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December 27, 2003
 LA
Times’ Hiltzik Wins Second Annual VDARE.COM Worst Immigration Coverage
Award!
By
Joe Guzzardi
“T’was
the night before Christmas when all through the house/
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”
Except for a couple of rats in the
White House. There George W. Bush and his sidekick
Karl Rove were gift-wrapping and
leaking to the Washington Post a great big
ugly Christmas Surprise for America: a massive guest
worker program that will
“match any willing employer with any willing employee.”
Read: “any willing Mexican employee currently
residing in Mexico.”
The White House announced that this
program—still being finalized—would be discussed with
Mexico’s omnipresent Vicente Fox during their summit
meeting in Monterrey in early January.
I wonder: will Bush and Fox seal
America’s fate with a kiss?
Bush hopes to the use his guest
worker program as part of his 2004 campaign
“compassion agenda.”
But where is Bush’s “compassion”
for the nine million
unemployed Americans and nine million more
under-employed?
I believe that Bush has
underestimated America’s coast-to-coast disgust with
incessant pandering to illegal aliens. A year’s worth of
e-mails I’ve received from across the country indicate
that Bush has lost many voters because of his immigration
blindness. I further believe that Bush does not have the
cushion he thinks he does in his re-election bid. Who,
save for Halliburton and its executives, has really
prospered under the Bush administration?
In the summer of 2001, when amnesty
last seemed imminent, we endured a spate of
unprofessional journalism on the subject. And one thing
we can count on from Bush’s upcoming meetings with Fox is
a more of the same.
With that in mind, let’s turn to
today’s topic:
THE
SECOND ANNUAL VDARE.COM AWARD FOR LOUSY IMMIGRATION
REPORTING.
And the 2003 VDARE.COM award for the
worst immigration coverage by a daily newspaper goes
to—the Los Angeles Times!
The Times withstood ferocious
challenges by the usual suspects—its east coast rival
New York Times, the
Washington Post and the
Chicago Tribune, to name but a few.
And the Times also repelled vigorous
attempts to report more unprofessionally by promising
upstarts like the
Salt Lake Tribune, the
Minneapolis Star Tribune and the
Denver Post.
In the end, though, the Los
Angeles Times stands alone. For twelve months, the
LA Times has editorialized, Op-editorialized and
indirectly editorialized through its biased news stories
for driver’s licenses, matricula consular cards, amnesty,
guest worker programs, the Dream Act, and Cal grants—all
on behalf of illegal aliens.
No self-respecting fish would permit
itself to be wrapped in the Los Angeles Times.
Still, the race for the crown went
down to the wire–until December 23, when the Times
published
Pulitzer Prize-winner(!) Michael Hiltzik’s (e-mail
him:
golden.state@latimes.com) column in the business
section titled
“Clearing Out Bad Data on Illegal Immigration.”
Hiltzik’s piece performed the
journalism hat trick: insulting, inaccurate and ignorant.
According to Hiltzik, his intention
is to ferret out
“how big of a drain” illegal immigration is on
the California budget. With a new Proposition 187 on the
horizon, Hiltzik accuses those who favor immigration
reduction of stooping to “contrive their own
statistics to back up their positions.”
Hiltzik takes a pot shot at FAIR’s
Executive Director
Dan Stein even though the Stein quote referenced
contained no “statistics.”
Wrote Hiltzik:
“ ‘California
is being bankrupted by cheap immigrant labor,’ Dan
Stein, executive director of a Washington group called
the
Federation for American Immigration Reform, wrote
this summer in the San Jose Mercury News.”
Stein has a telephone; why didn’t
Hiltzik call him? I’m quite sure Stein would be delighted
to answer any media inquiry about
illegal alien costs.
Who are the people who favor
immigration reduction? Hiltzik is happy to share what
we’re like by quoting—totally out of the blue—a recent
reader e-mail.
Regarding illegal aliens, Hiltzik’s
correspondent recommends:
"Put a
bounty on them. Shoot them as they cross, men, women,
children, who cares?"
Journalists would be hard pressed to
wallow lower in the muck. I have been involved in
immigration reform for 15 years—longer than most—and have
met
concerned people of similar mind from all walks of
life in all corners of the country.
Never, at any time, I have I heard
any statement that even begins to approach the content of
that e-mail.
But the e-mail quotation sets the
tone for what follows—a tedious string of omissions and
half-truths that characterize LA Times immigration
“reporting.”
I will not bore you by detailing
them. Even the most cursory review of Hiltzik’s column
reveals glaring errors.
VDARE.COM’s
Ed Rubenstein was similarly dismayed by Hiltzik’s
failure to grasp the complexities:
“It was
very selective and omitted more than it included. For
example, there is no mention of taxes. As we know, many
if not most illegal aliens work
off the books and therefore pay no taxes. So, even if
they don’t directly receive
social benefits, they use roads and schools for which
citizens pay taxes.
“And
speaking as an economist, I was disappointed that Hiltzik
never mentioned how a continued influx of illegal aliens
depresses wages and displaces
native workers. When ‘on-the books’ workers are laid
off, tax revenue for California declines accordingly and
unemployment insurance costs rise.”
Still, despite the most superficial
possible analysis of illegal alien costs, Hiltzik admits
that Californians ante-up $4.6 billion annually to
subsidize their presence.
The good news is that we can now say
that even the Los Angeles Times, an open-borders
advocate that has few rivals, acknowledges that illegal
immigration costs California taxpayers $4.6 billion a
year.
But Rubenstein’s own, professional,
estimate, based on an extrapolation of National Research
Council findings, is that California’s immigrants receive
an annual net subsidy from the state of nearly $10
billion—or nearly $22 billion if federal and state
subsidies are included.
Hiltzik concludes smugly that:
“As long
as its legal residents continue insisting on both
higher spending and lower taxes, the budget crisis will
stay with us.”
Yes, true enough as far as it goes.
But even the understated $4.6 billion is quite a tidy
sum!
And the lingering question is why
should Californians pay even 46 cents to accommodate
illegal aliens?
The answer is that we shouldn’t.
(For the one bright spot in Los
Angeles Times immigration reporting, see Fred
Dickey’s July 20 2003 Los Angeles Times Magazine
piece titled,
“Undermining American Workers” —which does address
the impact of illegal aliens on wages and taxes.)
Joe Guzzardi [email
him], an instructor in English at the Lodi
Adult School, has been writing a weekly newspaper column
since 1988. This column is exclusive to VDARE.COM. |
