Poll results can vary widely, depending on how the questions are worded. Nowhere is this truer than when the subject is immigration. A recent poll conducted by the University of Texas and Texas Tribune is no different. Not only did a question regarding Birthright Citizenship mislead those being asked, but it also misrepresented the 14th Amendment.
U.S. citizens comprise 25 percent of all domestic crop laborers. Another 21 percent are legal immigrants. Together, they make up nearly half of the agricultural workers that provide the nation's food supply. Yet the media is conspicuously silent on these legal farm workers, while devoting copious copy to the interests of their illegal competitors and their employers.
In response to the latest unemployment report, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich laments that anemic job growth isn't even keeping up with U.S. population growth, which requires 125,000 new jobs every month just to keep unemployment from getting worse. Reich neglects to acknowledge that seventy-five percent of U.S. population growth is due to government-controlled immigration policies.
Reporters confuse their readers when they state something as a fact in one sentence, then call it an "interpretation" in the next. But such is the failure of media to grasp the birthright citizenship and the Fourteenth Amendment issues that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote that legislators "are targeting the 14th Amendment, which automatically grants U.S. citizenship to babies born on U.S. soil even if their parents are here illegally. The lawmakers disagree with that interpretation, and they are attempting to force the issue into the courts for a decision.”
The Government Accountability Office's (GAO) report on E-Verify included some happy news (E-Verify is more accurate than ever) and some disappointing news (ICE's misplaced priorities). I was also disappointed in some of the things the report did not include. Here are some highlights from the report and my response. . .
Two years into the jobs recession, some reporters are still operating under the false assumption that immigration policy is determined by U.S. labor market conditions. According to The New York Times' coverage of a Brookings Institution report, “The flow of immigration has resumed, after….[having] stopped almost completely during the recession….The rise pointed to an increase in demand for immigrant labor in the economy, said Audrey Singer, a demographer and co-author of the report.”
The Migration Policy Institute estimates that 2.1 million illegal aliens could be immediately eligible for legalization should the DREAM Act pass into law. As with all estimates, this one is based on a series of assumptions - some worth questioning - but "2.1 million" is a useful number to use when considering the potential numerical impact of the legislation.
The DREAM Act was first introduced nine years ago and has been in the press almost weekly for at least a year now, yet you would be hard-pressed to find much written about the reasons opponents have been fighting (successfully) for nearly a decade to prevent the bill from becoming law. The media's blind spot has contributed to the frustration both sides feel today with the chance of compromise no more promising than it was a decade ago.
RUMOR: The 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to children born to parents illegally in the U.S.