The media hates middle class white people so much that they are trying to replace us

A extract from Against the corporate media, will be released September 10 by Bombardier Books. “The Media versus the Borders of the Nation,” by Mark Krikorian.

One area where the media narrative of the noble immigrant who is never wrong but can only be wronged is most apparent is in the coverage of the so-called Dreamers. Even the use of that advocacy label distorts the perception and reporting of the issue of illegal aliens who came here at a young age.

The original DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act was introduced in 2001. There have been many iterations of the bill over the past two decades, but all would have given green cards (i.e., permanent residency with a path to citizenship) to illegal aliens who came here as minors, had lived here for a certain number of years, had graduated from school or enrolled in a community education program, and had not been convicted of certain crimes. The reasoning was that because they were minors when they came to the U.S. illegally, they could not be held responsible for the actions of their parents. The closest the bill came to passage was during Congress’ lame duck session in late 2010, when it passed the House of Representatives but was defeated by the Senate.

Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, fearing that his country’s anemic Hispanic registration numbers would jeopardize his re-election, decided to implement something called the DREAM Act administratively to drum up enthusiasm among Hispanic voters (though the president had previously said he did not have the authority to do so). The result was Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which gave two-year, renewable work permits (but not green cards, which only Congress can grant) to more than 800,000 illegal “Dreamers” (though some have since withdrawn).

Won’t you send us the best of yourself?

The original DREAM Act and the DACA simulacrum targeted the most sympathetic group of illegal aliens to advocate for a broader amnesty for the rest of the illegal population. While not enough voters and legislators were convinced, the media lapped it up. Who better to represent the immigrant oppressed by the white supremacist phallocentric patriarchy than children!

This led to exceptionally bad reporting. The most striking failure in the reporting of DACA was not so much that sympathetic reporters indulged in sob stories—nor would we expect anything else. Instead, the press corps, almost as a whole, distorted the program’s requirements so as not to sow doubt in the minds of its recipients. It’s not that they lied, but that they either uncritically parroted the rhetoric of activists and their allies in Democratic administrations or smoothed over important wrinkles they deemed unimportant.

* Brought here as children.

This is where the media lies about DACA begin. There is no requirement that children be “brought here” by parents “through no fault of their own” to qualify for the program. The use of the verb “brought” is meant to paint a picture of babies in arms who have no say whatsoever. Even a decade after DACA was signed into law by Obama, TimesFor example, it still referred to “certain undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.” But to qualify for DACA, one only had to have come here illegally before the age of sixteen, with or without parents. While many, probably most, of the beneficiaries were in fact “brought here” by parents, one in eight were teenagers when they arrived, some of whom almost certainly came on their own, since a fifteen-year-old is considered working in much of the world. To give you some idea of ​​how common it is for teenagers to travel illegally on their own, during the first two years of the Biden administration, about a third of a million unaccompanied minors crossed the border illegally, most of them teenagers.

* Americans in everything but paperwork.

This is a lobbyist line that journalists thankfully avoided, but they accepted the premise without question. Contrary to the old “if your mother says she loves you, check it out” reporting ethos, reporters showed little skepticism about this assertion that was so central to the DACA case: Just how American were these illegal aliens?

A useful proxy for this would be English proficiency. Of course, the DACA recipients who were ordered by advocacy groups to be interviewed by reporters all spoke English, usually with a standard American accent, but were they typical? Curious media minds should have wanted to know, but in this case they didn’t. As it turns out, the DACA application form has a box to check to indicate whether an interpreter filled it out for the applicant. If reporters had asked how many applicants had used interpreters, they would have learned that Obama’s Department of Homeland Security did not tabulate that information, so there is now literally no way to know without manually going through 800,000 pieces of paper. You can understand why the Obama administration didn’t want to know, but there was no excuse for the Fourth Estate crusaders to ignore the question altogether and let the White House get away with it.

Illegal then, illegal now.

A CIS estimate using results from an English proficiency test for people with the characteristics of DACA beneficiaries concluded that perhaps a quarter of DACA recipients are functionally illiterate in English. But this knowledge may have undermined public sympathy for DACA beneficiaries and thus support for future amnesty, so only right-wing media took notice.

* Criminals do not need to register.

Another way the corporate media misrepresented DACA was how its members described DACA as only for people who “have a clean record,” in the words of one Times reporter who should have known better. Anything else might have undermined the image of “Dreamers” as paragons of virtue and fully deserving of amnesty. But there is no such requirement. While there is indeed a level of criminality above which one is ineligible, that is different from a “clean record.” To qualify for DACA, an applicant simply must not have been convicted of a felony, a serious misdemeanor, or “multiple offenses,” in the words of the Department of Homeland Security memo creating the program. “Multiple” was defined as three or more, and when the program was implemented, multiple offenses committed on the same date counted as only one offense.

Furthermore, only convictions were considered. More than 50,000 successful DACA recipients had arrest records, including for serious crimes. In the words of L. Francis Cissna, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under Trump, “America has shielded from deportation those with criminal arrests for sexual abuse of a minor, kidnapping, human trafficking, child pornography, or even murder.”

The same was true of gang membership, which was the subject of a question on the DACA application. But as with the question above about using an interpreter, the government didn’t want anyone to know how many DACA beneficiaries were in gangs, so it didn’t record that information on its own forms. And no one in the press showed the slightest interest in the subject.

The point of all this is not to make a case for or against DACA. It’s just that the press had no interest in reporting or even collecting facts that would cast the program in a negative light. That would have been seen in newsrooms as condescending, even racist. “The public has a right to know” became “the public cannot be trusted with such knowledge.”

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Elizabeth Nickson trained as a reporter in the London bureau of Time magazine. She became European Bureau Chief of LIFE magazine in the final years of the monthly publication, during which time she acquired the rights to Nelson Mandela’s memoirs before his release from Robben Island. She subsequently wrote for Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times Magazine, the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail and the National Post. Her first book, The Monkey Puzzle Tree, was an investigation into the CIA’s MKULTRA mind control program and was published by Bloomsbury and Knopf Canada. Her next book, Eco-Fascists, How Radical Environmentalists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, was a look at how misguided environmentalism is destroying the rural economy and culture in the US and around the world. It was edited by Adam Bellow at Harper Collins US. She is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Center for Public Policy, fcpp.org. You can read in-depth policy documents on various elements of the environmental junta here: https://independent.academia.edu/ElizabethNickson

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