Immigration, as both an area of policymaking and a topic of public discourse, holds the peculiar distinction of having perhaps the widest gulf between how strongly the public and the press feel about it, on the one hand, and how much they actually know about its history and mechanics on the other.
In news coverage, this manifests in multiple troubling ways. Perhaps most chronic and damaging is a general indifference to the procedural specifics of humanitarian migration, including a persistent misunderstanding of border statistics. For example, border apprehensions are misinterpreted as reflecting the number of migrants crossing, when restrictive policies are causing many people to try again and again.
Particulars beside the point
USA Today (10/5/21)
More broadly, immigration coverage suffers from a version of the same inane both sides-ism that permeates so much of political coverage in general. In one recent example, USA Today (10/5/21) published a story built around an interview with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, honing in on the rounding up and mass removal of would-be Haitian asylum seekers. The published copy noted that “thousands of migrants appeared before an immigration judge to see if they would be allowed to stay in the US,” an assertion that immediately reads as flatly wrong to anyone familiar with the last year and a half of border policy.
Starting in March 2020 and continuing as of this article’s writing, the federal government has leaned on a public health statute known as Title 42 to block most migrants from even applying for asylum in the first place, leading to widespread expulsions without anyone ever seeing a judge; this was the fate that awaited the majority of Haitians camped out at Del Rio. Still, the error remained up for days, and was only corrected after a sustained lambasting from advocates and attorneys.
A September New York Times article (9/19/21) referenced the mass “deportation” of Haitian migrants, and then went on to use the term practically interchangeably with “expelled,” despite the fact that an expulsion and a deportation are legally very distinct, even if they have a similar outcome. (A deportation entails a more thorough process and has continuing legal consequences such as bars on re-entry, while expulsions have sketchy legal footing and sometimes aren’t even recorded in detail, as if a person had never tried to enter at all.) It’s a slip-up that seems purely semantic, but betrays a certain sloppiness when it comes to distinctions that can have an enormous bearing on migrants’ lives.
Many such errors never get fixed, in what is a reflection of how numerous reporters and editors view immigration—a story where what matters are the political implications, and the particulars are beside the point. The migrants themselves are nothing but an abstraction.
Breathless ahistorical narratives
The Hill (5/1/21)
Still, it’s hard to throw too many barbs at often-overworked general assignment journalists slipping up in covering an extraordinarily complex subject, even if they tend to slip up the same ways again and again. What’s less forgivable is the endless propping up of breathless and ahistorical narratives that warp rather than clarify readers’ and viewers’ understanding of immigration. Chief among these is the media obsession with the debate over whether the Biden administration’s approach to humanitarian migration has been either open borders lunacy, or else largely an extension of the Trump era’s heavy-handedness.
A May story in The Hill (5/1/21), headlined “Biden Immigration Moves Under Scrutiny From Left and Right,” framed criticism of Biden from the left as a the result of an administration “reluctant to use its legal power to grant status to new and existing immigrants”–a puzzling phrase, given the lack of any such legal power. The Hill was apparently conflating allowing access to the asylum processing system at all with the ability to simply bestow permanent status, which is not something the president can do. It also repeated long-disproven right-wing arguments that there is meaningful impact from so-called policies of deterrence.
A more recent article for NBC News (9/27/21) found Biden “in a bind on the border”:
For many in Biden’s base, any kind of immigration enforcement action can smack of Trumpism. And for many Republicans, any attempt at reform is tantamount to giving away the country.
This leaves the White House “politically isolated and with no clear refuge,” NBC‘s Alex Seitz-Wald reported.
Of course, understanding which side’s arguments are more valid might suggest to readers where Biden ought to be seeking such “refuge,” but the article did little to clear that up. While it acknowledged that, as some on the left argue, Biden has continued some of Trump’s harshest border policies, it failed to note that claims like Sen. Josh Hawley’s assertion of “uncontrolled illegal immigration into the country” simply have no basis in fact.
Not a matter of perspective
Time (10/12/21)
The idea that this is simply a matter of perspective is, bluntly, ludicrous. The Title 42 policy, which the Biden administration is currently fighting in court to preserve, is hands-down the most restrictive border policy in US history, blocking access to even the right to begin an asylum process. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has forcefully come out against Title 42, suggesting it violates international law. More than one federal judge has questioned its domestic legality. A slate of health experts and epidemiologists have questioned the order’s supposed public health premise, and the administration has all but abandoned this rationale, confirming that it was always an anti-immigration policy at its core.
The consequences for those expelled have been well-documented and are dire. Whereas asylum seekers typically want to be found and detained by Border Patrol so they can launch their cases, the specter of indiscriminate expulsion has pushed migrants to attempt crossings undetected, in parts of the border where they’re at far higher risk of death. Kidnappings have been endemic among recently expelled migrants. Thousands of the Haitians who massed at the border last month were expelled to Haiti, despite that country’s current instability and the fact that the majority of them hadn’t actually lived there for years.
More broadly, since the very early days of the Biden White House, officials from the president on down have done their level best to discourage people from traveling to the US border at all, as most infamously illustrated by Vice President Kamala Harris’ “do not come” speech in Guatemala. The administration has continued the trend of coordinating with police, military and border officials in Mexico and Central America in a long-standing effort to establish a sort of regional barrier to migration. Why have just a border wall when the whole of Mexico can be a barricade?
Yet even against this backdrop, credulous reporters often take seriously conservatives’ strident accusations of a bleeding-heart Biden rolling out the red carpet as part of a good-faith debate. The argument seems to be accepted exclusively because Biden has refused to take as much sadistic glee in harming migrants as his predecessor did, and the goal posts have been dragged along so far that this in and of itself is taken as weakness on immigration.
Irresistible story of political clash
Washington Post Magazine (11/1/21)
A profile of Mayorkas in the Washington Post Magazine (11/1/21) claimed that “immigration hawks assail him as too soft. The most progressive migrant advocates lambaste him as too hard,” making no attempt to discern which position might have more basis in fact. Later on, it claimed that Mayorkas’ assurances that the border isn’t open are “a tough sell when images of migrants streaming into the country flood the Internet,” a laughable and contextless metric to use when discussing a policy issue.
It appears not to matter that random photos of border crossings say nothing about the larger dynamics at play, or that the people being photographed may well have been expelled from the country mere hours later. Here, the mask slips and it becomes clear that this is not about facts, but an irresistible story of political clash, a clash that is itself fed by the failure to facilitate a nuanced discussion.
It’s the same failure that has fueled the unhinged national conversation over critical race theory (FAIR.org, 8/4/21), a term that has lost specific meaning through its subsummation into the never-ending culture wars, and delayed a real public awareness and understanding of climate change. The details never mattered, subservient as they were to the greater goal of narrative conflict. It’s an addiction that many in the media just can’t seem to break, even as the consequences continually manifest themselves in real time.
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This post was originally published on FAIR.
