Arizona's Immigration Two-Step
PHOENIX -- Traumatized by a tidal wave of illegal immigrants, Arizona last year enacted the nation's most pitiless law to punish employers who hire undocumented workers. Now state lawmakers, having proved that they mean business -- even if it means killing off businesses -- are reconnecting with ...
By Lee Hockstader- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2008/04/20/AR2008042001755.html
Comments
For bad journalism, look at the article "Researchers Fear Southern Fence Will Endanger Species Further" in yesterday's Post. That article--not an editorial--argues that we shouldn't build a border fence because it gets in the way of wildlife.
However, the writer failed to note that her argument applies equally to ALL fences EVERYWHERE--along with roads, cities, suburbs, farms, shipping, and air traffic.
Nearly all the Post's articles on immigration are equally one-sided propaganda pieces.
But even though Hockstader's screed isn't bad journalism, it is bad editorializing.
It substitutes cheap shots (mainly namecalling) throughout in lieu of making actual arguments for his unstated but clear premise: that Mexico's ruling elite should be allowed to outsource its overpopulation crisis to America, along with its entire social welfare system.
Oh, and that anyone who objects to this invasion is such a knuckle-dragger that one needn't bother to even argue with him. A few put-downs like "nativist" or "racist" will suffice.
Propaganda differs from editorials in using emotional arguments instead of sweet reason.
I could teach a class on underhanded demagoguery using this article as an example.
Aside from the pervasive namecalling, some less obvious dirty tricks appear in this piece:
a. Hockstader only makes sense if this were the first amnesty. Instead it will be the third, the last one being in 1986.
Only now it's up to 20M illegals instead of 3M. The result of that real amnesty combined with fake enforcement was that even more Mexican citizens made themselves at home here. Nothing he says in this editorial would change that consequence.
And then what? HALF of Mexico's 100+M population wants to move here. In Hockstader's mental universe, is ANY number of Mexicans too much? And if there is a too-much number, what do we do when we finally reach it?
b. Hockstader's writing embodies the contempt for mainstream American culture common to the academic Left. America bad, Mexico good. That's why he speaks of opposition to illegal immigration so contemptuously.
It seems that for him American culture has no intrinsic value. So massively altering it across California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas is just fine.
OTOH Mexican culture is to be revered and celebrated (never mind that Mexican-American high school dropout rates and incidence of teen pregnancy are the highest of any sizeable socioethnic group in America).
Of course these are inexpensive attitudes for Hockstader to sport. He doesn't live here in the Southwest, where Mexicans are invading in such large numbers that they're supplanting multicultural communities with monolithic Spanish-speaking ones. Then again, if American culture is to be disdained, who cares? Not the media elites living around the Beltway.
And of course he doesn't move in the social circles of folks who have lost 5-20% of their earning power due to competition from illegals. His childrens' schools aren't crumbling under the weight of hordes of kids who don't even speak or write good Spanish, much less Ingles.
He can wish this plague of peasants on working-class Americans in the Southwest without spilling his mocha latte.
This illegal immigration by millions of Mexicans has no historical precedent, either for the sheer numbers or for its all coming from one other culture. The last big wave (around the turn of the 20th century) came from many countries--though they too brought down wages.
In fact, precious few Mexicans lived in America in large numbers until recently.
In 1940 Mexican-Americans represented .5% of the population--and Mexico's population was 20 million. Now they're, what, 14% of our population--more than blacks--and in Mexico the population has exploded to over 100 million.
News flash: we didn't do that. They did it to themselves, looong before NAFTA. They did it partly because Mexican society is dominated by a stuck-in-the-19th century religion that says even condoms are murder--much less IUDs or morning after pills.
The irony of ironies is that the liberal establishment used to love America's working poor. But the liberal establishment is a fickle lot. Now not even blacks--who have been most impacted by illegal alien labor--can divert Hockstader's adoring gaze from Los Mexicanos.
Not that I have anything against Mexicans myself. I speak Spanish and have studied the anthropology of Mexico's Indians. I just happen to like having my culture and my language in my country.
By Hockstader's principles I should be able to move to Mexico with a million other Americans and demand our rights to get Mexican citizenship but not learn Spanish--even to vote...because it's our right to impose our culture on theirs.
Why?
Beats me. Ask him.
ehkzu wrote: