A Review of Ann Coulter on Immigration
June 18, 2015
AT American Renaissance, Jared Taylor reviews Ann Coulter’s latest book on immigration. He calls it “a monument to common sense.” A memorable quote from the book:
“It’s a sweet deal the elites have: They get to have cheap nannies and lawn boys in the whitest towns in America–and feel morally superior at the same time.” There is plenty of hypocrisy: “The reason we can’t use immigration to bring in the best people is because our best people don’t want immigrants competing with their kids. They want immigrants competing with their landscaper’s kids.”
— Comments —
Henry McCulloch writes:
Ann Coulter is brave indeed to write about the third-rail topics she discusses in Adios, America. That said, compared with Peter Brimelow, Patrick Buchanan, the late Lawrence Auster and the handful of writers at VDare.com and elsewhere who have been writing about the National Question and the plutocrat-bought, government-executed unmaking of America through immigration for decades now, Miss Coulter comes late to the party.
Nevertheless Ann Coulter is courageous to address immigration, as she has a great deal to lose. She is a mainstream conservative figure and a media mainstay. As she knows well from previous experience, frankness about immigration, “diversity,” and their consequences is a good way to get oneself ostracized by the outlets currently making Coulter famous. That she’ll take the risk is a strong indicator of just how serious the problem is. And with Coulter’s high public profile, I’m very glad she is. Ann Coulter has my grateful thanks.
But… Even Miss Coulter continues to triangulate when it’s just too risky. In interviews and columns promoting Adios, America Coulter continually refers to the 1965 immigration “reform” that laid the legal predicate for the destruction of America as Ted Kennedy’s immigration law or Ted Kennedy’s victory. That misrepresents the law’s legislative history. It is true that, of the culprits, Kennedy is the best known today. It’s also true that, less than two years after his older brother’s assassination, the child-senator from Massachusetts was a sympathetic face to put on a bill most Americans had no reason to support. But Ted Kennedy in 1965 was far from being the legislative powerhouse he would become, always to America’s detriment, in later decades. For the 1965 immigration act, Kennedy was a poster boy, not a power-player.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (INA) is called the Hart-Celler Act after its Senate and House sponsors, Philip Hart of Michigan and Emanuel Celler of New York, both Democrats. Ted Kennedy wasn’t even the INA’s Senate sponsor.
The most important man behind the passage of the INA was Celler, a career Congressman from Brooklyn who was in the House so long he had the distinction of voting both against the Calvin Coolidge-supported Immigration Act of 1924 that brought immigration under control and for the INA of 1965 that demolished the former. The man behind Celler in 1965 was Norbert Schlei, a legal adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations who actually wrote much of the INA for Congressional Democrats.
The most important man in either House in terms of generating Republican votes for this Democratic, Great Society, legislation was Senator Jacob Javits, career liberal Republic politician from New York’s Lower East Side. Javits was the Republican sponsor of the INA and, as with Celler, Schlei and Hart, a far more important figure in the INA’s passage than Ted Kennedy.
I suppose Miss Coulter doesn’t mention Phil Hart because nobody remembers him anymore. But there’s not much risk in criticizing Hart’s role. He was, like Kennedy, a descendant of recent Irish immigrants. Celler, Schlei and Javits, arguably the trio who actually achieved this anti-American monstrosity, are touchier subjects. Also like Hart and Kennedy, all three were descendants of recent immigrants to the United States. But all three were Jewish.
It may be that Ann Coulter discusses Celler, Schlei and Javits’s role in the INA in Adios, America. I haven’t yet read the book. Forgive me if I doubt it, though, as she bashes only Kennedy in discussing it elsewhere. It may be that the success of Adios, America signals that out-of-control immigration, legal as well as illegal, is so out of control that it’s no longer a third-rail topic. If so, thank God and what a shame it has taken so long. It also appears, at least in Miss Coulter’s judgment, that Jewish advocacy of out-of-control immigration remains firmly third-rail.
To paraphrase something attributed to Voltaire, to know who has real power, ask whom may one not criticize. Jewish advocacy has been a critical motive force in the opening of America’s borders and the consequent transformation of the country. No account of America’s immigration travails that glides over its impact is telling the full story.
Bill R. writes:
I plan to be reading the book very soon. Having read nearly all of her other books, and based on what I’ve heard so far (including Jared Taylor’s review), I think this may prove to be Miss Coulter’s greatest contribution yet to our race and culture’s struggle to survive. And that is saying a lot for someone who has not only already contributed much to it (as well as being central to my own awakening to the truth about that struggle), but who has also managed to avoid being marginalized — though the elites remain ever vigilant in their efforts to do so — and, thus, has been able to continue assuring that her voice reaches the largest possible audience with page-turning best sellers, one after the other.
