TAKE 2 MILLION IMMIGRANTS AND CALL ME IN THE MORNING
At this point, the only thing we know for sure about the presidential election is that if Donald Trump loses, it will be because of his personality, and if he wins, it will be because of immigration.
I know this because the media are publishing almost as many stories about the wonders of immigration as they are about Trump being Adolf Hitler. The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, MSNBC, the lickspittles at Cato — you can’t open your computer or turn on the TV without encountering a tidal wave of lies about our beloved immigrants. (Former Washington Post readers, you’ll just have to take my word for it.)
In the Times, Linda Qiu produced a whopper of an article purporting to refute Trump’s malicious nonsense about immigration, and as an immigrant herself, must be completely unbiased, so I’ll use that as my template.
Qiu begins with the silly claim that Trump and his vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance, blame everything on illegal immigrants. (Her article is already hanging in my Museum of Straw Man Arguments.)
“Be it gun violence, high housing costs, long wait times at emergency rooms or an impending depletion of disaster relief funding,” she writes, “Mr. Trump and Senator JD Vance have offered the same diagnosis: All are because of unauthorized immigration.”
Well, maybe not exclusively because of illegal immigration. (Only RACISM can be blamed for everything.) But while immigration is not 100% responsible for these problems, it’s hard to think of anything that’s been made easier to solve by dumping millions of uneducated, poverty-stricken, non-English-speaking people on our country.
Nevertheless, Qiu claims Trump and Vance are not merely overstating the case, but completely wrong. You see, she has “experts.”
One “expert,” Ieva Jusionyte, a professor at Brown University, said, “Vance is not correct that there is an influx of illegal guns from Mexico. … It is simply not a thing.”
I totally trust someone who says, “it is simply not a thing.” If she threw in “not on my bingo card” or “saying the quiet part out loud,” she’d have sold me right there.
Except Jusionyte’s claim is absurd. Where do liberals imagine criminals get their guns? According to the Department of Justice, the guns used in crimes mainly come from illegal sources, to wit: people involved in the sale of illegal drugs, markets for stolen goods and other criminals or criminal enterprises. (How about the much-maligned gun shows? A grand total of about 0.8% of guns used in crimes come from gun shows. Ninety percent of guns used in crimes do not come from any retail source at all.)
As it happens, Mexican cartels are a gigantic criminal enterprise right on our border. They move enough fentanyl, synthetic methamphetamine and other drugs into our country to kill about 100,000 Americans every year. But not guns— no sir! — according to Jusionyte. Perhaps cartel enforcers protect their “multibillion-dollar narco empire” (New York Times) with complaints to the HR department.
The Times’ Qiu cites other “government data and experts” who claim we’re the ones sending guns to the cartels. (NYT rule: Always blame Americans.)
Liberals have been pushing this lie for 20 years. They finally got so desperate that Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, had to start putting U.S. guns directly into the hands of Mexican drug cartels so that Democrats could blame innocent American gun dealers. (For my younger readers, look up “Operation Fast and Furious.”)
Except Holder got caught, so the Democrats’ next idea was to dummy up a phony study that’s been refuted a million times, but was bought hook, line and sinker by the crack Times reporter.
Citing “U.S. and Mexican governments and independent researchers” — I just hope the independent researchers use phrases like “that’s not a thing” — Qiu somberly reported that “about 70 percent of firearms recovered at crime scenes in Mexico came from the United States.”
That is precisely the opposite of the truth — also my idea for the Times’ new motto.
Mexico doesn’t send all guns retrieved from crime scenes to the U.S. for tracing, only the ones with serial numbers, indicating they came from the U.S. About 70% of guns used by Mexican criminals have no serial numbers and no conceivable connection to the U.S., and, therefore, were never sent to the U.S. for tracing.
It’s only among the roughly 30% that were sent to the U.S. that a majority were traced to the U.S. That’s the Democrats’ big gotcha: Guns from the U.S. were traced to the U.S.! It’s a miracle! On the other hand, more than 80% of all guns found at Mexican crime scenes were not from the U.S.
This is the sort of stupid game liberals play to try to convince us that all guns are bad and all Mexicans are good — definitely better than Americans, with their nasty gun culture.
As for housing, anyone with the intellect of a parakeet ought to be able to grasp that more people in need of housing will inevitably drive up the price of housing. It’s called the Law of Supply and Demand. If Qiu has figured out a way to repeal that law, she should publish immediately. Not only will she win a Nobel Prize in economics, but everyone in the world can have beachfront property and a classic six on Park Avenue.
On the other hand, if she hasn’t repealed the law of supply and demand, Qiu is, in fact, dumber than a parakeet.
Finally, of course mass third world immigration harms our schools, hospitals, Social Security, disaster relief and every other service meant for the American people. First, there are the gobs of money required to accommodate millions of non-English speakers — like bilingual teachers, doctors, nurses, law enforcement officers, court translators, etc. All mandated by law.
But also, since 1970, we have been deliberately bringing in the poorest, least-educated people in the world. They don’t come close to making enough money to pay for the massive amounts of services they consume. Every additional schoolbook, teacher, bus driver, janitor, hospital bed, catheter, liver transplant — that’s on you, taxpayer. (If Kamala Harris is elected, you’ll also be on the hook for illegals’ transgender operations, too.)
