It’s pretty clear that the issue of immigration reform since the big Republican win in the Midterm elections has become a political punching bag with many politicos and pundits making wild swings hoping to score a point. But some of the rhetoric is so wrong that it’s ridiculous. Gotta wonder if the spokesmen are really serious about coming to any agreement at all?
For instance on Wednesday, Fox News’ “The Kelly File"’s host Megyn Kelly let a guest get away with saying that President Reagan had given citizenship to millions of illegals. That would make it seem that President Obama’s merely wanting to waive deportation for and give work permits to the parents of DREAMers (and maybe a few million others) through executive action, is peanuts.
But her statement is completely wrong. In 1986 Congress via an amnesty bill (yes, it was actually called that!) granted what they had been told was around 1 million unauthorized immigrants (turned out to be 3 million) a chance to apply for green cards. Congress did it, not the President. And it was a green card, not citizenship.
In fact, citizenship is never required or given away. Becoming a citizen is a big decision that only an individual immigrant with a green card can make. The sad cold truth is that despite a favorite American myth that maintains that everyone in the world wants to immigrate to the U.S. and become a citizen, the majority of permanent immigrants never do it — including the majority of those who were given amnesty in 1986.
Fox isn’t the only one allowing ridiculous statements to go unchallenged.
On Thursday, at a Brookings panel on voter turnout in the 2014 Midterms, Institute experts let one of their guests – a professor – get away with this comment: “Latinos voted way below their population numbers”. Yes, it’s true that the Latino population is estimated to be some 53 million and fewer than 10 million voted in 2014. So obviously the speaker’s point was that the potential for a huge Latino vote is out there – especially for 2016.
But that is completely disingenuous. The fact is that of the 53 million Latinos living in the U.S. in 2014, less than half are eligible to vote. 10 million voters of 23 million eligible voters is 43 percent – about the national turnout average. And she didn’t mention the rising percentage of Latinos who voted Republican. Later she admitted to me privately: “Oh, good point.”
Then there was Amy Goodman, anchor of the liberal talk show Democracy Now, who spoke Nov 6 at the Woman’s National Democratic Club in Washington DC. With the election barely 48 hours over, she can be forgiven for not talking about why exactly the Democrats suffered such an unexpectedly stunning loss in the Midterms. But not this statement: when talking about minority and Latino ‘immigrant’ voters she said “Millions of voters did not get to vote”. That was due to voter suppression she alluded.
But that leaves out an individual’s willingness to vote. Better said it would seem, and maybe not so insulting as she might think to even minority and Latino voters, is that in the midterm election of 2014, millions of eligible voters CHOSE not to vote.
Contributed by Margaret Sands Orchowski
