Schlafly & Pratt: Today’s Immigrants Have No ‘Desire To Be American’

Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly and Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt have both opposed immigration reform on the grounds that new citizens will overwhelmingly vote Democratic and, in Pratt’s words, “vote to take away our guns.” So it was no surprise that when Schlafly joined Pratt on his radio show this weekend, the discussion eventually turned to how immigrants don’t understand America and so will never vote Republican.

Schlafly started things out by alleging that the political problems of conservatives stem from the fact that “we’ve taken in millions of people who have no concept of the whole idea of limited government” and who “don’t even know what it means or have a desire to be American.”

Pratt agreed that we are “bringing in people who have never had any tradition of, never been schooled in what it means to have a limited government” and that “folks coming abroad are all natural Democrats, they’re looking, as you say, for big government, that’s their whole idea of what government is about, it’s there to give them more and more things.”

He added that Democrats are “eagerly bringing in these immigrants who at best don’t have an idea of what it means to be an American if they were to become one and may well be terrorists.”

“You know, I have friends who came in long ago,” Schlafly said, “and they told me with pride that after they got off the boat at Ellis Island to immigrate, their parents would stand them up and say, ‘And now we’re in America and we’re going to be Americans and we’re going to learn English and we’re going to learn a whole new set of laws and this is our country now, we’re going to be American.’ But you don’t find these immigrants saying this today.”

Now, she said, “anybody can come, no matter how much you hate us, no matter how you have no concept about limited government and the rule of law and the things that we believe in.”

Pratt added that this problem was especially acute with Muslim immigrants because “they’re taught from the Koran, they’re taught to hate people like us, they’re taught to want to kill people like us, and to the extent that they don’t, that’s taqiyya, that’s just a temporary lying to get along until they are tactically and strategically in a position to strike.”