Se han creado justificaciones para una guerra en la discusión sobre inmigración, no solo por parte de los consabidos programas de opinión caracterizados por el odio sino por la gran prensa en general.
Immigration has become a wedge issue fragmenting the American society and immersing it in widespread hysteria and outbursts of murderous violence.
Mainstream Media has provided the necessary backdrop. It harangues the crowds, just as it effectively did in 2002 drumming up a casus-belli for a war based on fictitious WMD –the non-existent “weapons of mass destruction”.
Politicians on both sides of the isle have happily embraced today’s casus belli on immigration crying wolf with effective sound bites such as: “immigrant invasion” and “criminal illegal aliens”.
Against this backdrop enters the infamous S.B. 1070 Arizona law, which will become effective on July 29. Its harshness is not aimed at actual human traffickers or “coyotes” but to its victims and even at good Samaritans as acknowledged in the complaint submitted by the Department of Justice against the Arizona law.
President Obama is demonized for even addressing the issue; when the reality is his administration gathers kudos implementing -not creating- the most comprehensive and vast attempt to purge immigrants in the whole of American history.
A generation of baby boomers (1946-1964) borne out of European immigrants –the largest immigrant wave in proportion to the American population in history- is incapable of understanding or even sympathizing with the travails of immigrants, concluded the Brookings Institution. This is the generation that owns and operates mainstream media.
Mainstream media embodied by giant networks such as CNN, public media such as NPR, even science journals like National Geographic have all contributed to creating a negative hype on the immigration issue.
CNN hosted over 4 years of Lou Dobbs daily hateful rants under the guise of “advocacy journalism”; NPR accepted funding from the controversial federal government program E-Verify purportedly aimed at finding and eliminating “illegal immigrants” from the workforce, and National Geographic entertains its audience with a truculent series on immigration named “Border Wars” portraying a caricatured war between our Border Patrol cowboys and “them” Indians -today’s immigrants.
The anti-immigrant frenzy continues, and now even our efforts to denounce profoundly un-American and unconstitutional abuses are regarded with suspicion, it is time to sober up before we further sully our conscience as a nation.
