Heather Mac Donald: Illegal Immigration Myths

From this:

As the nation braced for another demonstration of illegal alien power today [May 1], the press has been trotting out "fear engulfs the illegal alien community" stories, following the arrests last month of over 1,000 illegal aliens working for IFCO Systems North America. For instance: IMMIGRANTS PANICKED BY RUMORS OF RAIDS, reported the New York Times; ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS FEAR ROUNDUP, announced the Wall Street Journal; TALK OF IMMIGRANT ARRESTS IN AUSTIN FUELS FEAR, blared the Austin American-Statesman; and PATIENTS, FEARING INS RAIDS, DON’T SEEK HEALTH CARE, the Contra Costa Times warned...

...This ubiquitous journalistic conceit exposes two myths and raises a public policy question. The first myth is that illegal aliens live in the shadows. The "shadows" claim then becomes an urgent reason why Congress must pass a legalization plan: so that 11 million people can come out of hiding. In fact, illegal aliens live in the full blaze of day. Only when confronted with the merest hint that immigration enforcement is even possible do they curtail their movements—and then elite thinking immediately declares such curtailment a gross injustice.

But even if it were true that illegals lived in the shadows, why is that unfair? The bargain they chose was clear: if you come here illegally, the law says that you should face deportation. It is a measure of how surreal our immigration practice has become that it is now "mean-spirited" simply to raise the possibility in an illegal’s mind that his deportation risk is real, much less actually to deport him...

On a note related to the first paragraph, I discussed one such recent story in Laura Wides-Munoz propaganda on frightened "immigrants".

Immigration · Wed, 05/03/2006 - 00:31 · · Importance: 1