Furthermore, she remains as victorious as she is fearless in her willingness and enthusiasm for publicly debating anyone on this, or any of the other topics she has written on. So her enemies can only avoid her as much as possible because they already know she’ll beat them; therefore, they already know what we already know, that what they stand for is, as it always has been, a lie.
It is with supreme gratitude, therefore, that I salute, once again, a great and brave warrior in this desperate hour in the cause of our people.
Bill R. adds:
I think Mr. McCulloch is correct in pointing out Ann Coulter’s shyness on the issue of Jewish influence and open borders. It is equally true that Senator Kennedy was merely the de rigueur goy figurehead and toady for the real power and money behind the Immigration Act of 1965. My hunch is Miss Coulter is aware of Jewish influence on this issue but also aware that if she tackles it head on, she’ll end up with no readers. And in our culture, once they get you in the margin, barring a liberal conversion experience, you’re there for good. Others have only ever been in the margin. But for someone like Ann Coulter to end up there for good after where she’s been, would not be good for her or the rest of us. She still thinks this thing can be reversed (I’m rather less optimistic than she is, and that’s assuming she’s not even all that optimistic).
With all that, however, Miss Coulter, I have found, still manages to point you in the right direction at strategic moments. It was from Ann Coulter that I learned that the basketball team owner Donald Sterling was actually a Jew born Donald Tokowitz; and although again she did not mention her Jewishness explicitly, I had no problem discerning it when Ann Coulter noted that the reporter who wrote the Rolling Stone article about the fraudulent University of Virginia rape allegation was named Sabrina Rubin Erdely. She’s the only one who wrote on the case, that I know of, who gave you Miss Erdely’s middle name, and I cannot believe that was just coincidence, or that it escaped Miss Coulter’s notice that, in that particular case, that information indeed told you everything of relevance you needed to know about Rubin Erdely to understand why she had written such an article under such circumstances and what her motive was.
Laura writes:
I have not read Coulter’s book, so I will reserve full comment until I do.
Open borders is the inevitable working out of Protestant principles of equality and of the American ideal of freedom as an end in itself. Judging from this review, she does not get to those philosophical roots of the problem.
Mark Jaws writes:
“Open borders is the inevitable working out of Protestant principles of equality and of the American ideal of freedom as an end in itself.”
Didn’t these same Protestants in 1924 shut down the borders and reserve the right to discriminate in favor of their fellow northwestern Europeans seeking entry into our country? And didn’t these same Protestants don hoods and robes against liberal northern whites 50 years earlier during Reconstruction?
No, I think “Open Borders” has much more to do with the long tentacles of liberalism – much of them controlled by the Ashkenazi Influential Elite as discussed by Bill R and Henry McCulloch – than Protestantism.
Bill R. writes:
I haven’t yet read the book either, but I certainly don’t believe that the philosophy of “open borders” is some inevitable outcome or “working out” of Protestantism or “Protestant principles of equality.” One could just as easily (and I think more accurately) say “Enlightenment principles of equality.” But even there I would have to disagree because even Enlightenment principles of equality were light-years from the radicalized, Marxist egalitarianism of today, which is what’s responsible for the philosophy of open borders and unrestricted Third World immigration.
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that Protestantism actually invented and was therefore responsible for the concept of equality. It would still be unfair, in my opinion, to lay the blame for every extreme or radicalized form of equality on the original idea (which it may no longer even remotely resemble), as if the original idea somehow already bore, in germinal form, all of its future abuses, distortions, and extreme expressions, and should therefore be held responsible for them.
Not all manifestations of equality are created equal. Some are very bad, such as equality of results, and the consequent harm to others who are forced to surrender what is rightfully theirs in order to secure such “equal results” (the open borders philosophy is a manifestation of this type of equality), and other forms of equality are just, such as equality before the law. If Protestantism, again for the sake argument, were responsible for inventing a good application of equality, would it really be fair to blame it for its misapplications?
In Mr. Taylor’s review, he notes that Miss Coulter quotes Richard Brookhiser to the effect that, “The WASP character is the American character . . . . Without the WASP it would be another country altogether.” The review goes on to state that, “[Miss Coulter] also notes that ‘two centuries after the first Europeans settled America, the white population was 80 percent British and 98 percent Protestant.'”
