Tuesday’s New York Times tried to surround the story of illegal immigrants with a full-page spread, “The Reality of Illegal Immigrants Who Live in the United States,” from reporters Vivian Yee, Kenan Davis, and Jugal Patel.
The story was actually more balanced than the paper’s usual offerings on the subject (starting with that striking use of “Illegal” in the headline). Most of the paper’s coverage of immigrants leans heavily toward sympathy for illegals plight “in the shadows,” with a tacit call for amnesty. But the story still included a striking, perhaps unintended admission of labeling bias.
The Times actually admitted “undocumented” was a euphemism for “illegal,” even while the NYT uses it all the time, even making a shift in its style in 2013 to discourage the use of “illegal.”
There are 11 million of them, the best estimates say, laboring in American fields, atop half-built towers and in restaurant kitchens, and swelling American classrooms, detention centers and immigration courts.
In the public’s mind, the undocumented -- the people living here without permission from the American government -- are Hispanic, mostly Mexican and crossed the southwestern border in secret.
In the eyes of their advocates, they are families and workers, taking the jobs nobody else wants, staying out of trouble, here only to earn their way to better, safer lives for themselves and their children.
At the White House, they are pariahs, criminals who menace American neighborhoods, take American jobs, sap American resources and exploit American generosity: They are people who should be, and will be, expelled.
Illegal immigrants can be many of these things, and more. Eleven million allows for considerable range, crosshatched with contradictions.
There may be no more powerful symbol of how fixedly Americans associate illegal immigration with Mexico than the wall President Trump has proposed building along the southern border. But many of the unauthorized are not Mexican; almost a quarter are not even Hispanic.
After Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, the largest number of unauthorized immigrants comes from China (an estimated 268,000), where deportations run aground on a less literal wall: China is one of 23 countries that do not cooperate with deportations. (The Trump administration has pledged to pressure all 23 into doing so.)
The story, perhaps purposely described illegals using three different adjectives:
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Geography and demography are only two ways to anatomize these 11 million. Circumstance offers another: As he seeks to tighten law enforcement’s grip on unauthorized immigrants, Mr. Trump will grapple with a population of people who arrived in several ways and for myriad reasons, each slice presenting its own challenges.
To hear many liberals and immigrant advocates tell it, most undocumented immigrants are productive, law-abiding members of society, deeply rooted in communities all over the country, working hard, living quietly, paying taxes and raising families.
Statistics show that many of the undocumented fit this profile. About 60 percent of the unauthorized population has been here for at least a decade, according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
A third of undocumented immigrants 15 and older lives with at least one child who is a United States citizen by birth. Slightly more than 30 percent own homes. Only a tiny fraction has been convicted of felonies or serious misdemeanors.
This obvious point doesn't get nearly enough attention in the New York Times (or elsewhere):
Of course, as the Trump administration has emphasized, merely being here without authorization is a violation of the law.
Then came the odd tacit omission of labeling bias.
Even the wording of the issue is revealing: conservatives favor the term "illegal immigrants," which hardliners often truncate to "illegals"; immigrant advocates prefer "undocumented immigrants," a phrasing that they say prods the conversation back toward the humans in question, but that also has a whiff of euphemism. "Unauthorized" often shows up as a neutral alternative.
Newsbusters has long documented how the Times has long made clear its preference for the liberal-preferred “euphemism” of “undocumented” over the harsh conservative term “illegal immigrants” or (gasp!) “illegals.”
