"Conferring Legitimacy, This Card Draws a Crowd"

In "Conferring Legitimacy, This Card Draws a Crowd", the L.A. Times discusses a visit of a friendly Mexican consul to south Orange County to pass out ID cards that the FBI considers a security threat.

It has the standard bits, ending with a heartwarming vignette about one of the new ID cards ("Matricula Consular" cards).

It even contains yet one more reason to boycott CitiBank:

...while waiting for their cards, hundreds listened as Citibank employees gave out banking information. Calculators, mugs and fans with the Mexican flag were given out too.

"Even if you don't open it today, open a bank account," Lorena Maae, Citibank's assistant vice president for community relations in O.C., told one group in Spanish...

However, the L.A. Times must be feeling the heat because they devote no less than three paragraphs to sobering information. That's a full three paragraphs out of 21 total, a whopping 14%:

Sunday's event came just days after a measure that would have prohibited banks from accepting the matricula consular failed in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The matricula consular stirs the ire of illegal-immigration opponents who see the card, and the Mexican government's promotion of it, as a well-orchestrated campaign to bestow quasi-legal status to those who have entered the country illegally.

Although more than 1 million people in California carry the cards, which resemble driver's licenses and display the bearer's U.S. address, the FBI does not consider them a reliable form of identification...

They actually called them a security threat, but I congratulate the L.A. Times on their baby steps to somewhat accurate coverage.

For much more on this issue, including excerpts from newspapers that didn't even include that 14% dissenting content, see "Their Money or Your Safety".

Immigration_consul · Mon, 09/27/2004 - 07:21 · · Importance: 1