Other than "climate change," no issue brings out the New York Times's liberal bias more than illegal immigration. Thursday Times reporter Fernanda Santos piled on the pro-illegal immigrant tropes in her story from Phoenix, "In Arizona, Immigrants Make Plans In Shadows." Santos claims an Arizona law "seeks to push illegal immigrants out of the state by making it hard for them to go about their lives and earn a living." The paper has used that sympathetic description in several purportedly objective news stories about illegal immigrants.
Another beloved Times cliche: "shadows." The Times loves to call up the image of illegal immigrants cowering "in the shadows" -- the phrase has cropped up in several news stories, though it doesn't seem to jive with the massive pro-amnesty street demonstrations put on my immigrant supporters (and the photos of illegals that constantly grace the paper, like the one below).
The rest of Santos's story is similarly by the numbers.
Miguel Guerra has a wife, three children and a house. He has a car, but no driver’s license. He has business cards, but no immigration papers. He got into the habit of keeping his cellphone close when he drives so he can quickly call a cousin, the only legal resident among his relatives in the United States, in case he gets pulled over.
If he does not call again within an hour, he said, the cousin knows to look for him at the county jail.
Mr. Guerra, 36, moved here 13 years ago, before Arizona made illegal immigrants a target, turning once mundane tasks like driving to the grocery into a roll of the dice. Protesting the state’s strict immigration laws “hasn’t changed anything,” he said, so one recent evening he took a more pragmatic approach. He filled out an affidavit designating his cousin to care for his children, his money, his house and everything else he owns should he be arrested.
The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments next week challenging the most controversial sections of an Arizona immigration law, known as SB 1070, which seeks to push illegal immigrants out of the state by making it hard for them to go about their lives and earn a living. Lower courts have prevented many of the most controversial provisions from taking effect, but that has not stopped a chill from seeping into the bones of the state’s immigrants.
“Preparing for the worst is our best defense these days,” Mr. Guerra said.
Here and elsewhere in Maricopa County, where one in three residents is Hispanic, illegal immigrants -- interviewed at car washes, outside dollar stores, in schools and at the offices of a grass-roots organization called Puente, where Mr. Guerra and others worked on their affidavits -- seemed almost indifferent to how the Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of the law. Having lived through years of relentless enforcement of the state’s anti-illegal-immigration measures by the hard-line sheriff, Joe Arpaio, they feel little can make life harder than it already is.
