{"id":427418,"date":"2021-12-10T19:05:17","date_gmt":"2021-12-10T19:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fair.org\/?p=9025272"},"modified":"2021-12-10T19:05:17","modified_gmt":"2021-12-10T19:05:17","slug":"playing-both-sides-on-immigration-leaves-public-in-the-dark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/12\/10\/playing-both-sides-on-immigration-leaves-public-in-the-dark\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing \u2018Both Sides\u2019 on Immigration Leaves Public in the Dark\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>.<\/p>\nParticulars beside the point<\/b><\/h3>\n