December 24, 2006

Nina Bernstein/NYT: Immigration enforcement equals fear

Our old favorite Nina Bernstein of the New York Times offers "Immigrants Go From Farms to Jails, and a Climate of Fear Settles In". She spends two screens painting a picture of upstate New York dairy farmers and their illegal alien employees living in a state of fear. The poor dear farmers are afraid one of their enemies is going to drop a dime on them to ICE. The poor oppressed illegal aliens are afraid of being taken away in shackles (if the report had audio, it would be of the sound of cattlecars). She even uses the phrase "harvest of fear" and makes a reference to "The Twilight Zone".

She also mentions - but doesn't explore - the role that political corruption plays in lack of immigration enforcement. Instead, she concentrates on the emotional aspects with the clear intent of promoting immigration "reform".

Here's the first paragraph:

As record-setting enforcement of immigration laws upends old, unspoken arrangements, a new climate of fear is sweeping through the rural communities of western and central New York.

It will take a real reporter - and not just a pro-illegal immigration hack - to explore those "unspoken arrangements" and to follow the money. As for Bernstein, this is all we get:

Now, more aggressive enforcement has disrupted a system of official winks, nods and paperwork that for years protected farmers from "knowingly" hiring the illegal immigrants who make up most of their work force.

If the NYT wants to be a real news sources, they'll dispatch someone else to look into those "winks [and] nods", and not someone who's part of the problem.

And, apparently someone's reading the papers:

Others, including the [New York Farm Bureau], pointed to the unusual intensification of the dairy investigation after [Rodney Brown who together with his wife Debbie are dairy farmers in Clifton Springs] was quoted in a Sept. 11 Associated Press account [presumably "Farmers: Harvest raids are badly timed" by Cara Anna which appears to have been rewritten here].

Others mentioned include Marshall Farms, Cliff DeMay, "a large private labor contractor", and:

Maureen Torrey, an 11th-generation grower and a director of the Federal Reserve Bank's Buffalo branch

Looking into the political corruption side of this issue is left as an exercise for a real news source.

Please write public *at* nytimes.com with your thoughts.

Posted to Immigration at December 24, 2006 01:21 PM

Comments

we all know this game! the so called Dairy farmers are in fact big money people, not some poor guy with 5 cows, the climate of fear will set in soon and not just in upstate NEW YORK, but all over this so-called country, the real climate of fear will be when this nation "if you can call it that", will be when we become a hispanic country. SEE third world. buy guns for life.

Posted by: Fred Dawes at December 24, 2006 06:03 PM