October 22, 2007

Desperate New York Times immigration editorial plays race card; afraid attrition might work?

Like clockwork, the New York Times offers yet another immigration editorial and, of course, they're still wrong ("Ain’t That America", link). Per them, not enacting comprehensive immigration "reform" is yet another in the long line of "greatest historical shames" perpetrated by the U.S. The national mood is slipping into "hatred and fear" against those "documented or not, who speak Spanish and are working-class or poor":

The evidence can be seen in any state or town that has passed constitutionally dubious laws to deny undocumented immigrants the basics of living, like housing or the right to gather or to seek work. It's in hot lines for citizens to turn in neighbors. It's on talk radio and blogs. It's on the campaign trail, where candidates are pressed to disown moderate positions. And it can be heard nearly every night on CNN, in the nativist drumming of Lou Dobbs, for whom immigration is an obsessive cause.

As evidenced by their coverage, supporting illegal immigration and cheap labor is an "obsessive cause" for the NYT. As for those questions, the fact that the NYT's "reporters" aren't out there taking the candidates to task for the gaping holes in their policies shows that they're just a propaganda source and not a real newspaper.

Then, after promoting Eliot Spitzer's scheme to give driver's licenses to illegal aliens, they offer three choices to solve the problem. The first is mass deportations, something that no national leaders are calling for. The second could have been written by either the Democrats or the Bush administration:

Find out who they are. Distinguish between criminals and people who just want to work. Get them on the books. Make them pay what they owe - not just the income, Social Security, sales and property taxes they already pay, but all their taxes, and a fine. Get a smooth legal flow of immigrants going, and then concentrate on catching and deporting bad people.

They can't even get that right: all of the amnesties so far proposed would have allowed terrorists and criminals to sneak through the cracks, with the latest Senate bill allowing the DHS to admit known gang members. At least one version would have forgiven two years of taxes. And, that "smooth legal flow" sounds vaguely like an attempt to flood the U.S. with cheap foreign labor.

Their last choice is a mischaracterization of attrition, and they appear to have done that because they're afraid it might work:

Catch the few you can, and harass and frighten the rest. Treat the entire group as a de facto class of criminals, and disrupt or shout down anyone or any plan seen as abetting their evildoing.

Most people who support attrition are obviously not guilty of what the NYT claims; they're simply playing the victim. In fact, the ones trying to do the "shouting down" are those on the NYT's side who continually try to racialize the issue, use misleading "news" reports (such as from the NYT), smear people like Lou Dobbs, and so on.

The New York Times doesn't want a real debate on this issue: they want to try to kneecap their opponents by calling them bigots rather than, for instance, doing real reporting on this issue and disclosing all the downsides of the "reform" they support or asking the presidential front-runners to defend their flawed policies.

Posted to Immigration2007b at October 22, 2007 11:52 AM