Hating the browning of America

When it comes to Ann Coulter—the conservative blonde avenger, the loud-mouthed provocateur, the human hot-button of mass-media notoriety who is forever tossing turds into liberals’ punch bowls — people always want to know: Is she for real?

Even the title of her latest book, ¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole, is guaranteed to raise many folks’ blood pressure and strain their credulity.

“I don’t know why liberals find this idea about me comfortable,” Coulter tells me over dinner, “but I just had lunch with a law school friend of mine, and I had forgotten—and he reminded me—that at law school I wore mink coats and took up smoking just to annoy liberals, so apparently I’d been like this for awhile. He said, ‘You’re exactly like you were in law school.’

“In order to change this country to one more favorable to crazy liberal policies, Democrats passed—and Republicans were hoodwinked into passing—this crazy 1965 immigration law that has changed the country in shocking and dramatic ways,” Coulter says, explaining her book’s premise and referring to legislation—sponsored by the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy—that abolished long-implemented preferences for immigrants from Northern and Western Europe over Africans, Asians and other third-world natives.

“This has been our law for 50 years now, and I blame the Republicans for idiotically continuing it,” she continues. “The Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986 [creating an easier path to citizenship for foreigners who illegally entered and settled in the United States] was a mistake. As for these idiot Tea Partiers or whichever conservatives are idol-worshipping Ronald Reagan, he was great for his time, but it was a different world. I don’t think he’s going down as the greatest president when he signed an amnesty law.”

Coulter argues that teeming hordes of new immigrants, especially from Mexico, vote overwhelmingly Democratic, so current immigration policy is really “an evil-genius plan to change the country. That’s what the Democrats get out of it. Obama never could have been elected in this country but for Teddy Kennedy’s immigration act. Never, never, ever, ever!”

Coulter’s politically quixotic prescription: a 10-year moratorium on all legal immigration; a complete dismantling of the immigration bureaucracy, not only government agencies and sympathetic elected officials but also outside advocacy groups; the erection of an impassable fence along the entire U.S.-Mexican border (in her book, she praises the Communist East Germans for effectively, sometimes lethally, preventing their citizens from breaching the Berlin Wall); and a return to pre-1965 policies that give preference to highly educated, usually white Europeans.

“I wouldn’t care if they were white or not; I’m talking about peasants who come from backward cultures,” she says, although she expresses alarm at predictions that by 2050 Caucasians in this country will be a minority. “There are white people from backward cultures. They just don’t happen to come from a country contiguous to the United States. It’s backward cultures that are providing cheap labor and Democratic votes.”

Coulter, however, is unfailingly friendly to our waiter, who identifies himself as “Luis,” an immigrant from Ecuador who came here 10 years ago and is working his way toward U.S. citizenship.

Coulter argues that U.S. immigration policies were demonstrably better a hundred years ago. “There was no mollycoddling of immigrants back then. With the Irish and the Italians, and even the Germans—especially the Germans—we were allowed to boss them around,” she says. “We could say, ‘No. No. You can’t do this anymore. You are an American now. Knock it off!’ The only problem with the fact that they [recent immigrants] are brown—well, you’re saying they’re brown, I’m saying they’re peasants—is that they’re piggy-backing on the black experience, and saying ‘That’s racist’ if you tell them to do things our way, and ‘You can just assimilate to us,’ not the other way around.

“Can you imagine the Irish or Italians or Germans saying that to our country back at the turn of the century? ‘No! Fuck you! You came to our country. Learn our ways!’”

Using language that many doubtless will find hair-raising if not downright offensive, Coulter speaks of the “browning of America”—a term she says she adopted as a negative after seeing it bandied favorably on MSNBC—and how the country is being ruined by an influx from Latin America, the Indian subcontinent, Vietnam, Nigeria, and other benighted locales.

“In Nigeria, everyone is a criminal,” Coulter claims. “But we take more immigrants from Nigeria than we do from Britain. Don’t react casually to that! That’s madness. The British are just going to other countries. And a lot of these countries, like Spain, are just shitholes now. Young, smart people are emigrating to Germany and they won’t be collecting Social Security immediately. Perhaps we should consider them rather than a Nigerian terrorist.”

Coulter adds that among the victims of Latino immigration, especially, are African Americans. “Hispanic groups will move into neighborhoods and say, ‘We don’t want any blacks here,’ and start physically attacking blacks,” she says. “It’s kind of wild. In most race relations, it’s never blacks who are victims of terror, it’s whites. Now blacks are being terrorized.”

So, Ann Coulter is the voice of African Americans now?

“I know they’re never going to adopt me, so you don’t have to say it in that sarcastic way,” she parries. “If they still hate me, I don’t care. They’re being totally screwed by this whole diversity and integration imperative, and they really are part of America. They are so important culturally in America—I mean the humor, the actors…they have the comedians and the music. I love Dave Chapelle, and my close personal friend Sherrod Small. I love Eddie Murphy, although he doesn’t do anything anymore. And Chris Rock.”

In ¡Adios, America! and over dinner, Coulter expands on her belief that when new arrivals from foreign climes are not busying themselves with “browning” the country, collecting welfare payments and swarming to the polls to vote Democrats into office, they are committing Medicare fraud, child rape, gang rape, honor killings and a host of other un-American activities.

