Posted by
Michael A. Minton on Monday, April 07, 2008 1:00:32 PM
While perusing Louisville’s Courier-Journal newspaper on Sunday, April 6, 2008, my eyes were naturally drawn to an article entitled “Arizona Waging Immigration Fight On Its Own Terms.” As you may have read, I have focused quite a bit of energy and brain-power on the issue of illegal immigration. In fact, a lot of my new book, Mr. Right Opinion-Unplugged and Unashamed (available soon at: http://www.51756.authorworld.com/), deals with this very topic.
However, I was particularly interested in this article because it sounded as though the newspaper was praising Arizona for dealing with the issue on its own terms, as opposed to waiting for the federal government to get around to it (as if that will ever happen). And if you read the Courier-Journal, or any other Gannett-owned newspaper, you know how out-of-character it is for anything conservative to get positive coverage.
Now, I will be the first to admit that my articles are biased. I report on current events from a conservative point of view, and I make no apologies for it. However, I am the operator of a news and opinion weblog. I am not, nor do I claim to be, an independent source of news. The Courier, however, is supposed to be a newspaper; inherently obligated to report on current events from an unbiased stance. But as we all know, unbiased journalism is nearly impossible to find these days.
At any rate, the story started out on a good note. Reporter Nicholas Raccardi, of the Los Angeles Times (no bias at that paper), starts the article by noting that “Arizona has become a laboratory for whether a state can single-handedly combat illegal immigration.” This statement obviously makes the point that the feds are doing next-to-nothing on the illegal immigration front. And nothing could be closer to the truth.
The article points out that Arizona, in recent years, has made it almost impossible for illegals to receive government services, and that a new law there makes it possible for the state to close businesses that hire illegal immigrants. It also says that the sheriff of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, has his deputies, along with “posses” of volunteers, going out to search for “illegal street vendors or immigrants.” All good things in my opinion. Any time a state can solve problems without the interference of the federal government, that is a good thing. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
Apparently, state Rep. Russell Pearce, who has authored some of Arizona’s toughest immigration laws, feels as I do. The LA Times quotes him as saying, “What I love about what Arizona is doing is that we don’t have to rely on the federal government…. It has truly woken the rest of America that states can fix that problem.”
Up to this point, the news story had been strangely, and uncharacteristically, positive about Arizona’s fight against illegal immigration. It just seemed to good to be true…and it was! Mr. Riccardi was just setting us up for the kill. The rest of his article is just a rant about how unfair it is to illegals for American states to actually enforce immigration law. The article spends all of three paragraphs highlighting the positives of the state’s immigration fight, and it spends the remaining twenty-three paragraphs on a huge, bleeding-heart diatribe about the evils of enforcing the law.
By my estimation, that is nearly an eight-to-one allotment of negative vs. positive coverage. This is a terribly unfair advantage to the pro-illegal camp. Especially when one considers the fact that news outlets are supposed to be neutral in the first place!
The article states that “Illegal immigrants complain that it’s impossible to find good work and (they) are leaving the state.” It would seem to me that this outcome is the whole goal of what the state is doing, and that Arizona is therefore meeting it’s goal. That’s really not too hard to figure out.
Mr. Riccardi does point out one legitimate complaint: he says that a minority of illegals have been unfairly victimized by the system the state uses to verify the employability of potential illegals. Apparently, Arizona uses a system called E-verify, a federal pilot project that allows businesses to verify the status of workers. It seems that the system has mistakenly identified a small percentage of people as possible illegals.
However, the acting chief of E-verify, Katherine Lotspeich, said officials would soon be proposing several changes which would make the system more error-free. The reporter then identifies one of the “victims” of the E-verify system, a naturalized citizen who was told by employers that he would lose his job due to information supplied by E-verify.
What the article tries to hide, though, is the fact that the reason the “victim,” Mr. Ochoa, was classified the way he was is that he, like some 3,200 foreign-born U.S. citizens, failed to register his citizenship with the Social Security Administration. Therefore, they are classified by E-verify as possible illegal immigrants. So, in reality, what the reporter tries to call victims of the system are actually victims of their own failure to properly register their citizenship.
It truly is amazing how these folks at the LA Times try to play on our emotions. In one case, they talk about a thirty-two year-old illegal by the name of Jorge Hernandez. They say that Mr. Hernandez, who has lived in Phoenix illegally for the past eleven years, lost a job he had worked at for years because of the new employer-based sanctions enacted by Arizona.
The quote from the newspaper is: “Now he struggles to support his family by working as a day-laborer, and is thinking of leaving.” Seriously, that’s what they say in trying to garner my sympathy for this man who is here illegally in the first place. They say he now dreams of moving to New Mexico, where the anti-illegal immigrant sentiment is weaker.
State Rep. Pearce, whom I quoted earlier, said that the positive effects of Arizona’s efforts were undeniable. “Smaller classroom sizes (and) shorter emergency room waits” have been seen as a result of the state’s work. He also says, “Even if (illegal immigrants) are paying taxes-and most of them aren’t-the cost to taxpayers is huge.”
The state’s work in fighting illegal immigration is having a major impact. So effective is it that the neighboring Mexican state of Sonora has complained about the number of refugees fleeing Arizona and coming back to Mexico. Imagine that…a Mexican state complaining about the number of Mexican “refugees” crossing the border! Only now, the illegals are heading in the right direction!