immigration reform

The Myth About Myth Busting

Alan Jenkins — Mon, 02 May 2011 23:44:12 -0400

So I’m trying to convince my wife that we should raise chickens in our back yard—it’s a suburban Green Acres thing, you might not understand. She has been, shall we say, cool to the idea, despite my promises of fresh eggs, cute chicks, and benefits to the environment.

Fortunately, I found and ordered online a copy of Backyard Poultry magazine. Seriously. And the cover story? “Seven Myths Surrounding Urban Chickens.” Technically, of course, my chickens would be sub-urban. But it still seemed like a stroke of luck.

Now, as a communications professional, I know there’s literally a ton of social science research showing that myth busting—identifying and factually debunking commonly held myths and misinformation—is worse than ineffective; it actually deepens audiences’ belief in the lie. It reinforces your opponent’s frame. And it exposes the myth to new audiences who may not have heard it before.

But surely those lessons wouldn’t apply to communications with my spouse, a well-educated and thoughtful person who (presumably) trusts my veracity, if not my judgment or animal husbandry skills. So I began reading the list of myths in preparation for our conversation:

Myth #1: Chickens carry diseases communicable to humans.
Myth #2: Chickens are too noisy.
Myth #3: Chickens cause waste and odor.
Myth #4: Chickens attract predators, pests and rodents.
Myth #5: Property values will decrease.
Myth #6: Coops are ugly.
Myth #7: What will the neighbors think?

The article painstakingly debunked each myth, explaining, for example, that a forty-pound dog creates more solid waste than 10 chickens.

By the time I finished reading, I had learned at least one thing: I will not be getting any chickens. Communicable diseases? I hadn’t even thought about that. A forty-pound dog? That’s a lot of chicken poop. Not only would the article not convince my wife, it had turned even me off to the idea—despite the cogent arguments that these are myths, not facts.

So, once again, myth busting not only doesn’t work, it undermines our arguments. Yet progressives continue to do it. A search of OurFuture.org yields dozens of mythbusting articles, on topics from job creation to Social Security to immigration to the role of government. (And, okay, I have one in there on the mortgage meltdown). Same with progressive blogs ThinkProgress and HuffingtonPost.

So if myth busting doesn’t work, what does? Telling our affirmative story, framed on our terms, in ways that overwhelm the myths without repeating them or sharing them with new audiences. We can document the many contributions of immigrants, including the payroll, Social Security, and other taxes they pay, without repeating the myth that, well, you know. We can tell the story of government’s crucial role in our lives without reinforcing the conservative “big government” frame. And we can articulate a future for Social Security consistent with its actual resources and timeline.

And, of course, we can explain that chickens are quiet, sweet-smelling creatures that improve property values, live in beautiful coops, and carry only diseases that human can’t catch.

We need not, should not, stay silent in the face of lies, myths, or misinformation. But we should tell our story, not that of our opponents. Anything less would be…chicken.

Repealing the 14th Amendment is Wrong for America

Alan Jenkins — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 06:55:08 -0400

For well over a century, children born on American soil have been American citizens. Changing that guarantee is not a new idea, but Arizona Senator Jon Kyl’s proposed hearings on the subject have given it new life. A close look at the history and purpose of the citizenship provision makes clear why changing it would harm us all.

Marching for America

Alan Jenkins — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 06:26:03 -0400

Last Sunday, as the health care bill was being debated, 200,000 Americans gathered on the National Mall to urge action on another national priority: fixing our broken immigration system.

Speakers included civil rights leaders like Ben Jealous of the NAACP, faith leaders like Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles, and labor leaders like Andy Stern of SEIU. The dais was filled with leaders from the House and Senate. And the event drew everyday people—families, workers, congregants, and community leaders—from around the country.

They came together to call for workable solutions that uphold our nation’s values and move us forward together. They seek commonsense reform creating a process for undocumented immigrants who register with the government, pay taxes, pass a criminal background check, and learn English to become legal residents and, eventually, citizens. The vast majority of Americans, across the political spectrum, support that agenda.

And they came because immigration reform is the right thing to do, for America and everyone in it. Our country is founded on the idea that we all hold basic human rights, and that it's wrong for any group to be exploited or mistreated. Our current system facilitates the exploitation of workers and the denial of due process. It must be fixed to prohibit mistreatment of immigrants or anyone else, whether it's hate crimes, racial profiling, or exploitation by unscrupulous employers.

As the speeches made clear, fixing our broken immigration system also goes to the anger that so many Americans feel toward corporate greed. One reason that the system is broken is that unscrupulous big businesses like cheap labor that they can control. We need a system that protects workers from exploitation and allows us to all rise together. What we don't need is those with an eye only on greed and profit dictating how the immigration system should work.

The marchers’ efforts have already born some fruit. Ahead of the march, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) outlined a much-needed framework for comprehensive immigration reform legislation. While not perfect, the framework includes crucial elements. And its bipartisan sponsorship is a welcome departure from the partisan rancor on display in the health care debate.