She blames politically correct U.S. government census-taking and crime statistic policies—and the media establishment’s reluctance to identify the countries of origin of the alleged perpetrators—on the fact that she doesn’t have generally accepted stats to back up her assertions, merely horrific anecdotes and back-of-the-envelope guesses.

In her assertions about the allegedly low average intelligence of various “undesirable” immigrant groups, she relies on the studies of Jason Richwine, whose work on IQ and immigration was too controversial even for the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, which dismissed him from his staff job there after his Harvard doctoral dissertation came to light.

Meanwhile, Coulter blasts the current crop of Republican presidential hopefuls—with the exception of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker—as “bozos” and “morons,” and heaps special contempt on Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (whom she accuses of favoring amnesty), and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who lately pays lip service to tough policies, Coulter says, “but I don’t trust him.”

Source: The Daily Beast

Outsourcing in America

You’ve spent twenty plus years loyally working in Information Technology (IT) for Southern California Edison, and eighteen months ago your boss tells you that they are going to study outsourcing but not to worry, “your position is safe.” On the one hand you are worried because you know many stories of American IT workers losing their jobs to outsourcing, but on the other you feel comforted that you’ve been loyal to SCE and provide a critical service. Then eight months ago they tell you that they are outsourcing most IT functions and that they want you, get this, to train your guestworker replacement. If you say no, SCE will terminate you with cause and you would lose not only a severance package but also eligibility for unemployment insurance. This is the common story I heard from many workers at SCE.

The work that the 400 SCE IT employees do isn’t disappearing, instead it and their jobs are being taken over by foreign guestworkers here on H-1B visas. Those guestworkers are employed by the two leading India-based outsourcing firms, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys.

The SCE workers are wondering: “Why should I lose my job when the work still needs to be done? Why is the government doing this to me and my family?”
Adding to the injustice of losing their jobs, the SCE workers are being forced to do something that is so common in the industry it is a term of art: “knowledge transfer,” an ugly euphemism that means being forced to train your own foreign replacement. The SCE workers are, “demoralized; in disbelief; beyond furious; down in the dumps; feeling anguish; depressed; feeling dehumanized; feeling humiliated; worrying about the future; worrying about paying the bills.”

The SCE workers rightly place the culpability squarely on SCE executives, the president, and Congress. One worker simply said, “Shame on Edison for doing this and shame on our politicians for enabling it.”

H-1B visas are temporary work permits issued by the U.S. government that are good for up to six years. The intent is for these visas to be used only when an American worker cannot be found. In fact, the U.S. Department of Labor states, “The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) requires that the hiring of a foreign worker will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers comparably employed.”

In practice, the H-1B visa has been used for years to undercut American workers with lower-wage, and often lesser-skilled, workers brought in from overseas. How does this happen? Congress sets the wage floors for H-1Bs, and it has set it far below market wages. And the Department of Labor has chosen not to investigate the rampant abuse of the program. As a result, over the past decade, outsourcers like Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys have become the dominant users. Just over the past four years, Tata and Infosys received more than 33,000 new H-1B visas. That’s 33,000 jobs lost due to those two companies alone. They use the program to replace American workers domestically while using their H-1B workforce stationed in America to facilitate the transfer of work and jobs to India. These are not immigrants in waiting, the firms sponsor virtually none of their H-1B workers for permanent residence (greencards). Instead of a way to fill skills gaps, the H-1B program has become a way to suppress wages and pad profits.

The practice of replacing American workers with cheaper H-1B guestworkers is widespread. It is so endemic in the H-1B program that last year the majority of the visas went to outsourcing companies. Indian Government officials have dubbed the H-1B as the “Outsourcing Visa.”

Why do companies replace Americans with foreign guestworkers? The SCE workers rightly believe the motivation is “pure greed.” According to a recent consulting report commissioned by SCE, the typical SCE IT worker is earning $110,000 while government records show Tata pays its H-1B workers $66,000 and Infosys pays $71,000. The savings go beyond just wages. H-1B workers have very limited bargaining power since the employers control their work permit. It should come as no surprise that H-1B workers are easily exploited. Those significant cost savings far outweigh the one-time H-1B legal and administrative fees of about $5,000 per worker.

The SCE workers I spoke to have a message for Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez: use your statutory authority to investigate and stop the H-1B abuse. If you find abuse debar those employers from using the program.

And their message to Congress is: close the loopholes that allow employers to use H-1Bs for cheap labor. Given all of these facts, you would think that Congress would be hard at work fixing the H-1B program. Instead, many are moving in the other direction, writing legislation to triple the number of H-1Bs while doing nothing to close the loopholes. The Skills Visa Act, introduced by Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), in the last Congress, and the bipartisan I-Squared Act recently introduced by the Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) would threaten tens of thousands more middle class jobs. However, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) have been working for a decade to fix the program. They propose: raising the H-1B wage floors to the average wage; ensuring that American workers have a first and legitimate shot at jobs; and, ensuring that American workers aren’t being replaced by H-1Bs. This would mean the H-1B program is being used for truly skilled workers and not simply cheap labor.

Ron Hira is an associate professor of public policy at Howard University, a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute, and co-author of the book Outsourcing America