Betsy Rubiner/ Time promotes illegal immigration for Postville (Agriprocessors)

Betsy Rubiner of Time Magazine offers "Iowa: What Happens When a Town Implodes" (link) about the aftermath of the Postville immigration raid; see the last link first if you aren't familiar with that issue. The article attempts to emotionalize the issue and encourage support for illegal immigration; consider how it ends:

Many townspeople hope a responsible buyer will revive the plant. "We'd like to see somebody who buys it and makes it an honest business," says [Darcy Radloff, the city clerk].

However, everything before that point supported it being run as a dishonest business. Postville was a town built on and profiting from illegal activity and the Agriprocessors plant was allegedly involved in thousands of cases of various types of abuse. For instance, the company was charged with over 9000 child labor law violations. Rather than fighting against such massive corruption and discouraging abuse by discouraging illegal activity, articles like the one by Rubiner seek to paper it over with pleas to emotion. One wonders what other forms of illegal activity Rubiner would seek to paper over, and one wonders how dumb Time thinks their readers are that they can't search on the internet to find all the things Rubiner didn't tell them. Note that this is a second go-round for her; she wrote a similar article in May 2008.

On a sidenote, the copy is peppered with highly off-topic, Iowa-related links right in the copy, such as "See pictures of an Iowa steak fry" and "See pictures of Hillary Clinton campaigning in Iowa with Bill Clinton". Hopefully that will disturb the show Rubiner is putting on for enough people that they'll do a search for the truth.

Wed, 01/28/2009 - 22:30 · · Importance: 4