One reason a coherent debate about immigration is almost impossible in this country is that the press fails to honestly and accurately report even the most basic facts.
A Saturday Associated Press report on the topic by Nicholas Riccardi exemplifies this consistent failure.
Riccardi's distortions began in the opening paragraph of his early Saturday dispatch:
For years, a movement to limit the number of migrants into the U.S. and end a system that favors family members of legal residents has had to fend off criticism that it's as (sic) a poorly veiled attempt to produce a whiter America.
Huh? Who has actually said that they want "a whiter America," i.e., to increase the percentage of white people in U.S.? This is a straw-man argument the open-borders crowd routinely raises, which isn't surprising given their lack of defensible arguments.
Later, Riccardi incorrectly described the history of the "chain migration" controversy:
Trump has embraced (Jeff) Sessions' cause of trying to end "chain migration," a term opponents have long applied to the family-based system but one that got little attention until the president tweeted it in capital letters as he abruptly demanded its end amid immigration talks in September.
That's nonsense. Anyone who has followed attempts to have a debate about legal and illegal immigration in this country knows that chain migration has been a serious controversy for at least two decades.
In fact, Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin opposed chain migration in 2010:
Durbin, on the Senate floor, declared as a feature the fact that the "DREAM Act" under discussion at the time "would not allow what is known as chain migration,” and that "In fact, DREAM Act students would have very limited ability to sponsor their family members for legal status."
In the past few days, the senator has decided that the term "chain migration" is inherently racist — even though he reportedly used the term himself in the Thursday meeting with President Trump.
Riccardi then mentioned the "diversity lottery," but forced readers to infer that it is anything but "skill-based":
Trump also favors stopping the diversity lottery, a system that reserves visas for people from countries that have relatively few immigrants in the United States. It favors African countries and was part of an immigration deal Trump was negotiating with a group of Democratic and Republican lawmakers Thursday when he made his explosive comments.
As to the "negotiating" which supposedly occurred on Thursday, almost no one is reporting that Trump's "explosive comments" came about because senators tasked with coming up with a viable DACA compromise proposal weren't "negotiating" at all.
The AP's Riccardi failed to report the details of the bad-faith proposal presented by Durbin and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham in that meeting. Friday evening, Laura Ingraham at Fox News did the job Riccardi failed to do:
Transcript:
LAURA INGRAHAM: Well, they pranced up to the White House for the grand unveiling, and they were flummoxed when immigration stalwarts Congressman Bob Goodlatte from Virginia and Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas were already in the room, as was White House policy adviser immigration expert Stephen Miller.
Remember, just a few days earlier when the cameras were rolling, the President said he would not sign any DACA deal without the funding of his wall, and an end to chain migration, and that stupid visa lottery system.
Yet somehow the dynamic duo thought that they could through charm and flattery alone, charm Trump into agreeing to their "solution" that didn't meet the President's baseline. And actually, if you can believe it, their idea increased chain migration.
The President, to their faces, said it was dead on arrival. Good for him.
See, AP, it's not difficult at all to report the truth — if you want to.
Here's one more falsehood supplied by the AP's Riccardi:
Both sides of the immigration debate have long agreed that the U.S. should move toward a more skills-based program.
That's nonsense, and Jennifer Palmieri at the far-left Center for American Progress proved it earlier this week:
... The memo from Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary Clinton’s former top aide and executive vice president for communications and advocacy for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, called on Democrats to make the fight for DACA recipients a “moral imperative” or else risk jeopardizing their chances in 2018.
Oh, and in case anyone is wondering (at this point, no one really should be), site searches at the AP and the New York Times indicate that both outlets have failed to report Palmieri's damning admission that granting citizenship to illegals is primarily about getting more votes for Democrats.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
