Coulter’s late arrival on immigration; Henninger’s ignorance of Hispanics

Ann Coulter defends America’s Anglo-centric culture and the need for immigrants to assimilate into it. It’s a stirring piece, with many zingers, but, being a glass-half-full type, I must say that if Coulter has these strong views about immigration and American culture, why has she been keeping them hidden all these years? Second, her present argument against the Bush-Kennedy amnesty bill would apply equally well against our entire legal immigration policy, yet she still remains silent about that.

On another point, Coulter writes:

In an astonishing exchange on Fox News last weekend, Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal responded to Heather MacDonald’s point that Hispanics in this country have a 50 percent illegitimacy rate, the highest teen pregnancy rate of any group and the highest high school drop-out rate of any group, by asking: “Why don’t we feel we are under cultural assault in New York City? You have no sense of this at all here.”

Daniel Henninger has just won the 2007 Pauline Kael Prize for Liberal Manhattanite Cluelessness. It was Kael, the long-time movie critic of The New Yorker, who at the time of Richard Nixon’s 49-state victory in 1972 wrote: “I don’t know how Nixon could have been reelected. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.” Henninger’s own comment reveals that the arrogant elites who push for open immigration, and call the rest of us xenophobes for opposing it, know nothing about the actual country that their policies are transforming—and nothing about the actual immigrants whose presence here is making that transformation happen.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 31, 2007 12:57 PM | Send