They can’t handle the truth.
They can’t handle the truth.
T he media are on the case.
The New York Times just published a report headlined “In JD Vance’s Backyard, Conspiracy Theories About Migrants and Voting Abound.”
A new, exhaustive Washington Post report finds, as the headline puts it, “Republicans flood TV with misleading ads about immigration, border.”
Meanwhile, the press has deemed a Trump claim about immigrants and jobs “debunked.”
What all of this represents is not so much fact-checking by the press as narrative-policing — certain facts and opinions are deemed false or conspiracy theories based merely on their political inconvenience.
In the Times story about the “conspiracy theories,” the paper takes aim at the idea that “Democrats are bringing undocumented immigrants into the country to vote for their party.”
According to the report, this notion “strains even the imagination, envisioning Democrats in Washington circumventing border rules, officials and infrastructure to allow undocumented immigrants into the country, help them settle and then cast ballots, legally or not.”
Of course, the first three-quarters of that sentence, rather than straining the imagination, accurately describes what has been happening every day at the border under the Biden administration.
The only contestable part is the final bit about immigrants casting ballots, although the Times notes immediately afterward: “More than a dozen cities and towns, mostly in deep-blue areas, allow foreign nationals to vote in local elections regardless of their immigration status, which state and local leaders say is warranted because unauthorized immigrants pay taxes at levels comparable to those of citizens and strengthen their economies.”
Now, these jurisdictions account for a relatively small proportion of illegal immigrants, and we’re talking local, not federal, elections. But it’s surely relevant here — if never mentioned by the Times — that Democrats favor sweeping amnesty proposals that would make illegal immigrants into citizens with the right to vote.
So the contention that illegal immigrant voters are stealing Trump’s rightful victories from him, a claim Trump himself has made, is indeed insane. It is completely truthful, though, to say that Democrats have opened the floodgates to illegal immigrants to whom they want to grant the right to vote.
Do they support these polices out of sheer humanitarianism? There’s no doubt that the open-borders policy is, in some large part, driven by a moral view that borders are illegitimate and immigration status a mere matter of book-keeping. Still, the Left has been quite open about the fact that it views demographic change as working in its electoral favor.
To take just one example, in 2013, the left-wing Center for American Progress issued a report that argued, “Supporting real immigration reform that contains a pathway to citizenship for our nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants is the only way to maintain electoral strength in the future.”
Suffice it to say that if Democrats believed that poorly assimilated, low-skilled immigrants were a potential electoral boon to Republicans, they wouldn’t be as enthusiastic about bringing them into the country and giving them the right to vote. But the Times would probably consider this observation a conspiracy theory.
For its part, the Washington Post complains about the content and tenor of GOP ads on immigration.
According to the Post, “Taken as a whole, the ads convey an unrealistic portrait of the border as being overrun and inaccurately characterize immigrants generally as a threat, of which there is little evidence.”
By any measure, given the historic influx over the past three years, the border has been “overrun.” Whether or not the flow represents a threat is a subjective judgment, but given the costs and the associated disorder and criminality, it’s obviously reasonable to call it one.
The Post relates, “Dozens of ads criticize the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the border, while showing chaotic scenes that were filmed in 2018 under the Trump administration.”
This is a pettifogging criticism. How relevant is it, ultimately, that the B-roll isn’t right? It is certainly sloppy tradecraft, but are we supposed to believe that things actually look much more orderly now than they did under Trump?
The Post report continues, “Multiple ads show the same scene of migrants running at the border, paired with text on screen that gives the viewer a false impression that migrants are flooding unchecked into the United States.”
A false impression? What would it take to convince the Post that migrants are flooding into the country? The key modifier here may be “unchecked,” since so often migrants surrender to immigration authorities to get processed into the country rather than simply running away (although that happens, too).
Indeed, that is the Post’s problem with the video of migrants running: “In the unedited video, Border Patrol agents had just instructed migrants in Lukeville, Ariz., whom they were taking to Border Patrol stations, to ‘start walking to the first camp,’ according to a reporter who posted a minute-long video of the scene on X in December and spoke to The Post.”
Look for yourself.
This is not a tableau of an orderly border. It is a mass of people who have come on the assumption that they will get in and indeed, by all appearances, are on the verge of entering the country courtesy of an accommodating Biden administration.
This is the reporter’s tweet that accompanied the video, by the way:
AZ: Border Patrol agents tell a group of roughly 300 migrants to start walking to the first camp as transport is hard to get out to this spot at the wall in Lukeville — They take off in a mad dash — And I’m in the middle of it all.
The Tucson Sector which is where we are had nearly 3k migrant encounters yesterday according to CBP sources.
Clearly, the video justifies alarm about the state of the border, and it belongs in ads ringing the alarm, no matter how the Washington Post wants to spin it.
The report also takes umbrage at an ad boosting John Curtis in Utah’s Republican Senate primary. The Post quotes the ad: “Young women sold into prostitution, terrorists, and illegal immigrants invading our country.” Then, the report adds, ominously, “The Post reached out to a representative at Conservative Values for Utah for comment and did not get a response.”
Since it is a fact that terrorists have been part of the flow, it is indisputably true to say that “terrorists and illegal immigrants are invading our country,” and it is also truthful that women are being sex-trafficked across the border.
So what’s the Post’s problem with the ad? Perhaps the word “invading”? That’s a subjective judgment. It’s a pungent word, but even Al Sharpton has used it.
Then, there’s been the pile-on regarding Trump’s recent statement at a press briefing that almost all of the recent job creation has gone to the foreign-born.
Trump said, “Virtually 100 percent of the net job creation in the last year has gotten to migrants,” adding, “In fact, I’ve heard that substantially more than — uh, beyond, actually beyond the number of 100 percent.”
This was met with widespread derision. As the subtitle of a MSNBC piece had it, “No, immigrants haven’t accounted for ‘virtually 100 percent’ of job creation, but Trump’s latest mathematical invention shows how he’s relying on dark fantasies to stoke fear and division.”
Newsweek headlined its item, “Trump Argues Migrants are Stealing Jobs, Experts and Data Disagree.”
According to Mediaite, “Besides the fact that [it’s] objectively not accurate that ‘virtually 100%’ of jobs went to migrants, it is not mathematically possible for more than 100% of the total jobs created to go to any category of people.”
Now, Trump should have said the “foreign-born,” a much broader category of people, including people who might now be citizens, not “migrants.” But for all the high dudgeon directed at it, the basic claim is correct.
Again, you can look up the numbers at BLS table 7a yourself and find that a large share of jobs since the pandemic have gone to the foreign-born. The exact percentage fluctuates depending on the month and the comparison point prior to the pandemic, but the number of immigrants working has grown, while the number for the native-born has lagged.
This is not complicated. It’s simply a fact. As for the number being higher than 100 percent, Trump’s enemies seem to think the mathematical concept of “more than 100 percent” doesn’t exist, but if the number of immigrants working is going up and the number for the native-born declines, you indeed get more than 100 percent.
Steve Goldstein of MarketWatch tried to explain it:
Data: https://t.co/QKGytrtkWr
In spreadsheet form pic.twitter.com/ojnEdDEwBj
— Steve Goldstein (@MKTWgoldstein) August 16, 2024
The BLS numbers, which involve numerous technicalities too arcane to address here, are open to interpretation. You can consider them benign, or see in them another indication of a disturbing trend in the labor-force participation rate of men without bachelor’s degrees. But you can’t say they are false, especially with a snotty, superior tone.
Not that that is stopping anyone. On immigration, like so many other issues, it’s not truth or falsity that matters, but compliance with an elite-enforced narrative.