There is every indication that the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants Miss Coulter referred to there who built, ruled, and had complete political, religious, and cultural hegemony in America for all but these last fifty years of its history (which, coincidentally, also correspond to the years of its most obvious and catastrophic decline), were firmly and overwhelming committed to maintaining the European racial character and identity of the nation. The best evidence for this is perhaps simply in the fact that during all those generations, the European racial character and identity of the nation was, in fact, maintained, and continued to be maintained at least up until 1965, when the nation was already nearly two centuries old. If Protestantism was “working out” its “open borders” inevitability, it was certainly taking its time because there was obviously no dearth of Protestant Americans to accomplish it if they had wanted to.
The fact of the matter is, during all that time, there was never any indication that Protestantism was tending Americans in a direction toward giving the country they had populated and worked so hard to build away to non-European immigrants. Therefore, I see no evidence that our present immigration crisis is the inevitable working out of “Protestant principles of equality.” (I would agree it was the inevitable working out of radicalized, specifically cultural Marxist, and therefore secular and atheistic, principles of equality, but I see no evidentiary cause for laying the blame for the development of those radicalized principles at the feet of Protestantism.) And, just for the record, the legislation that did finally begin the give-away of the country to non-European immigrants was publicly led by a Catholic (Ted Kennedy) backed largely by Jewish money and influence.
Furthermore, to this day, American Protestants still vote more to the right than any other major religious category. For example, in every presidential election since 2000, the majority of the Protestant vote has gone to the Republican candidate, whereas the majority of the Catholic, Jewish, and Other faiths vote, has gone to the Democratic candidate (with the exception of 2004 when a majority of the Catholic vote did go to the Republican). And if one counts only the white Protestant vote, the majorities in favor of the Republican candidate were of landslide proportions, every one. Strange that Protestants would, after all this time, still continue to demonstrate the “open borders inevitability” of their own philosophy so counter-intuitively, and so at odds with their own supposed “Protestant principles of equality.”
Laura writes:
Some brief comments in response to Mr. Jaws and Bill R.:
Didn’t these same Protestants in 1924 shut down the borders and reserve the right to discriminate in favor of their fellow northwestern Europeans seeking entry into our country?
Protestantism is many varying, shifting beliefs. The concepts of tolerance and equality became more and more part of Protestant sects over time. There are spiritual and philosophical reasons for that change, which I would summarize as the falling away over time of a supernatural sense of things.
One could just as easily (and I think more accurately) say “Enlightenment principles of equality.” But even there I would have to disagree because even Enlightenment principles of equality were light-years from the radicalized, Marxist egalitarianism of today, which is what’s responsible for the philosophy of open borders and unrestricted Third World immigration.
The dissemination and spread of Enlightenment beliefs to form a reigning ideology could not have taken hold without Protestantism’s lack of an objective standard and authority for Revealed faith and morality. Equality and liberty were America’s secular religion that bound together contrary sects. Yes, they became more radical over time under other influences.
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that Protestantism actually invented and was therefore responsible for the concept of equality.
No, I never said Protestantism, which is many different, shifting beliefs, “invented” the concept of equality. However, since one of its key ideas is that the individual faces God alone, without intermediaries, it undermined the hierarchical sense of life.
If Protestantism was “working out” its “open borders” inevitability, it was certainly taking its time because there was obviously no dearth of Protestant Americans to accomplish it if they had wanted to.
The fact of the matter is, during all that time, there was never any indication that Protestantism was tending Americans in a direction toward giving the country they had populated and worked so hard to build away to non-European immigrants.
Yes, it was taking its time. America was changing, becoming more individualistic, industrialized, and capitalistic. I think these things were indeed foreshadowings. The birth rate was declining during the nineteenth century and family life was gradually changing under the influence of intensifying individualism, which is a major feature of Protestant society. The eventual radical falling away in the 20th century from the moral code that governed family life for centuries and that was part of America’s Christian inheritance was, I believe, a major factor in the opening up of America’s borders. Protestants (in general) accepted contraception and divorce. It’s just a fact of life that the more children people have and the more people have children, the more serious a society is about the future and the more unlikely it is to give up job opportunities for its own. In a Christian social order, the economy is for families rather than families being for the economy.
You are conflating race and religion, I think. The ancestors of WASPs, after all, were Catholic for many hundreds of years. There was no objective basis for Protestant beliefs other than the authority of the Catholic Church. Protestantism is a dissolving thing and as a whole leads to liberalism and social atheism, in which religion is simply a private matter subject to individual judgment. What does that have to do with open borders? Equality is a substitute religion.
For example, in every presidential election since 2000, the majority of the Protestant vote has gone to the Republican candidate, whereas the majority of the Catholic, Jewish, and other faiths vote, has gone to the Democratic candidate (with the exception of 2004 when a majority of the Catholic vote did go to the Republican).
Ethnicity is at work in those votes. (Much of that Catholic vote, by the way, is by nominal Catholics poorly formed in the faith.)