any “immigration reform” to a country already flooded with tens of millions of legal and illegal immigrants to “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice … mopping the floor while the water is still pouring.” Instead, “we need to stop the inflow, then take time to assimilate the immigrants already here.”
This is not a radical idea. When I first joined Congress, I was a proud cosponsor of the late Bob Stump’s Mass Immigration Reduction Act, which would have lowered legal immigration to 40,000 for at least five years. The bill had over 50 co-sponsors including several Democrats.
Yet no one has reintroduced it since Obama’s election, and few politicians will even discuss reducing overall levels of immigration. In 2012, when the House GOP voted to abolish the Visa Lottery, they coupled it with an increase in STEM visas.
When Senator Jeff Sessions introduced an amendment to the Gang of Eight amnesty bill to ensure no more than 30 million legal immigrants would come into the country over the next decade, the 17 other members of the Senate Judiciary — including Ted Cruz, Chuck Grassley, John Cornyn, and Mike Lee — voted against it.
Coulter attributes the GOP’s failure to get serious about immigration to cheap labor and campaign consultants, whose “solitary interest is in pleasing big donors by constantly apologizing to Hispanics for not moving fast enough on amnesty.”
Fortunately, with Jeff Sessions’ leadership, more Republicans are talking about reducing legal immigration, including two presidential candidates — Rick Santorum and Scott Walker. Coulter warns in Adios America that both men had supported amnesty in the past, but — regardless of their sincerity — it’s a positive sign that they are campaigning on the issue.
Hopefully, Adios America’s success will force a real immigration debate that the media and Republican establishment are desperately trying to avoid.