Not surprisingly, a majority, 54%, of immigrant-headed households are on welfare, compared to only 39% of U.S.-born households — i.e., the people government assistance was intended to help. For illegal immigrants, the figure is 59%. And don’t forget, an awful lot of “U.S.-born households” include second- and third- generation immigrants. It might be time to update liberals’ favorite cliché to, “We’re a nation of immigrants on public assistance.”
What happened to the claim that immigrants, especially illegals, aren’t allowed to collect welfare? Oh, yeah, that’s a lie.
Among other free stuff, illegals get free school breakfasts and lunch, as well as women, infants and children (WIC) benefits, plus emergency room care for all their medical needs. Some states give illegals Medicaid and SNAP. Most important, illegals simply need to drop a baby, and they can immediately start collecting full welfare on behalf of their allegedly, but not really, “American citizen” kid.
I don’t like Trump’s personality either, but since the left will not stop bringing in the third world until our country is the same as every other country, and there’s no reason for anyone to come here, we don’t have much of a choice on Tuesday.
COPYRIGHT 2024 ANN COULTER
‘There is no core identity, there is no mainstream’
What happens in a country without cultural conservatism? Look no further than Canada, where the national identity is disintegrating.
In 2015, soon after taking office, the new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gushed to a fawning New York Times that, “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada. There are shared values – openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other – but there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.”
Along with his fellow travellers in the institutions, he set to work ripping the country’s historic identity to shreds. The three prongs of the attack involved setting fire to its past, promoting LGBTQ and critical race theory in schools and government, and unleashing an unprecedented wave of mass migration. Only now that the full impact of this cultural revolution is sinking in is the country waking up. Even the mainstream liberal left admits things have gone too far.
Journalist Omer Aziz, in the liberal establishment Globe and Mail, penned a viral piece about the betrayal of the ‘Canadian Dream’, which he characterised as on life support. He speaks of a social crisis, an immigration crisis, an economic crisis and a political crisis after the ravages of Trudeau. Former Tory cabinet minister Kevin Klein adds, ‘Today, our country’s identity is under siege, not from outside invaders but from within – by an ideology that seeks to erase what it means to be Canadian. The left’s relentless attack on our values, history, and sense of belonging is tearing at the very fabric of our democracy.’
This summer I spent five weeks in the eastern part of my country, setting foot in the only two of the country’s ten provinces I had yet to visit. What greeted me? The progress pride flag fluttered everywhere across the picturesque small towns of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Food chains in these overwhelmingly British-origin provinces were staffed almost entirely by recent arrivals, the product of an unprecedented wave of temporary foreign workers encouraged by Trudeau’s Liberals. If you think Britain, with 50 percent more people than Canada, took in a lot of immigrants last year, consider that Canada admitted a staggering 1.9 million to the UK’s 1.2 million.
But perhaps the most symbolic sight was in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where woke activists had recently torched the only eighteenth century building in the city – one of only a handful outside Quebec – to the point it may have to be demolished. This ISIS-style vandalism was fired by the vogue for ‘decolonisation’ emerging in the wake of over 100 arson attacks on churches across Canada. These, which Trudeau called ‘understandable’, accompanied a wave of statue toppling of Canadian founders such as Sir John A. Macdonald (as well as Queen Victoria), and were motivated by leftist myths about the churches’ role in the country’s Residential Schools programme for indigenous First Nations people.
Though mistreatment of indigenous Canadians occurred at these schools, as they did in reserve and non-native schools, records show that native people who attended Residential Schools had significantly lower mortality rates from infectious diseases than their peers who remained on reserve. Documentary evidence reveals that children were not removed from reserves without parental consent. Aspirational native parents sought to have such schools constructed and wanted their children to attend. Many who attended spoke positively of their experience. The evidence also does not back up accusations that the schools were designed to erase the culture of First Nations people.
The charge that children were killed or placed in ‘mass graves’ by those who ran the schools has no basis in documentary or forensic records. Rather, it is based on selective oral testimony and ignores the considerable monetary and identity incentives shaping the narrative of plaintiffs, white progressive allies and well-paid lawyers. Recently, the Canadian government forked over a whopping $2.8 billion to atone for their claims. The notion that residential schools amounted to a form of ‘genocide’ is based on misinformation and an abuse of the English language, but this did not stop the entire political and media establishment endorsing the lie. Telling such truths is smeared as ‘denialism’ by woke elites, and zealots among them are trying to criminalise it.
Meanwhile, gender reassignment surgery and self-identification are the norm, the UK’s Cass Review has been dismissed and draconian human rights bills like C-16 and C-63 permit plaintiffs to haul people before kangaroo courts known as Human Rights Tribunals for subjectively-defined offences like misgendering. Trudeau’s government has majored on speech policing and authoritarianism towards the right, abusing the language of ‘hate’ and ‘misinformation’ while trafficking in both.
The downstream effects of this woke revolution include falling per capita GDP, rising crime and youth unemployment, soaring house prices and a surge in homeless encampments. As I note in my new book Taboo, the so-called ‘culture war’ is about much more than culture.
Perhaps the only silver lining to the story is that Trudeau’s dumpster fire seems to have woken people up. Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are crushing the Liberals in the polls by nearly 20 points, on course for a clear majority of seats. Two-thirds of people want lower immigration and the issue is a top concern for voters for the first time I can remember. Meanwhile young Canadians, bucking trends elsewhere in the Anglosphere, appear to lean well to the right of their elders on some metrics.
Only time will tell if this is too little, too late.