Americans have got to drop their weird verbal tic of inserting “illegal” into any discussion of immigration.

After I pointed out on “Fox News” that the dispute between Sen. Rand Paul and Gov. Chris Christie over spying on “Americans” was entirely a problem of immigration, “Fox Insiders” put these two sentences together:

“[Coulter] explained that halting illegal immigration would help solve other key issues such as the economy and national security. ‘Don’t make terrorists citizens through immigration, and we’ll have a lot less of a national security problem,’ Coulter said, pointing to the attacks at the Boston Marathon and in Chattanooga.” (Emphasis added.)

Were those guys illegals? Did Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev swim across the Rio Grande to get to Boston? Did Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez hire coyotes to sneak him across the border so he could shoot four Marines and a sailor in Chattanooga?

No. Our government invited them in.

Some of our other beloved legal immigrants include:

— Anwar al-Awlaki, the man whose death in Afghanistan provoked Rand Paul to stage a 13-hour filibuster in opposition to the use of drones against — I quote — “American citizens”;

— the Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan;

— the attempted Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad;

— all those Somali immigrants living in Minnesota, bloc-voting for Al Franken before flying to Syria to fight with ISIS;

— Sirhan Sirhan;

— the 9/11 hijackers;

— the Pakistani terrorist Daood Sayed Gilani, American anchor baby, responsible for four days of bombings in Mumbai in 2008;

— the New York subway bomb plotter, Najibullah Zazi;

— Pakistani terrorist Aafia Siddiqui, who shot a U.S. Army captain in 2010;

— the “local man” arrested this week for trying to organize an army of ISIS fighters in New York and New Jersey, Nader Saadeh — anchor baby “American citizen.”

ALL LEGAL IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR CHILDREN! Why were any of them in this country? What are we getting out of this?

It’s not just the Fox website. Wherever I go on this book tour, I find people injecting “illegal” into the discussion, as if they’re being polite, like saying “Jewish” instead of “Jew.” But all these “homegrown,” “American” terrorists aren’t Americans, at all — except as a result of recent government policy.

This week, Sens. Jeff Sessions and Ted Cruz have sent a letter to the Obama administration asking how many “non-citizens, naturalized U.S. citizens and natural-born U.S. citizens have been involved in terrorist-related activity since 1993.” National Review’s headline? “Cruz, Sessions: How Many ‘Homegrown’ Terrorists Were Illegal Immigrants?” (The headline was later changed, after complaints.)

It’s a national neurosis! People simply refuse to see what’s right in front of their faces.

Admittedly, the media hide the evidence, but did anyone read this 2010 New York Times headline, “2 New Jersey Men in Terrorism Case Go Before a Judge,” and think, Oh my gosh! What is America coming to?

The “New Jersey men” were Mohamed Mahmood Alessa and Carlos Eduardo Almonte. Alessa, born to legal immigrants from Jordan and the Palestinian territories, told his Boy Scout troop, “Osama bin Laden is a hero in my family” and expressed a desire to mutilate homosexuals and subordinate women. (He was the first member of his troop to earn a merit badge in female circumcision.)

Alessa’s co-conspirator, Almonte, is a legal immigrant from the Dominican Republic. (Raising suspicions, he doesn’t play baseball.) He could be heard on a wiretap saying that he wanted U.S. troops to come home “in caskets.”

He also attended an anti-Israel rally with a large sign reading “DEATH TO ALL JUICE” — which he posted to his Facebook page, a social media platform created by a juice. (Naturalization officials must have high-fived one another when they got that guy.)

CNN was so relieved to have a “homegrown” terrorist who wasn’t a Muslim, the network abandoned its own rule book and identified Almonte as the child of “Latino immigrants” — amid fulsome descriptions of him as “an all-American kid” and an “all-American altar boy.”

So the good news is: Not all “American” terrorists are Muslim immigrants. Some are Latino immigrants — who typically become radicalized after coming into contact with one of our prized Muslim immigrants.

In addition to “DEATH TO ALL JUICE” Almonte, there was Bryant Neal Vinas, whose parents were legal immigrants from Argentina and Peru. Vinas fought with al-Qaida in Afghanistan and, in 2008, plotted to bomb New York’s Penn Station.

At least he’s not one of those icky illegal immigrants!

I have a word limit, so I’ve limited today’s discussion of legal immigrants to the terrorists. But I note that the big news this week is about an illegal immigrant, Victor Aureliano Martinez Ramirez, who raped, then murdered 64-year old Marilyn Pharis with a hammer at her home in Santa Maria, California. Has anyone noticed that Martinez Ramirez’s co-conspirator in the rape-torture-murder was legal immigrant Jose Fernando Villagomez?

It’s getting to the point where we’re going to need cattle prods and shock collars to break people of the neurotic compulsion to slip “ILLEGAL” in front of the word “immigrant.” The reality of legal immigration cannot make a dent in the elite’s make-believe world, where legal immigrants are only hot Swedish models, Rupert Murdoch and Sergey Brin.

Instead of Christie and Paul sparring over government policy on search warrants in a post-9/11 world, could we reconsider the government policy of admitting legal immigrants who need to be spied on?

Copyright 2015 Ann Coulter