Gray Lady Down (16 page)

The
Times’
journalistic lapses, failures and blunders on the immigration issue do not stem from deadline pressure, a lack of newsroom resources and personnel, or carelessness. Rather, they stem from a slavish devotion to the ideology of diversity, along with wishful thinking, naiveté, double standards, social distance, elite guilt, intellectual dishonesty, historical shallowness and old-fashioned partisanship.

The paper’s reluctance to face the realities of illegal immigration squarely is reflected in its queasy coverage of alien criminality, as well as the different attitudes, values and customs that some immigrant groups bring as baggage, and the implications these differences carry for the American tradition of assimilation. The relativism that the
Times
brings to its reporting on these subjects, as well as the issue of dual citizenship and divided loyalty, suggests an attempt to undermine the ideal of assimilation as a “dated, even racist concept.”

Two things appear to be driving immigration reporting. The first is a failure of confidence in America and its history—a “punitive liberalism,” as James Piereson has called it, or “penitential narcissism” in Oriana Fallaci’s phrase. The second driver is an intellectual and journalistic framework that romanticizes “the
Other” and shrugs off the question of a Latinization or Islamization of American culture as if it were meaningless. Like other liberal institutions, the
Times
puts the “human rights” of illegal immigrants ahead of the collective right of ordinary American citizens to decide who should be allowed to immigrate and who should not—thereby essentially voiding one of the most fundamental aspects of any country’s sovereignty.

At the
Times,
pressure has steadily increased to erase the distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigration. As Randal Archibold wrote in April 2006, there is “the awkward question of who is legal and how much it should matter.” Officially, the paper’s style guide says a distinction should be made, but the newsroom reflects a calculated confusion. Sometimes headlines will use the word “migrant”; the text of reports may use “undocumented worker,” “undocumented migrant,” or “immigrants who are undocumented.” The
Times
rarely uses the term “illegal alien.” A 2004 story headlined “160 Migrants Seized at Upscale Arizona Home” was obviously about illegal immigrants being smuggled into the country, but the headline refused to say so.

One editorial writer, Lawrence Downes, gave an explanation for the evasive vocabulary when he wrote that “America has a big problem with illegal immigration, but a big part of it stems from the word ‘illegal.’ It pollutes the debate. It blocks solutions. Used dispassionately and technically, there is nothing wrong with it. Used as an irreducible modifier for a large and largely decent group of people, it is badly damaging. And as a code word for racial and ethnic hatred, it is detestable.” Many readers thought this was moral preening on Downes’ part—and offensive to boot. Wrote one:

The
Times
also shows its bias in the numbers it chooses to report. In a mid-2009 panel discussion, Jeffrey Passel of the Pew Research Center estimated that nearly one million illegal immigrants enter America annually, but the
Times
has used the figure of 400,000 and doesn’t acknowledge the discrepancy, much less explain it.

While minimizing the numbers of illegal immigrants, the
Times
plays down the social costs they impose as well. According to William Bratton, former police chief of Los Angeles, gang violence is “the emerging monster of crime in America.” At least 90 percent of all the outstanding homicide warrants in Los Angeles are for illegal immigrant criminals, most of them gangbangers. Because of their social marginality, immigrant children are particularly likely to be seduced by the gang culture. But the
New York Times
has often reported on gangs as if they were created by the United States itself, and as if deporting alleged gang members were a human rights abuse. Pieces such as Ginger Thompson’s September 2004 report called “Tattooed Warriors: Shuttling Between Nations, Latino Gangs Confound the Law” rarely involve interviews with victims of immigrant gang crime, and seldom reveal that expelling gang members helps reduce crime in Los Angeles and other cities.

Illegal Mexican immigrants are heavily involved in the production and distribution of methamphetamine. But in a February 2002 Web report by Timothy Egan, headlined “Meth Building Its Hell’s Kitchen in Rural America,” the role of illegals is not mentioned. A report on California’s “Emerald Triangle,” consisting of Humboldt, Trinity and Mendocino counties, mentioned only “Mexican nationals.”

One of the strangest treatments of the illegal immigrant gang/ drug nexus came from Tim Golden in a 2002 piece headlined “Mexican Drug Dealers Turning US Towns into Major Depots,”
which focused on small towns in Georgia where thousands of “Mexican immigrants” have flocked to the mills. “The same pipeline of immigration and trade has been exploited by Mexican drug dealers,” Golden reported, adding that they have emerged as major wholesalers throughout the country. He noted that the number of Mexicans in federal prison on drug charges doubled from 1994 to 2000, but did not say what percentage of them were illegal.

There are many other types of crime where the perpetrators’ status goes unreported. In 2003, for example, a Long Island commuter was stabbed in front of his house after walking home from the railroad station. When five illegal immigrants were arraigned five months later, Patrick Healy made no mention of their status in the
Times,
though he did report that police believed “some of the defendants were gang members.” In fact, they were MS-13. Healy quoted a sister of one of the men giving the oldest cliché in criminal justice, “He must have been with the wrong people at the wrong time,” but failed to note something that the
New York Post
reported: the defendants were laughing while being booked.

