Goodbye to the prosperous country founded by overwhelmingly Protestant colonists in the 18th century. Hello to the third-world multicultural mélange with a distinctly Mexican accent, appalling cultural norms, and a clearly leftist political orientation. Such is the vision of the United States given by no-holds-barred pundit Ann Coulter in her latest book, Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole.

Coulter’s subtitle summarizes her basic thesis -- that America’s immigration policies since the decisive Edward Kennedy immigration bill in 1965 have altered our demographic makeup so radically that the nation will be unalterably degraded if immediate changes aren’t made to our legal and illegal immigration practices. Despite assurances to the contrary, Kennedy’s legislation became the vehicle for fundamentally transforming America’s immigrant population from largely European to overwhelmingly Third World in origin.

Indeed, Coulter observes in her heavily annotated work that about 50 million Mexicans, more than a quarter of that nation’s population, has already migrated, either legally and illegally, to America -- a figure derived by employing data other than census forms that folks unlawfully in the country clearly don’t complete at the postulated 90% rate. Thanks to family reunification policies and notoriously lax enforcement of sanctuary laws, “since 1970, nearly 90 percent of all legal immigrants have been from the Third World.”  Accordingly, the country now accepts “more immigrants from Nigeria than we do from Britain.”

The devastating consequences of accepting millions of immigrants from cultural backwaters are evident in crime statistics -- stats that Coulter says are incredibly hard to secure since it’s now deemed racist to ask how many incarcerated folks are foreign born. Despite the virtual blackout on such data, it’s clear that immigrants (legal and illegal) constitute a disproportionate percentage of the nation’s prison population. “The U.S. government admits that at least 351,000 criminal immigrants were incarcerated in the United States as of 2011.” 

Many of these criminals, Coulter observes with biting sarcasm, are committing crimes that Americans just won’t do. Adios America is replete with atrocities that most news outlets won’t specifically attribute to immigrants. Instead, a “man” or “residents” are to blame for gruesome crimes. Consider, for example, a 1998 New York Times story in which the journalist employs numerous misleading terms in his report on a vicious gang-rape in Fresno, California (“working class city… men and boys… 24-year-old man… teen-ager… seven juveniles”) all the while avoiding specifically identifying both the perpetrators and victims of these crimes as Hmong immigrants. Coulter adds that “over the next year, about three dozen Hmong men were indicted for a series of gang rapes and forced prostitution of young girls in the Fresno area.” 

The truth that PC journalists are loath to admit is that Third World attitudes toward women are generally abysmal when compared with the United States. Thus, the fact that young Hispanic girls in the U.S. are seven times more likely than their white counterparts to give birth between the ages of ten and fourteen is perfectly consistent with Mexican law where “in thirty-one of thirty-two states… the age of consent for sex is twelve.” The lone exception is Mexico State where the legal age is fourteen. Thus, it shouldn’t be surprising that Hispanics have the highest unmarried birthrate in the U.S., “even higher than American blacks,” a fact “that will never be identified as the consequence of mass immigration.” 

For Coulter, one of the most egregious aspects of American jurisprudence is the notion that any baby born in America, regardless of the mother’s legal status, automatically becomes an American citizen. That baby then becomes an “anchor” to bring the rest of the family to America. Coulter argues that this reading of the Fourteenth Amendment was “cooked up by Justice William Brennan in 1982” and has given rise to a flood of planned births in the U.S. by illegal immigrants. In Stockton, California, for example, “70 percent of the 2,300 babies born” in 2003 at that city’s “San Joaquin General Hospital’s maternity ward were anchor babies.” Coulter adds to that statistic one more fact: “By 2013, Stockton was bankrupt.”

The policy of bestowing American citizenship on the progeny of individuals who purposely break U.S. immigration laws is so crazy that even Nevada Senator Harry Reid blasted it in 1993: “If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant? No sane country would do that, right?” But soon afterward, Coulter notes, “Democrats discovered that parents of anchor babies were voting for them! Suddenly Senator Reid decided it wasn’t insane to give citizenship to children born to illegals” and that “it was racist not to do so.”

According to Coulter, another con-job foisted on the American people involves polls about illegal immigration. These surveys typically require respondents to choose between two unreal alternatives: 1) granting illegal immigrants a “pathway to citizenship” based on a long list of conditions (fines, taxes, et cetera) that are never actually imposed or 2) rounding up and deporting all these folks. The latter draconian alternative ignores the possibility of self-deportation, a choice that would become much more likely if an E-verify system that checks an employee’s social security status were widely utilized. Another omitted alternative is to let illegal immigrants remain “in the shadows” -- an option most illegals obviously favor over returning to places like Guadalajara.

Coulter’s book also sheds light on the role played by Mexican billionaire, Carlos Slim Helu, in America’s immigration debate -- a man “whose fortune depends on tens of millions of Mexicans living in the United States, preferably illegally” and sending billions of dollars back to relatives in Mexico. In 2008, Slim’s quarter-billion dollar loan “saved the New York Times from bankruptcy.” Subsequently, the Times became, in Coulter’s view, increasingly strident on the issue of illegal immigration, last year urging Obama to “Go Big” on immigration and “give ‘millions of immigrants permission to stay.’ What a difference,” Coulter observes, “one thieving Mexican billionaire makes!”

While accepting millions of Third World immigrants is clearly, on Coulter’s evidence, bad for America, “it’s fantastic for Democrats” as well as for businesses that profit from this vast source of low-wage labor. Incredibly, Coulter informs us that until 1970 immigrants to America actually “made more money, bought more houses, and were more educated” than native-born Americans.

Coulter’s advice to largely oblivious GOP Presidential contenders is to “just shut it down. No more family reunification, no more scam marriages, no more refugees, no more phony asylum cases (which is all of them), and no more ‘high-tech workers’ providing slave labor to Microsoft.” A fence on the southern border, an end to “anchor baby” status, and “a timeout” on Third World immigration are required if America is itself to avoid becoming “a Third World republic that will never elect another Republican -- in other words, ‘California.’”

Adios America is full of anecdotes and will doubtless be dismissed as merely anecdotal by folks who profit from our current immigration system or who mindlessly repeat the bogus mantra, “Diversity is our strength.” Truthfully, however, Coulter’s book contains a raft of important statistics and several compelling arguments that should give pause to anyone analyzing the effects of America’s legal and illegal immigration policies over the last five decades. 

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California. Opinion columnist for the North County Times (1996-2012); online reviews, blog.