Govt statistics related to DHS funding debate go unreported by mainstream media

A week ago, the Center for Immigration Studies made public some government statistics it obtained through a Freedom Of Information Act request from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. USCIS’ data show that since 2009, the executive branch has issued 982,000 new work permits to citizens of other countries who were in the United States illegally. The government statistics also show that 470,000 work permits have been issued to aliens here on tourist visas. During this time, work permits were issued to aliens in multiple visa categories that are not eligible for U.S. employment by law. In all, USCIS issued approximately five and a half million work permits “report.

982,000 is roughly equal to the number of jobs employers added October-December 2014.

470,000 is roughly equal to the number of jobs added August-September 2014.

5.5 million is roughly equal to the number of jobs added January, 2013-January, 2015

-(Bureau of Labor Statistics)

These revelations put the current Congressional debate about limiting the President’s ability to issue work permits to unauthorized aliens in greater context. Naturally, the mainstream media had this to say about the report:

Immigration reporters, editors and their publishers aren’t interested in the numerical levels of immigration. They don’t find debates over immigration limits or violations of congressional limits by the executive branch to be newsworthy. Only ten percent of voters can correctly guess that immigration averages about one million permanent work permits per year and they’re unlikely to get that information from the national papers of record. Few Americans know that the U.S. is experiencing the longest and highest sustained level of immigration in history. In 2013, the U.S. Senate introduced, debated, and passed a bill that would mandate the largest expansion of immigration in U.S. history (above the current record levels), a fact the main stream media never acknowledged.

The establishment media often describes the immigration debate as being “harsh,” but do they consider their own role in making it so? When the core question of limits is removed from the immigration narrative, why remains is a debate over the qualities, not quantities of immigrants. Citizens, politicians, and activists who are concerned about the numerical levels of immigration become marginalized, leaving a broader platform for people who oppose not mass immigration, but immigrants themselves (and illegal aliens especially). As much as mainstream immigration restrictionists wish there were not, there are “anti-immigrant” voices. You can usually find them in comment sections online, including (sometimes) on NumbersUSA.

While I do not welcome the “anti-immigrant” perspective, I respect the media’s choice to acknowledge it’s existence. The media often fails, however, to differentiate anti-immigrant concerns from concerns about the limits congress puts on immigration or the executive branch’s failure to enforce those limits. The media has been unwilling to write about immigration as a question of numerical limits, including how limits on work permits exist to protect American workers. We have a broken immigration debate, defined by distrust and misunderstanding. Reporters, editors, and publishers are partly responsible. They ignore the question of limits not only at the peril of their readers’ immigration comprehension, but also their own.