March 11, 2007

Maria Sacchetti, Yvonne Abraham, Boston Globe support sweatshops, illegal activity

Maria Sacchetti and Yvonne Abraham of the Boston Globe offer a massive slab of pro-illegal immigration propaganda in "Fear grips kin after immigration raid" about the Michael Bianco, Inc. raid. The article is designed to provoke an emotional response and encourage those who aren't familiar with this issue to support illegal aliens being allowed to continue working here rather than being deported. It glosses over illegal activity and the alleged Dickensian conditions at the plant.

It even features a highly saturated photo from a press conference with three children being used as a prop. At first glance I thought the photo was a painting, and I wonder whether it really came out of the camera looking like that or whether they've performed some color manipulations.

The article starts like this:

Karin Fernandez had problems in Honduras.

She was two months pregnant, and the baby's father was gone. She had only a ninth-grade education and no work.

But her aunt in New Bedford offered a solution: Come to Massachusetts. Have the baby here. Work in the leather goods factory where it's easy to find a job.

"I was in a really ugly crisis," said Fernandez, 19.

In late 2005 she paid a smuggler $4,500 to bring her over the border. She made it to New Bedford and to the factory where the managers were said not to care if their employees' documents were fake.

Their hugely sympathetic rendering has just glossed over people in foreign countries looking to the U.S. as an escape valve rather than trying to solve their problems in their home countries. There are hundreds of millions or billions of people in situations worse than Fernandez', and they can't all come here. And, that escape valve is something the leaders of countries like Honduras know about and encourage. Isn't it better for us and for them to encourage those countries to solve their own problems rather than using us as an escape valve?

They also gloss over what was most likely an explicit attempt to have an anchor baby, as well as the network effect involved in illegal immigration. And, needless to say, human smuggling is illegal, as is entering the U.S. without permission, as is hiring someone knowing that they're an illegal alien.

Maria Sacchetti and Yvonne Abraham (with contributions from Brian R. Ballou) want you to forget about those unnecessary complications. Just look at the waving baby, concentrate on the waving baby, you're getting sleepy, you're ready to support massive illegal activity and sweatshops...

Please write ombud *at* globe.com with your thoughts.

UPDATE: As Jeebie points out in comments, $4500 is a lot of money in Honduras. In fact, according to this, the Honduras Per Capita Gross National Income was $2710 USD. This page say the Gross National Income per capita was $2590 USD in 2003. This page has it even lower: "per capita gross national income in 2003 was approximately $970", and this page agrees. Let's be generous and say it's $3000. Meaning that she was able to come up with at least one and a half times the per capita gross national income of her country, and we're supposed to believe she "had problems"? For those who'd like to do more research, $4500 is equivalent to about 85,000 Honduran Lempiras.

UPDATE 2: Various figures for the U.S. Per Capita Gross National Income are available from around $33,000 to $40,000. Let's lowball it at $30,000, meaning that roughly speaking her $4,500 is equivalent to a U.S. 19-year-old having $45,000.

Posted to Temporary at March 11, 2007 10:01 AM