Everything said about President Trump’s “Muslim ban” is a lie — including that it’s a Muslim ban.
The New York Times wore out its thesaurus denouncing the order: “cruelty … injury … suffering … bigoted, cowardly, self-defeating … breathtaking … inflammatory … callousness and indifference” — and that’s from a single editorial!
Amid the hysteria over this prudent pause in refugee admissions from seven countries whose principal export is dynamite vests, it has been indignantly claimed that it’s illegal for our immigration policies to discriminate on the basis of religion.
This is often said by journalists who are only in America because of immigration policies that discriminated on the basis of religion.
For much of the last half-century, Soviet Jews were given nearly automatic entry to the U.S. as “refugees.” Entering as a refugee confers all sorts of benefits unavailable to other immigrants, including loads of welfare programs, health insurance, job placement services, English language classes, and the opportunity to apply for U.S. citizenship after only five years.
Most important, though, Soviet Jews were not required to satisfy the United Nations definition of a “refugee,” to wit: someone fleeing persecution based on race, religion or national origin. They just had to prove they were Jewish.
This may have been good policy, but let’s not pretend the Jewish exception was not religious discrimination.
If a temporary pause on refugee admissions from seven majority-Muslim countries constitutes “targeting” Muslims, then our immigration policy “targeted” Russian Christians for discrimination for about 30 years.
Never heard a peep from the ACLU about religious discrimination back then!
According to the considered opinion of the Cato Institute’s David J. Bier, writing in The New York Times, Trump’s executive order is “illegal” because the 1965 immigration act “banned all discrimination against immigrants on the basis of national origin.”
In 1966, one year after the 1965 immigration act, immigrants from Cuba suddenly got special immigration privileges based on “national origin.” In 1986, immigrants from Ireland did. People from Vietnam and Indochina got special immigration rights for 20 years after the end of the Vietnam War.
The 1965 law, quite obviously, did not prohibit discrimination based on national origin. (I was wondering why the Times would sully its pages with the legal opinion of a Grove City College B.A., like Bier! Any “expert” in a storm, I guess.)
In fact, ethnic discrimination is practically the hallmark of America’s immigration policy — in addition to our perverse obsession with admitting the entire Third World.
Commenting on these ethnic boondoggles back in 1996, Sen. Orrin Hatch said: “We have made a mockery” of refugee law, “because of politics and pressure.” We admit one ethnic group out of compassion, then they form an ethnic voting bloc and demand that all their fellow countrymen be let in, too.
As the former Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, explained this phenomenon in Der Spiegel: “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”
That’s our immigration policy — informed by Emma Lazarus’ little poem having nothing to do with the Statue of Liberty, but affixed to an inner wall of its pedestal 20 years later, demanding that the U.S. accept every other country’s losers.
Americans are weary of taking in these pricey Third World immigrants, who show their gratitude by periodically erupting in maniacal violence — in, for example, San Bernardino, Orlando, New York City, Fort Hood, Boston, Chattanooga, Bowling Green and St. Cloud.
The Muslim immigrants currently being showcased by the left are not likely to change any minds. The Times managed to produce only 11 cases of (temporarily) blocked immigrants that wouldn’t scare Americans. (Imagine what the others are like!)
For purposes of argument, I will accept the Times’ glowing descriptions of these Muslim immigrants as brilliant scientists on the verge of curing cancer. (Two of the Times’ 11 cases actually involved cancer researchers.)
Point one: If the Times thinks that brilliance is a desirable characteristic in an immigrant, why can’t we demand that of all our immigrants?
To the contrary! Our immigration policy is more likely to turn away the brilliant scientist, in order to make room for an Afghani goat herder, whose kid runs a coffee stand until deciding to bomb the New York City subway one day. (That was Najibullah Zazi, my featured “Immigrant of the Week,” on May 1, 2012.)
Point two: I happened to notice that even the stellar Muslim immigrants dug up by the Times seem to bring a lot of elderly and sickly relatives with them. And you get to support them, America!
House Speaker Paul Ryan’s driving obsession (besides being the Koch brothers’ lickspittle) is “entitlement reform,” i.e., cutting benefits or raising the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare.
I have another idea. How about we stop admitting immigrants who bring in elderly parents so they can immediately sign up for social security benefits? Or any immigrants who need the American taxpayer to support them? Or who steal millions of dollars from U.S. safety net programs? (I illustrated the explosion of immigrant theft from government programs in Adios, America! by culling all the news stories about these crimes over a one-month period and simply listing the perps’ names.)
Point three: Contrary to emotional blather about the horrors refugees are fleeing, a lot are just coming to visit their kids or to get free health care. One of the Times’ baby seals — an Iraqi with diabetes and “a respiratory ailment” — was returning from performing his responsibilities as an elected official in Kirkuk.
So I guess he’s really not so persecuted, after all.
While it’s fantastic news that most Muslim refugees aren’t terrorists, the downside is: They’re not refugees, they’re not brilliant, they don’t have a constitutional right to come here and they’re very, very expensive. Until politicians can give us more government services for less money, they need to stop bringing in the poor of the world on our dime.
COPYRIGHT 2017 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION
