Illegal Immigration Lies
May 02
It’s May Day again, and I again am reminded of just how biased the is U.S. media is in its handling of the whole illegal immigration issue. A local Los Angeles newscast reported on today’s May Day rallies, playing shot after, long, lingering shot of several protesters carrying American flags while showing only extremely brief glimpses of the large numbers of people wielding Mexican flags. I know, nothing new there.
I remember 2 years ago when a much larger protest ended with a rally just blacks from my house. I checked out the scene and was a bit surprised to see an overwhelming percentage of Mexican flags in the crowd. However, news coverage of that same event was carefully edited to make it look as though American flags predominated.
Now I’m hardly the obsessive flag-waving type, yet I mention all this because such abject manipulation of press coverage is appalling. The job of reporters is to report, not to editorialize , sanitize, or vilify.
That same local L.A. newscast spent several minutes tonight emphasizing the “clear message” and “peaceful behavior” of the protesters (who were continually referred to simply as “immigrants”). Then the station ran a very brief interview of a man from a group called “Friends of the Border Patrol”, and this clip was framed by a title that read simply, “Anti-Immigrant”.
I find this type of manipulative and inaccurate labeling and editing to be particularly appalling, and it is evident in almost every newscast covering the immigration situation. Anyone speaking against illegal immigration is called “anti-immigrant”, despite any evidence at all that they are against legal immigration. This phenomenon is, in fact, beyond mere misrepresentation. It is lying.
I would venture to guess that the vast majority of Americans are strong supporters of legal immigration. In fact, the United States admits more immigrants legally every single year than the rest of the world combined. Yet anyone who stands up for the rule of law is labeled as a nativist or worse? This is sheer insanity.
I for one would LOVE to see levels of legal immigration increased, particularly for doctors and engineers, be they from Mexico, South Africa, or India. Yet levels for professional are strictly capped. Even those medical professionals who manage to get green cards are made to go through ridiculously complex re-training and to navigate serpentine bureaucracy, often for years, before they can hope to practice medicine.
True, the employers who hire illegal immigrants are the heart of the problem and must be punished. But the illegal immigrants themselves are breaking the law and causing untold damage to the workers they displace (and yes, they DO displace workers!) An actually unbiased media report would highlight not only the plight of the illegal immigrants but ALSO the plight of the very workers they displace, who have been slammed by both illegal immigration AND outsourcing do to the “free trade” policies of the past 10-15 years. Of course, this type of coverage is all but unheard of.
So why do new reports empathize only with law-breaking illegal immigrants while ignoring displaced native workers? If the recent coverage of the writers’ strike taught us anything, it’s that news coverage in this day and age of concentrated media ownership tends to reflect the agenda of the media corporations. Large corporations reap huge benefits from the suppression of wages that results from illegal immigration. They have come to depend on the constant infusion of cheap labor like a heroin addict depends on his next fix. Like an addict, they will lie, cheat, and steal in order to keep getting their next fix.
In all likelihood, reporters are not strong-armed by their corporate bosses into supporting one point of view or another. Instead, they have grown lazy, simply regurgitating press releases. They are, in essence, easily manipulated, and corporations are far better prepared to manipulate the press than are grassroots organizations.
So on this May Day I am left to reflect on the sad state of the press in America. Only with a truly free and unbiased press can a democracy thrive. Our best hope is that the proliferation and dissemination of diverse points of view through blogs and other online sources will continue to flourish. Long live bloggers!