With health care largely out of the way, it’s time to turn to immigration reform. Doing so should not compete with job creation and fixing the economy, but support it. It should lift wages, increase tax revenues, and move us forward as one nation.

Obama Immigration Policy: Record Arrests

Eric Lotke — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 07:55:01 -0400

New data just came in from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. In the first nine months of fiscal year 2009 the U.S. government reported 67,994 new immigration prosecutions, continuing and accelerating the surge from the Bush years. If this activity continues at the same pace, the annual total of prosecutions will be 90,659 for this fiscal year, up 14.1 percent from last year.

Everyone agrees there is an immigration problem in America. But accelerating arrests doesn’t look much like a solution. We’re still waiting for change.

Reality Check: Immigrants and Health Care

Immigration Policy Center — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:18:50 -0400

Washington D.C. - As the current debate on health care rages in town halls across the nation, immigration is being used as a way to jam a stick into the wheels of impending reform. Some are scapegoating immigrants as a way to thwart progress on the issue and are arguing that even legal immigrants be restricted from our health system. Linking these two issues does nothing to advance necessary reforms to either health care or immigration. The U.S. can do both, but public debate and discussion must be based on facts, not myths and misinformation.

The U.S. is not spending "too much" on health care for immigrants.
• A July 2009 article in the American Journal of Public Health found that insured immigrants had much lower medical expenses than insured U.S.-born citizens. Insured immigrants' per-person medical expenditures were 1/2 to 2/3 less than the U.S.-born with similar characteristics.
• Recent immigrants constituted 5% of the nonelderly adult population, but were responsible for 2% of adults' total health care costs, making their share disproportionately low.

The vast majority of people in America who don't have health insurance are U.S. citizens.
• The majority of people who do not have insurance are U.S. citizens. Noncitizens comprise a relatively small portion of the uninsured population. Four out of five people in America who have no insurance are U.S. citizens. U.S. citizens make up the majority of the uninsured (78%), while legal and undocumented immigrants account for 22% of the nonelderly uninsured.
• Furthermore, U.S. citizens account for most of the growth in the number of uninsured individuals between 2000 and 2006. Citizens made up approximately 80% of the growth in the number of uninsured persons in America, while noncitizens accounted for approximately 20% of the growth.
• The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research found that in 2005 undocumented immigrants made up only a small share of California's uninsured population. Nearly four in five of California's uninsured adults and children were citizens and legal immigrants.

Contrary to popular belief, noncitizens are significantly less likely to use emergency room services than U.S. citizens.
• According to the non-partisan Kaiser Commission, noncitizens have poorer access to care and receive less primary health care than citizens, but they are less likely than citizens to use the emergency room. In 2006, 20% of U.S.-citizen adults and 22% of U.S.-citizen children had visited the emergency room within the past year. In contrast, 13% of noncitizen adults and 12% of noncitizen children had used emergency room care. Despite the myths, immigrants use less health care, including less emergency room care, compared to U.S. citizens.
• A 2006 study published in Health Affairs found that communities with high rates of emergency room usage tend to have relatively small noncitizen populations. Cities with large immigrant populations such as Miami-Dade County, Florida and Phoenix, Arizona have much lower rates of emergency room use than areas with small immigrant populations such as Cleveland.

For more information on immigrants and health care, see:

• IPC Fact Sheet: Sharing the Costs, Sharing the Benefits: Inclusion is the Best Medicine
• IPC Blog Post: Including Immigrants in Health Care Reform Makes Economic Sense

Real Immigration Reform Waits

Armand Biroonak — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:45:16 -0400

Yesterday the Obama administration announced plans to change the federal government’s detention policy of undocumented immigrants. Although a step in the right direction, recent policies from the White House and the Hill still do not go far enough, leaving out comprehensive immigration reform.

To be sure, Obama’s announced plan is an improvement, it will strengthen oversight, end the most rigid practices and centralize detention. Long criticized by civil rights and immigrant advocacy groups, federal detention the past few years has resulted in over 400,000 immigrants held annually in prisons and jails scattered across the country with little transparency. From a failure to provide adequate medical treatment, clothing and food, to the lack of access to lawyers, neglect and abuse caused the deaths of dozens of innocent individuals in custody.

But recent legislation only continue this troubled policy of detention and deportation, instead of providing a pathway to citizenship for the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. The Obama plan still maintains detention. A Senate bill last month makes the voluntary ‘e-verify’ system permanent, allowing for employers to check the status of workers. While last week 88 conservative Democrats and Republicans in the House introduced an enforcement-only immigration bill.

And conservative right-wing groups are even injecting nativist rhetoric and anti-immigrant scare tactics into the health care reform debate.

Rep. Jeff Akin (R-MO) went so far as to falsely claim:

“If before we had trouble with people coming here illegally, if we give them free health insurance and health coverage that’s going to make it more attractive for them to come. So if you don’t like illegal immigration, then you’re not going to like this bill either…”

The truth is that providing a pathway to citizenship is the right approach to immigration, not to mention the most humane. Studies have shown that legalization of immigrants is a net benefit to our economy, even part of the answer to health care reform and the Baby Boomer crisis. All indications however point to reform legislation— good or bad— up for a vote by early next year, leaving millions to wait much longer in the shadows of our society or behind bars.

