Tonight's 60 Minutes featured a segment called "The All-American Canal", an attempt by Scott Pelley of CBS News to pull heartstrings in order to support illegal immigration (cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6453537n). Hundreds of people have died in that Canal along the border, and Pelley discussed a crusade by John Hunter (brother of Duncan Hunter) to install climb-out ladders and the like (allamericancanal.org).

The problem is that their crusade would make things worse: it would encourage people to cross with many of those not making it. See the false compassion page for a longer discussion, but there are only two ways to reduce border deaths: either declare completely open borders, or discourage people from crossing in the first place. The U.S. is never going to do the first, and Hunter and Pelley are doing the opposite of the second. While I fully expect many of their viewers to have been taken in, I urge those viewers to think this through: their campaign would encourage more to try to cross, it would lead to more deaths, and it's thus highly immoral.

Next to that, the fact that Pelley falsely stated that due to the new immigration law, "police in Arizona will be able to stop anyone they like and order a check of their ID to determine whether the person is in the U.S. illegally" isn't that important, but it does help underline how little trust you can place in his reporting. Under the law as first enacted, police would first require "lawful contact" and then could only ask about someone's status if they had "reasonable suspicion" that the person was in the U.S. illegally. That's been clarified under the amended law to make clear that it has to be in conjunction with a stop for another violation.

If you'd like to do something about this, it's actually not that difficult: make the points on the false compassion page to the face of someone like Pelley, get their response on video, and then upload it to video sharing sites.

UPDATE: Oh, #&#&. "60 Minutes of Misinformation" points out that the host of this report was Scott Pelley and not Steve Kroft as previously stated. I've changed the text accordingly.