News

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.

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.”

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.”