Pulitzers for propagandists?

Today's New York Times features a rant by their Supreme Court reporter (and Pulitzer Prize winner) Linda Greenhouse, titled "Breathing while undocumented," about--surprise--Arizona's new get tough on illegal immigrants law. Here's my response:

However you feel about illegal immigration, you should object to Linda Greenhouse trying to sway you with propaganda instead of persuasion. For example:

1. She calls Arizona a “police state,” thus equating it with the regimes of Burma, North Korea, & Iran. This isn’t just hyperbole—it’s a grotesque insult to the political prisoners of real police states, trivializing their plight by the comparison.

2. She equates Arizona’s proof of legal residency requirement with the Soviet Union’s rigid internal passport system. But we all have to show valid ID all the time—to buy something with a check or credit card, if a cop asks for it, if we’re carded in a bar or a liquor store. And when you travel abroad you have to show your passport in a variety of circumstances, pretty much daily.

Soviet internal passports were part of a system that decreed where legal citizens could live or even travel. Arizona places no such controls on legal residents, so it isn’t comparable--and again belittles those who suffered under totalitarian oppression.

3. She redefines illegal aliens as “undocumented” people. Iillegal alien” is the term you see in all legal documents. Ot clearly denotes their illegal status—which in this country is a misdemeanor--a crime. Not a felony, but a crime nonetheless. Redefining them as “undocumented” is a legal fiction that purposely obscures their status as petty criminals, & equates their status with yours if you’d lost your driver’s license & a cop stopped you & asked for your ID. In that instance you’d be “undocumented.” Otherwise it’s a legally meaningless term.

Suppose Linda Greenhouse took a vacation, came home & discovered me living in her home. She orders me out. I say “Why? I’m just undocumented.” Think she’d call the cops & have me arrested?

Not one country on Earth has laws allowing you to enter their country on the excuse that you’re “undocumented.” Why do Leftists want America to be the sole exception?

Besides, the term implies that these people just dropped out of the sky. But these people are—every single one of them—citizens of another country. A country they were born in, mostly with documents from that country. So they aren’t “undocumented” at all.

Calling them undocumented is a framing device—a way to tilt the conversational playing field in your favor. Instead of arguing that they have a right to be here, leftists like Greenhouse use words like this to slip the assumption in without bothering to make a case for it. To be fair, right wingers do the same thing (“activist judges” comes to mind) all the time.

It’s yet another example of how ideologues have more respect for their ideas than for you as an individual; they believe sliming you is justified by their noble ends, forgetting how ex-Communist Emma Goldman observed that “the means reveal the ends.”

4. She claims that it is illegal to treat an illegal alien as if they’re illegal, in the name of civil liberties, calling it “a new crime of breathing while undocumented.” Um, a trespasser is a trespasser as long as they’re trespassing. Actually, legally they’re still guilty of the crime of trespass even if they leave where they trespassed—just as you’re guilty of speeding even if you slow down later.

Of course what she’s implying with that cutesy turn of phrase is that Arizona cops will stop anyone who looks Mexican & lock ‘em up if they can’t prove they belong here. That is illegal, but it’s not what the law actually says, & it’s not what Arizona police departments say they’ll do.

Which is to look for people who look like they’re smuggling or being smuggled. Like a Ford Econoline van stuffed with 20 ragged men, women & children, along with backpacks & milk jugs full of water. Or a file of 50 such people in the middle of the desert, half a mile north of the border. Or a residential house with 50 such people camped out inside it.

Now if they look Mexican and/or don’t speak English, that’s another clue. But mainly it’s situational—which is what cops do if they’re trying to do their job & stop crime.

5. She calls this an “anti-immigrant spasm.” Here she conflates legal & illegal immigration. Again, no argument supporting that assumption, making it a classic dirty trick.

6. She refers to a 1975 Texas law as “a law to deprive undocumented immigrant children of a free public education.” But you could as easily call it “a law to require citizens of other countries not here legally to obtain social services—including educational ones—from their own country.” Here again, Goodman’s language presumes that illegals dropped out of the sky, absolving their own countries of any responsibility for them.

Finally, she never mentions that the primary reason Mexicans come here illegally is Mexican overpopulation (from 13.1 million in 1900 to 111 million to day, an eightfold increase). Leftists avoid this fact because it’s not America’s fault…so it can’t be true.

What Mexico needs isn’t an American overpopulation escape valve—it needs China’s one child law.