The following is an excerpt from ¡Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole (June 1, 2015) by Ann Coulter.

To paraphrase the line about families, you can’t choose your native-born Americans—but you can choose your immigrants. Our immigration system will be working when the number of immigrants who commit crimes is zero.

Why would any country import other countries’ criminals? What could possibly be on the plus side of the ledger, with “criminal” on the minus side? Since the United Nations isn’t yet demanding that America allow everyone in the world to immigrate here, couldn’t we at least discriminate on the basis of felon vs. non-felon? Maybe we could do a triage:

1.) Helpful to country;

2.) Not helpful to country, but not a felon;

3.) Felon.

Here’s another idea: Instead of the Census Bureau collecting detailed information about how many rental units have “broken or missing stair railings” (382,000 in 2010) or have had mold in their bathrooms in the last twelve months (1.1 million in 2010), how about the government tell us how many immigrants have committed crimes? Determining the number of foreign born in the criminal justice system doesn’t rely on taking surveys, trusting Americans to accurately report on their stair railings, and hiring teams of statisticians to spend years analyzing the data. We just need the government to count. Unlike mold in private homes, criminals have come into significant contact with the government—cops, prosecutors, judges, and prison guards. And we’re already paying those guys’ salaries. As important as the number of carports in America is, it’s also important to know how many immigrants are committing crimes.

With the government keeping that information locked in a steel casket at Fort Knox, one has to look at ancillary facts. The available data suggest that the crime rate among immigrants is astronomical. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), for example, inadvertently issued a report indicating that there are twice as many foreign-born criminals as the GAO’s estimate. In 2006, the DHS stated that 605,000 foreign-born criminals would be arrested by state and local law enforcement in 2007 alone. That’s double the number of illegal aliens for whom the states requested reimbursement in 2009. If the DHS’s estimate is correct, then nearly a third of the 2 million prisoners in state and local facilities that year14 were foreign born.

Piecing together state and federal reports, it appears that half the correctional population in California consists of illegal aliens. According to a state report, there were fewer than two hundred thousand inmates in the entire California prison population, including mental hospitals, in 2009. That year, 102,795 illegal aliens were incarcerated in California, costing the state more than $1 billion a year. Texas counts only illegal aliens who have already been fingerprinted by the Department of Homeland Security. Even with that limitation, Texas arrests more than thirty-two thousand criminal aliens a year.

Then there is the explosion of America’s prison population since we began admitting millions of Third World immigrants in the 1970s. From 1925 until 1970, a steady 0.1 percent of the population was in state or federal prison. Thus, in 1925, when the U.S. population was 100 million, there were about one hundred thousand people in prison; and in 1970, when there were 200 million Americans, there were two hundred thousand in prison. Then, suddenly, just as a very different sort of immigrant began to be admitted under Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act, the prison population skyrocketed. If the incarceration rate had remained the same, there would only be about 310,000 people in prison today. Instead, there are more than 2 million prisoners in America. Since 1970, the U.S. population has increased by one-third, but the prison population has nearly sextupled. A lot of factors affect incarceration rates—liberal judges, destructive social programs, illegitimacy, and social decay. But those come and go. Immigration is forever.