Wednesday, February 22, 2017

"The Myth Of The U.S. Immigration Crisis"

This is pretty interesting:
Illegal immigration to the U.S. ended a decade ago and, according to the Pew Research Center, has been zero or negative since its peak in 2007
Or anyway, I thought it was at first... The assertion above would be great....but...30 seconds of Googling showed that it apparently isn't true.  Wikipedia (lol...I know...) says that in 2015 there were about 1,200,000 new illegal immigrants in the country. What the author seems to be saying is that enough are leaving the country to keep the number fairly steady. That--if true--is important. But it's dishonest to put it the way he puts it. 
   It doesn't take much reading around to see that the right is constantly trying to pump up the number of illegals and the left is constantly trying to minimize it. The dishonesty, it is so tedious.
   So, anyway, I got all excited by the Bloomberg View piece, but then just got pissed off.
   And another thing: the (apparently intentional) conflation of immigrant with illegal immigrant pervades that piece. This is far from a mere semantic gripe. By failing to mind this very simple and important distinction, the author finds himself needing to explain things that need no explaining--e.g. how it could be that Trump benefited from "anti-immigration" sentiment though Americans are generally very pro-immigrant. Gosh, what a puzzler...

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home