The way most media cover immigration ahead of the midterm elections tells you everything you need to know.
When a president wants to protect illegal immigrants for political reasons in an election year, the left-wing media call that hope and change. Conversely, when a president wants to protect Americans from illegal immigration, that’s “lies” and “fear.”
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When they’re not busying themselves trying to find new ways to make President Trump and Republicans responsible for mass shootings, cable news and the national newspapers are round-the-clock accusing the White House of “fear-mongering” and, as CNN’s Anderson Cooper said, of “using the White House just for politics” by talking about illegal immigration before next week’s elections.
It’s not that Trump is necessarily lying or that he’s talking about the issue at all. What they mean to say is: We don’t like Trump’s stance on immigration.
It wasn’t a problem in June 2012, in the heat of a presidential election year, when then-President Barack Obama announced from the Rose Garden — you might say he was “using the White House just for politics” — that he was unilaterally exempting 1 million-plus young illegal immigrants from threat of deportation.
In the lead-up to the announcement, the New York Times editorial board called specifically for Obama to take the action.
“There is one important thing Mr. Obama could do right now to give these young people hope: He could use his executive authority to halt deportations of those who would be eligible for the Dream Act,” the paper said on June 3, just 12 days before Obama’s proclamation.
After the new policy was declared, the Times approvingly noted in a new article that the action “clears the way for young illegal immigrants to come out of the shadows, work legally and obtain driver’s licenses and many other documents they have lacked.”
The article admitted that support for Obama “was lagging among Latinos” and that his dictum might aid his “re-election prospects” — but nowhere to be found was the level of current hysteria that Trump faces because he dared notice a horde of Central Americans doggedly making their way to the southern border.
The Associated Press reported just last week that the 7,000-plus people — and it’s true that we don’t know who they are, as they come and go — had been offered assistance by the Mexican government but “the bulk of the migrants were boisterous … in their refusal to accept anything less than safe passage to the U.S. border.”
Now, before they’ve even set foot within 100 feet of the border, they’ve reportedly planned to sue the Trump administration.
This is what Trump has been talking about — or, in the words of the New York Times, what he’s been “fear-mongering” about.
Trump announced this week he would deploy 15,000 military troops to the border in anticipation of the caravan, but because it’s not already at our doorstep, the media are calling any anticipation of it a political stunt, even on Fox News, the supposed state-TV channel.
“The migrants … are more than two months away, if any of them actually come here,” Fox anchor Shepard Smith said on Monday. “But tomorrow is one week before the midterm election, which is what all of this is about. There is no invasion, no one’s coming to get you. There’s nothing at all to worry about.”
Liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote that because the caravan is “still about 1,000 miles from the border,” there is “no emergency, no invasion, no reason to panic.”
Hurricanes in the Caribbean frequently peter out or hit the U.S. coast and cause little or no damage, so maybe this is how the Weather Channel should start reporting on looming storms.
“It’s a Category 5, but there is no threat!”
But what happens when it gets here?
“It’s 300 miles offshore, don’t buy into the fear!”
It’s suddenly cynical for a president to act on immigration before an important election, even as media loved it when Obama did the same thing in 2012.
The only difference is that in 2012, Obama and the media were on the same side.
