Reason Magazine's TV unit offers the misleading, anti-science, and anti-American video "Delta Smelt & Undocumented Farm Workers: How Federal Policy Is Failing CA's Central Valley" (below and at peekURL.com/vfqmkCZ ). It begins with a sub-Sean Hannity discussion of the endangered Delta Smelt, but quickly becomes a plea for looser immigration policy and amnesty. As could be expected, Reason is either too intellectually dishonest or too dim to understand and admit the roles of externalities in what they promote.

For an example, they interview Robert Silva, the mayor of Mendota and allow him to say the following unchallenged:

Why do the feds worry about a fish, than a person that's human, that contributes to society and works out in the fields... contributes to the world and yet the fish is more important ...I've had people from europe ask me the same thing, and they say, 'you know what, where we come from we don't worry about a stupid little fish'.

One obvious problem is that the Smelt is part of the food chain, and making it extinct might affect people and other animals in unforeseeable ways. Another obvious issue is the huge costs (health, remediation, etc.) associated with doing things the way they were done, for instance, in Eastern Europe under Soviet occupation (start here: articles.latimes.com/keyword/pollution-eastern-europe). This is California, not the DDR. And, of course, the whole issue of the Delta Smelt is much more complicated than the mayor lets on (economist.com/node/14699639). Nothing in Reason's report even hints at the level of complexity involved in that issue.

Another person Reason uses to say the things they'd like to say is Chris Collins of the Sacramento Bee; he makes the outrageous claim that 98% of farmworks are immigrants. It's highly doubtful whether that's even true of Central Valley field workers, and according to the Labor Department at least one quarter of farmworkers were born in the U.S.He also references conservative growers who are lifelong Republicans who differ with the GOP on the issue of immigration, imagining them saying "I really feel like we can't take a just deport them all stance". First, no one who has any political power supports mass deportations; see the deportations false choice page. Second, just because I've heard that propaganda before doesn't mean what Collins said is a propaganda attempt. More likely, he's probably just not enough of a reporter to do things like follow the money.

Later, the producer/writer of the video, Paul Feine states "the Central Valley has always attracted self-reliant immigrants willing to work hard to pursue their dreams". That's to a certain extent accurate, but Reason is failing to note that the "cheap" labor used by growers is in fact not that cheap: it's heavily publicly-subsidized including for those workers and also their (potentially U.S. citizen) children. No one in the U.S. is "self-reliant", all depend on various levels of government in various ways. And, low-wage workers are the least "self-reliant" of all. Reason - a supposed libertarian magazine - is doing what they've been doing for years: supporting huge subsidies.

The unspecified form of comprehensive immigration reform (amnesty) that Reason supports on the video would have other huge costs such as by reducing the political power of U.S. citizens, giving even more power inside the U.S. to the Mexican government, and giving even power to the far-left. Reason would electorally help the very people who'd fervently work against them politically, and they're too dim to notice or too corrupt to care.

Reason's video is also anti-American in that many of those unemployed in the Central Valley are actually citizens of other countries. The pro-American solution would be to encourage immigration enforcement in order to free up scarce jobs for Americans, as I proposed almost two years ago. Reason is, of course, promoting the opposite: they'd make the situation in the area even worse for American workers. Their loyalty isn't to their fellow Americans but something else.