Against the Corporate Media, from Bombardier Books.
One area in which the media narrative of the noble immigrant who is never wrong but can only be wronged is most evident is the coverage of the so-called Dreamers. Even using that advocacy label skews the perception and coverage 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 proposal over the intervening two decades, but they all would have given a green card (that is, permanent residence with a path to citizenship) to illegal aliens who came here as minors, had lived here for a certain number of years, had completed school or were in some educational program, and who had not been convicted of certain crimes. The rationale was that since they were minors when they came to the U.S. illegally, they should not be held liable for the actions of their parents. The bill came closest to passing in the lame duck session of Congress at the end of 2010, when it passed the House but failed in the Senate.
Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, fearing that anaemic Hispanic registration numbers would threaten his re-election, decided to implement something like the DREAM Act administratively to generate enthusiasm among Hispanic voters (even though the president had earlier said he lacked the authority to do that). The result was Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which gave two-year renewable work permits (but not green cards, which only Congress can do) to more than 800,000 illegal-alien “Dreamers” (though some have dropped out in the interim).
he original DREAM Act and its DACA simulacrum targeted the most sympathetic group of illegal aliens in order to make the case for a broader amnesty for all the rest of the illegal population. While insufficient numbers of voters and lawmakers were persuaded, the media ate it up. Who better to represent the immigrant oppressed by the white supremacist phallocentric patriarchy than children!
This led to some exceptionally bad reporting. The most notable flaw in reporting on DACA wasn’t so much that sympathetic reporters feasted on sob stories—we would expect nothing less. Rather, the press corps, almost as one, misrepresented the program’s requirements in order not to cast doubt on its beneficiaries. It’s not that they lied, but that they either uncritically parroted the rhetoric of activists and their allies in Democratic administrations, or they ironed out important wrinkles that they judged inconsequential.
* Brought here as children.
This is the starting point of media falsehoods about DACA. There is no requirement that children be “brought” here by parents “through no fault of their own” to be eligible for the program The use of the verb “brought” is intended to paint a picture of babes in arms exercising no agency. Even a decade after DACA was decreed by Obama, the Times, for instance, still referred to “some undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.” But to be eligible for DACA, one only had to have come here illegally before age sixteen, with or without parents. While many, probably most, of the beneficiaries were, in fact, “brought” here by parents, one of eight were teenagers when they arrived, some of them almost certainly coming on their own, since a fifteen-year-old is considered to be of working age in much of the world. To give a sense 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 all but paperwork.
This is a lobbyist phrase that journalists thankfully avoided, but they accepted the premise unquestioningly. Contrary to the old “if your mother says she loves you, check it out” reportorial ethos, reporters expressed little skepticism about this assertion that was so central to the case for DACA—just how American were these illegal aliens?
A useful proxy for that would be proficiency in the English language. The DACA recipients served up by advocacy groups to be interviewed by reporters all spoke English, of course—mostly with standard American accents—but were they typical? Inquiring media minds should have wanted to know, but not in this case. As it turns out, the DACA application form has a box to check if an interpreter filled it out for the applicant. If any reporters had asked how many applicants used interpreters, they would have learned that Obama’s Department of Homeland Security didn’t tabulate that information, so there is now literally no way to know without going back through 800,000 pieces of paper by hand. You can see why the Obama administration would not want that known, but there was no excuse for the crusaders of the Fourth Estate to ignore the question altogether and let the White House get away with it.
A CIS estimate using results from a test of English proficiency for people with the characteristics of DACA beneficiaries concluded that perhaps one-fourth of DACA recipients are functionally illiterate in English. But this knowledge might have undermined the public sympathy for the DACA beneficiaries and thus undermined support for future amnesties, so only rightwing media noticed.
* No criminals need apply.
Another way the Corporate Media misrepresented DACA was how its members described DACA as only for those who “have a clean criminal record,” in the words of a 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 beyond which one is ineligible, that’s different from a “clean record.” To be considered for DACA, an applicant must merely not have been convicted of a felony, a significant misdemeanor, or “multiple misdemeanor offences,” in the words of the Department of the Homeland Security memo that created it. “Multiple” was taken to mean three or more, and in implementing the program, multiple misdemeanors committed on the same date counted as only one offense.
Further, 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 “let those with criminal arrests for sexually assaulting a minor, kidnapping, human trafficking, child pornography, or even murder be provided protection from removal.”
It was the same with gang membership, which was the subject of a question on the DACA application. But like the question discussed above about use of an interpreter, the government didn’t want anyone to know the share of DACA beneficiaries who were in gangs so it didn’t record the information on its own forms. And no one in the press expressed the slightest interest in the subject.
The point of all this is not to make a case for or against DACA. It is merely that the press had no interest in relaying, or even gathering, facts that would have cast the program in a negative light. To do so would have been seen in newsrooms as punching down, even racist. “The public has a right to know” morphed into “the public can’t be trusted with such knowledge.”
Elizabeth Nickson was trained as a reporter at the London bureau of Time Magazine. She became European Bureau Chief of LIFE magazine in its last years of monthly publication, and during that time, acquired the rights to Nelson Mandela’s memoir before he was released from Robben Island. She went on to write 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 of the CIA 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 environmentalism, badly practiced, is destroying the rural economy and rural culture in the U.S. and all over the world. It was published 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 papers about various elements of the environmental junta here: https://independent.academia.edu/ElizabethNickson
Her substack is named 'Welcome to Absurdistan'.