The Times and immigration
As people who read this blog know, I don’t like the way the New York Times covers Latin American immigration. I admire the fact that they cover it as much as they do, since it is more or less the biggest story of our lifetime, but my objection is one of narrative.
Basically, when journalists set out to cover a story, I don’t care how objective they think they are, they always have prejudices, and those prejudices most often manifest themselves in the narrative arc of a certain story. This is especially true of feature stories. In a feature story, you have to have a narrative with something of a plot and characters, which provides a nice outlet for prejudicial cliches (e.g. - homeless people are victims, military parents are proud).
My particular problem with the New York Times‘ coverage of Latin American immigration is its chosen narrative - that immigrants to America are harried, shat-upon, victims of fate struggling against the odds in a cruel world. The latest addition to the Times‘ work in this vein is a huge story today that follows three sisters in an immigrant Mexican family.
I don’t have a particular problem with this image of immigrants. But if it’s true for them, it’s also true for any number of struggling American families. So what is the real difference between struggling immigrant families and struggling American families?
You could pick the obvious differences: language, food, religion, family values, legal status. But a striking difference that is little remarked upon is that these immigrant families are suddenly about ten times more prosperous than they were just a few years ago. They are more prosperous because they chose to take a risk and come (in many cases illegally) to a country with a better infrastructure, a better economy, a better legal system, and more opportunities for social mobility. Recent immigrants aren’t coming here to escape a war or a dictator or a famine. They’re coming because, damn it, they want to make $12 an hour like tio Jose.
The upshot of this particular truth is that the social well-being of immigrants is not the most pressing concern at the moment. They put themselves in the situation they’re in, and while I applaud them for their bravery and stick-to-it-ivness, I’m not particularly interested in reading one long anecdotal narrative after another about how hard it is to do what they’re doing. This is something that should be left to novelists.
In the meantime, there are a lot of real and pressing stories that could be covered. What is the state of Latin American entrepreneurship? Are immigrants buying houses? Are they stagnating in destructive social patterns? Is new illegal immigration snatching away opportunities from earlier waves of immigration? What are the causes of this illegal immigration? What about public infrastructure? How has the INS been approaching illegal immigration? What about the prison system? If you want to do an anecdotal story, why not hang out in a small town in Illinois or North Carolina where the Latino population has quadrupled in the space of a decade? How are they dealing with it? What are the new immigrants adding to our economy and society? How much uneducated, poor, skilless labor can our economy and society absorb and convert into educated, middle-class, skilled citizens? Is there a tipping point after which our economy will be overwhelmed? Or is the American capacity for absorption limitless?
There are so many interesting stories that would have meaning for the decisions politicians, policy wonks, and voters will be making in the coming years. Every once in a while the Times’ takes a stab at reporting something meaningful, but they inevitably slip into the same “Latino = victim” narrative.
Considering, however, that this is the biggest story of our lives so far, I’d like to see a little more depth.