The
Times
showed its protective instincts toward illegals in its coverage of a 2005 murder case in New City, a Rockland County suburb of New York. Douglas Herrera, a 39-year-old Guatemalan who had overstayed a six-month visa issued in 2001, was left to clean up after a landscaping job. He beat, raped and strangled the woman of the house, then stole her husband’s clothes and her cell phone, using it to call her friends and relatives to taunt them and boast about the rape. The story was certainly newsworthy. The perpetrator was using a fake name with fake documents, at a time when New York’s governor, Eliot Spitzer, had proposed giving driver’s licenses to illegals, and when identity theft was very much on the media’s radar screen. The case also put a spotlight on the sanctuary policies that had prevented the police from detaining the man in previous traffic violations and had allowed him to remain free after being charged in 2002 with misdemeanor assault on his girlfriend and never showing up for court—a deportable offense given his status.

The
Times,
however, shunted the story into the Metro section and omitted the perpetrator’s illegal status, even though it was
in the AP “brief” that the paper used on one day. (When I called the
Times
to ask about this, I could not get a straight answer.) And instead of using the case as a peg for a wider examination of illegal alien crime in suburbs, or answering the question of how someone using a fake name can get released from jail, it produced a smarmy report focused on how other Latino landscapers feared a backlash that would make it harder for them to get work. Critics charged that if the races were reversed and some “nativist” had done this to an immigrant, the
Times
would have been all over the story. Their criticism gained some traction from the fact that the story of an African immigrant teenage girl who was wrongly detained on suspicion of terrorism and then released was featured on the front page at the same time the gardener’s misdeeds were buried inside.

In 2005, an actress in Greenwich Village was killed by an illegal construction worker after complaining about the noise coming from the apartment below hers. The worker strangled her, then hung her on a shower curtain rod to make it look like a suicide, which investigators saw through quickly. The status of the suspect was reported from day one by the New York tabloids, but the
Times
took a few days to get around to it.

So-called “sanctuary laws,” which essentially bar local law enforcement officials from inquiring into immigration status, have caused legal and judicial chaos in cities like New York, New Haven, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Yet a database search turns up only one piece by the
Times
that candidly discussed how these laws obstruct the fight against crime. An April 2005 report by Charlie LeDuff, “Police Say Immigrant Policy Is Hindrance,” gave a good account of frustration among Los Angeles police over not being able to pick up known illegal criminals who had snuck back into the country until they were caught for a felony. But LeDuff also gave a lot of space to those wringing their hands about ethnic profiling. He missed or ignored the substantial penalties that police officers face if they do inquire into a criminal suspect’s immigration status. He also did not mention the history of the sanctuary law, known in Los Angeles as Special Order 40, and how in the late 1990s there was an effort to roll it back, but
the ethnic lobby put such intense pressure on politicians that it became even more sacrosanct.

Sanctuary policies were a heated issue during the 2008 Republican presidential primaries, but according to the
Times
columnist Gail Collins, “sanctuary city” was just “a right-wing buzzword aimed at freaking out red state voters.” With remarkable glibness, Collins joked:

The
Times
has low-balled other issues involved in illegal immigration, such as the diseases that are brought across the border, like tuberculosis. The housing that illegals live in is often overcrowded and dangerous, which is partly the fault of unscrupulous landlords, often immigrants themselves. In early 2009, overcrowding led to the deaths of four New York City firemen, trapped in a burning apartment that had been illegally subdivided. “Partitioned Apartments Are Risky but Common in New York,” read the anodyne February 2002 headline over a blasé report by Manny Fernandez. Even on the issue of illegal sidewalk sales of counterfeit goods, the paper is in denial. One 2006 piece on counterfeiting in the garment district by Nicholas Confessore, a cub reporter, said the vendors were African Americans, though almost any New Yorker could tell you that the majority of vendors selling knock-offs are African illegals.

Births to foreign-born women in the United States are at their highest rate ever, nearly one in four. As the
Christian Science
Monitor
has written, some experts worry that the traditional rapid assimilation of immigrants maybe breaking down, with potentially troublesome consequences. Muslim immigration has brought its own set of concerns for assimilation to American norms. Based on a study of immigrants from the Middle East, Steven Camarota, from the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, told the
Monitor
he estimates that there are some 600,000 children of Muslim immigrants in the United States. “These facts, set in the context of new twists in Islamic terrorism, are raising questions about how well the children of Muslim immigrants are being assimilated,” the
Monitor
declared, “feeding a growing sense of concern among Americans about immigration, and about Muslim immigrants in particular.”

But the
Times
tends to see assimilation as something that steals cultural identity and leaves immigrants floating randomly in the melting pot. An editorial about the surging Latino population says, with apparent satisfaction, that changes in communications and business “guarantee that assimilation won’t replace heritage.” A review by Michiko Kakutani of a book about assimilation, among other topics, by the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington was condescendingly headlined “An Identity Crisis for Norman Rockwell America.”