[Below is an excerpt from a chapter I wrote on media coverage of immigration for a new book, out today, titled “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 anemic 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).
The 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.
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