Gabriel Thompson - author of "Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won't Do" [1] - offers an article [2] at Alternet opposing Alabama's new immigration law in which he shows that either he's clueless, or he thinks his readers are.

The article ("2 Big Lies About Immigration Disproved in One Alabama Town") concerns Russellville, Alabama, a town that's seen an influx of Hispanics to work in the local Pilgrims Pride poultry plant. The two "big lies", per Thompson, are that illegal aliens are stealing jobs and that they're depressing education standards. Let's take a look at how he got things wrong.

1. He says:

So here one has all the ingredients for a story that seems to fit every nightmarish scenario dreamed up by the Pat Buchanans of the world. An impoverished town is overwhelmed with immigrants, who take many of the local jobs and whose kids show up at school in large numbers unable to speak a word of English. It’s the perfect assignment for lazy journalism, the kind of article that can write itself by plugging into predictable narratives. Slap the word INVASION across the screen and you’ve got a special report the likes of which Lou Dobbs - if he hadn't been booted from CNN - wouldn’t have been able to resist.

It's unfortunate that Thompson didn't provide any examples of that "lazy journalism", since searching for something that barely exists would have kept him busy for a while. The fact is that the mainstream coverage of immigration is incredibly skewed to support illegal activity. For instance, back in 2007 I identified a category of MSM articles that I termed the Crooked Town Story: articles about previously dilapidated towns that had been rescued supposedly be an influx of illegal aliens or other foreign low-wage workers. There are only two others at the link, but stories like that are easy to find. See also this, this, and many of the entries in our Reporters and MSM Sources categories (on the Topics page). See this for an example of who the MSM is willing to cover for in order to support illegal immigration. Thompson is close to engaging in what he decries: he's writing something similar to a paint-by-the-numbers, isn't-illegal-immigration-great-for-business story and then accusing others of being hacks. Thompson pretends he's taking on the establishment, when he's acting just like the mainstream media and serving the interests of those who actually have power and who want to profit in one way or another from illegal immigration: corrupt businesses, corrupt banks, and power-seeking politicians.

2. Thompson doesn't realize that Dobbs was booted from CNN because - flawed as he is - he at least paid attention to the problems with massive immigration in a realistic way. Unlike 99.9% of MSM reporters, Dobbs wasn't a complete shill for those who want to profit from illegal immigration in one way or another. Thompson isn't exactly perturbed that CNN took Dobbs off the air: at the least he doesn't appear to be a strong supporter of speech he doesn't agree with. Thompson isn't willing to look behind the stories and try to figure out what exactly Dobbs could have been doing that would have gotten him taken off the air. Some lefties used to take the slogan "question authority" seriously; to Thompson it appears to be little more than a bumper sticker.

3. In an attempt to disprove the fact that illegal aliens take jobs from Americans, Thompson says:

When I relocated to Russellville in 2008, I found that, as a citizen, it was exceedingly easy to “steal” a job back: I was hired within a week after arriving... As I soon learned, the hard part wasn’t getting the job; the hard part was keeping the job. During a single shift I could be asked to tear apart more than 7,000 chicken breasts by hand or carry and dump 30 tons of meat onto an assembly line. The work was painful and unpleasant, with my hands and wrists aching and bits of chicken fat often stuck to my face. To deal with the pain, management had installed machines dispensing various brands of painkillers along one wall of the break room, and during our orientation we were advised to take such pills every four hours... Within two weeks, most of the people who had gone through the English-language orientation with me had left... This was typical. I learned from a previous employee that during one week the plant had hired 150 new people; that same week, 175 workers quit. During the six weeks I was employed at the plant, new faces appeared every day.

What Thompson doesn't seem to realize (or maybe he does and he's just trying to dupe his readers) is that the 1/3 of the workers at the plant who are per him foreign-born per him not only reduce wages (which "top out at about $10 an hour"), they decrease safety standards. That's just Economics 101: more workers lead to lower wages, and more workers mean that a company can "turn and burn": if a new employee doesn't like the conditions at the plant they can just hire someone more hard-up.

With fewer workers available to the plant, the plant would have to raise wages and increase standards in order to retain scarce workers. Thompson - like many other supposed liberals - either lives in or is trying to sell a fantastic scenario where Russellville can have a large number of workers through immigration and good wages and safety standards. Thompson either doesn't realize or pretends he doesn't realize that you can't have both. Obviously, that can go too far and wages and standards can rise to such a level that a company will be forced to move. On the other hand, an even larger supply of workers would enable the plant to lower wages and standards even more. Lefties of the past went too far in some cases and resulted in the first outcome. Thompson isn't like those lefties of yore, and it's not too difficult to see him supporting the second outcome with truly horrible wages. Just as long as he can get as much immigration as he wants. Thompson refers to Robert Bentley as one of those "politicians seeking to build their careers upon the backs of undocumented immigrants." He either doesn't realize or doesn't reveal that he's acting as a shill for those companies that want to build their businesses upon the backs of undocumented immigrants.

4. Regarding education, Thompson says:

So if immigrants aren’t stealing jobs, what about schools? With so many kids entering school and not speaking English, surely the system has come crashing down, right? ...Actually, quite the opposite. By fifth grade, Latino students are equal to their peers in math, reading, and writing. (By the fifth grade, they’re also speaking with a flawless Southern accent). Russellville boasts one of the highest graduation rates in the state, at 94 percent. And while Latino students are quickly catching up, immigrant parents are proving to be dedicated partners in improving the school system.

Alabama doesn't exactly have a reputation as an educational star; see the decade-old chart of high school graduation rates here. See also the picture below comparing Russellville's county to the richest city in Alabama [3]. There are a lot of apples and oranges involved in any such comparisons, but Russellville doesn't appear to much of a standout compared to other cities in the U.S. that haven't experienced an influx of low-skilled foreign workers. Note also that Thompson relies for his good words on their school system with the thoughts of a Special Ed/ESL teacher and the town librarian, neither of whom appear to exactly be unbiased sources. Did Thompson fail to note the thoughts of those who disagree with him, or did he just not bother to ask?

Now, it's your turn. Did I make my case? Or, do you still think Gabriel Thompson is on the right track? If so, leave a comment below and I'll provide even more information showing just how wrong he is.

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[1] His book's publisher? Nation Books, from The Nation whose publisher is Katrina vanden Heuvel. As discussed at the last link, she's a member of the CFR. Fighting the power, from the heart of the establishment.

[2] alternet.org/story/152168/2_big_lies_about_immigration_disproved_in_one_alabama_town?page=entire

[3] The image below consists of two images from alsde.edu/Accountability/Accountability.asp. Both are of the 2010-2011 Alabama Reading and Mathematics Test for grade 8 math. The top image is of Mountain Brook City, and the bottom is of Franklin County (where Russellville is located). In the chart, blue is good and yellow is bad. Obviously this is not an apples to apples comparison, but it does show that importing even more unskilled people into Russellville might not be such a good idea.
The images are from:
alsde.edu/Accountability/Image.asp?Image=Images/GS30A5.JPG
alsde.edu/Accountability/Image.asp?Image=Images/GS30A2.JPG