Hiding The Truth

Well, Lou Dobbs should be getting scads of screeching hate mail just about now by my watch. Because, you see, he dares to call out the mainstream media for their all-out effort to push their agenda on illegal immigrants by playing with the language.

NEW YORK (CNN) — The Bush administration and the leadership of the Democratic Party are preparing to take another legislative leap at imposing a massive illegal alien amnesty on American citizens.

And the mainstream media are complicit in advancing this thinly veiled blanket amnesty. Instead of asking and answering important questions about why our immigration laws aren't being enforced and why we're permitting pervasive document fraud, the national media seem hell-bent on trying to obfuscate the issue, shamelessly playing with language, equating legal immigration with illegal immigration while obviously trying to preserve the illusion of objectivity.

Too often, the language of the national media describes illegal immigration as "migration" and illegal aliens as "undocumented immigrants," even though many of them have lots of documents, most of which are fraudulent or stolen. Some media outlets have taken to calling illegal aliens "entrants." Whether such language is meant to engender sympathy or to intentionally blur the distinction between legal and illegal, the mainstream media are taking sides in this debate.

The Arizona Republic, for example, used "undocumented immigrant" more than 80 times in 36 separate stories in the past month alone; the term appeared as many as 12 times in one article on "migration," according to our Lexis-Nexis search. At the same time, "illegal alien" appeared a total of only nine times during that span, with seven of the references coming from readers' opinions, one from a quotation and one from an editorial.

The mainstream media report as if America would no longer be a welcoming nation if we stopped illegal immigration. Nothing could be further from the truth. Why do the national media conveniently and routinely neglect to report that the United States brings in more lawful immigrants than the countries of the rest of the world combined? Each year, we accept 2 million immigrants legally. We give a million legal immigrants permanent residency every year. We bestow citizenship on 700,000 people a year and provide almost half a million work-related visas a year.

Dobbs point here is that if there is to be a debate about illegal immigrants, it has to be an honest one. Not one filled with newspeak euphemisms. Dobbs presents a lot of good reasons why this debate needs - desperately - to take place openly and honestly. Not with agenda-driven camouflage language. The facts are that a flood of unskilled labor into the country hurts the most vulnerable Americans. It hurts our own, fellow citizens more than anything else. And that needs to be addressed first, before any amnesty plan. 

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  By Cameron, Thursday, 26 April , 2007 @ 6:28 am

  Lou Dobbs? You mean the Dan Rather of financial news, that Lou Dobbs? Something does need to be done to rationalize our immigration policies. We might start with cooling the rhetoric on depressed wages. Claiming great harm is being done to the wages of American workers is just not born out by the facts. Economic studies have shown the group most effected by immigrant labor are high school drop outs, and that they depress their wages by somewhere between 1% to 3%.

Other Links to this Post

1. Maggie's Farm — Friday, 27 April , 2007 @ 4:16 am