NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland — Appearing at a panel with Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly across the street from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Saturday morning, conservative columnist Ann Coulter joked that Republicans pushing for amnesty are actually racist because increased immigration would depress the wages of black and other minority workers.
“My whole life I’ve heard ‘Republicans are racist, don’t like black people, don’t care about black people,'” Coulter said. “I never believed it until I read Marco Rubio’s amnesty bill.”
“Did you know that Marco Rubio’s amnesty bill would triple legal immigration? Triple it,” Coulter said leading up to that comment. She continued:
“Did you know that the children covered under the DREAM Act include 17-year-olds. We’re talking about giving amnesty to ‘oh the children, the children.’ They’re 30 years old. The majority of immigrants don’t care about amnesty. The Democrats know that.
“In Obama’s ads to Hispanic language radio and TV stations, his ads don’t talk about amnesty. The ads were saying Obamacare is going to give you free healthcare. They know how Hispanics don’t care. In fact, I was just thinking about how you know that big line with the Democrats that ‘Republicans only care about the fetus until it is born’ because they don’t support a swath of social service workers I guess.
“But the point is, how about flipping that around on them? Democrats only care about immigrants until they vote. On a number of 1.2 million immigrants a year, who is that hurting? It’s hurting the last round of immigrants. It’s hurting all low wage workers.”
Coulter argued that the Senate-passed immigration bill or similar proposals would result in a growing underclass in America. “This is nothing but indentured servitude,” Coulter said. “Mark Zuckerberg brings in people to run the copy machine and they’re not ‘the best and the brightest.’ They aren’t even the ones taking the top jobs. They are low level employees. But the advantage of H1Bs is they can’t leave the company that brought them in. They can’t bargain for higher wages. As if Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t already have enough money.”
Coulter said conservatives and Republicans need to focus all of their attention right on making sure amnesty and a massive legal immigration increase does not happen. “There is no point in talking about any other issue,” Coulter said. “There is no more important issue than immigration. Phyllis Schlafly’s report has demonstrated that we lose everything if we lose immigration.”
The Eagle Forum report in question argued the demographic results of an amnesty and massive legal immigration increase would permanently destroy the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Despite the significance of the issue, Coulter said the media has by and large ignored the ramifications of such policies if they even cover immigration at all.
“What’s strange about the immigration thing is I cannot think of another issue where you cannot hear the other side in the media,” Coulter said. “There is no issue that is as important and of as much interest to the American people and it is simply hidden by the media. I think they correctly suspect that the American people may not be with them.”
Coulter also noted that virtually no major media outlets have given airtime to the drastic ramifications of these immigration proposals, from newspapers to cable news. Coulter said Republicans in Congress, many of whom lead conservative battles on issues ranging from Obamacare to tax reform to welfare reform to many other policy battles have few places to turn to learn about immigration.
“Even beyond not searching for the ‘best and the brightest’ the world over, once the Democrats get them here, the Democrats get them on welfare because they want warm bodies, they want the votes,” she said. “Why Republicans are going along with this is the most baffling question, other than they’re busy with other things,” she said. It’s like invasion of the body snatchers. You don’t know who to trust.”
Coulter also touched on double standards for some topics in the immigration debate.
Referencing the 1965 immigration legislation from Ted Kennedy, Coulter noted that Kennedy and its other supporters “swore up and down” that the bill would not change the ethnic makeup of America. “So they’re apparently allowed to talk about ethnicity [regarding] the impact of an immigration bill when they’re lying, but if we point out using the exact [argument in reverse] that that was a lie, [they say] ‘oh no, that’s out of bounds, that’s racist,'” Coulter said. “It’s a very strange disjointedness. And to follow on this point, this isn’t natural.”
“This isn’t a natural process,” she added. “It’s like you’re being raped and the guy is telling you ‘my penis is in you, but what can you do?’ ‘No! You’re raping me!'”
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