The Bloody Truth Behind Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric

Sally Kohn — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:16:06 -0400

A week after a white supremacist attacked the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and on the day that three teenagers are being sentenced in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, for brutally beating and killing a Mexican immigrant, it’s time we confront the fact that behind violently anti-immigrant and supremacist rhetoric is a real urge and a real encouragement for actual violence.

On May 30, 2009, a group of armed men and women killed 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father in Arivaca, AZ. The vigilantes were Minutemen, members of a “civilian defense corps” that polices the US-Mexico border for undocumented immigrants. When Jason Bush, 34, Shawna Forde, 41, and Albert Gaxiola, 42, allegedly busted down the front door of the Flores home and murdered Raul Junior Flores and his daughter and seriously injured Flores’ wife, the armed gang was supposedly looking for drugs and cash to fund their anti-immigrant organization.
Shawna Forde was the Executive Director of Minuteman American Defense (M.A.D.) and a spokesperson for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), often touted as a “mainstream” voice opposing immigration. But if Forde was indeed involved, the bloody acts in Arivaca reveal the true hatred and contempt behind anti-immigrant organizations in our country. Many well-meaning, average Americans who have understandable concerns about our economy and how they’re going to support their families have been convinced that anti-immigrant organizations are on their side and feel their pain. But the reality is, organizations like the Minutemen and FAIR are only co-opting our economic insecurity (an insecurity that’s actually shared by immigrants and citizens alike) to mask their real agenda, motivated purely by hatred for those who are different.

It was the same thing in Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler started by talking about how Jews were threatening the German economy and should all be expelled from the country. And then he killed six million.

Are we really so naïve as a nation to think that the anti-immigrant fervor, from Lou Dobbs to the Minutemen, is anything about our economy or our well-being or our way of life? After all, our nation was built by immigrants, our strongest economic times in recent years have been driven by high rates of immigration and even now, our economy actively lures low-wage worker from across the border to get back on firm footing. Do we really think we’d be reacting as negatively if the immigrants coming here had light skin and spoke French?

Jason Bush, one of the other Minutemen charged in the Arizona murder, was charged in another slaying in 1997 in Washington State. He allegedly bragged to a police informant about “killing a Mexican.” The man Bush killed was a 29-year-old homeless man who had been sleeping under a blanket near a parking lot when Bush stabbed him several times with a knife.

Regarding the Arizona murders, the Minutemen American Defense group has placed the following statement on its website:

MAD does not endorse or condone any events that are outside of the normal boundaries of any normal private citizen who is concerned about the current conditions of the opened border condition and we do work totally within the boundaries and with the total cooperation and knowledge of all appropriate Law enforcement agencies in our areas of operation.

While revealing how ironic it is that groups like M.A.D. criticize new immigrants for not speaking English, the statement does anything but condemn violence against immigrants. It’s worth noting here that Forde and her gang allegedly entered the Flores home wearing law enforcement attire. Groups like the Minutemen are pretending to uphold laws that they flagrantly violate. Who are the real law breakers? Immigrants who come to the United States without legal permission but every single economic invitation, to work for companies that actively recruit them in order to support their desperate families back home? Or the vigilantes who prowl our southern border with assault rifles and camouflage and raid innocent families’ homes and slaughter 9-year-old children?

“This was a planned home invasion where the plan was to kill all the people inside this trailer so there would be no witnesses,” said Sheriff Clarence Dupnik of Pima County, Arizona. “To just kill a 9-year-old girl because she might be a potential witness to me is just one of the most despicable acts that I have heard of.”

I actually feel badly for Shawna Forde. She was fed a load of crap about how her economic troubles and sense that the 21st century was passing her by were the fault not of something vague like the public education system or American trade policies or Reaganomics but something specific, something dark-skinned, something that fit perfectly into the us-versus-them scary story that readily embraces misplaced blame: immigrants. Never mind that we were all in the same boat, sinking fast, immigrants and citizens alike --- and never mind that shaking her fist at foreigners and patrolling the US-Mexico border was distracting Shawna from taking action that would have brought about real change, like making our economy more democratic, changing tax policy to help working families, easing the burden of health care costs and gas. No, Shawna believed the hate mongerers on CNN and the internet and stuck to her guns. Literally. But if the allegations against her are true, Shawna can really only be blamed for taking to extremes the garbage that so many Americans believe is true, the lies we swallow to make the bigger pill of America’s real, shared problems seemingly dissolve but in truth get stuck in our collective throat as we’re looking the other way.

The alleged acts of Shawna Forde and her gang are inhumane. Our outdated immigration policies are inhumane. We can and must reform our immigration laws to make America work better for all of us, immigrants and citizens alike. That is the only pro-America side of this debate. Everything else must be unmasked for what it is — a façade for an anti-immigrant bloodbath. On which side will you stand?

The Politics of Immigration

Isaiah J. Poole — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:40:32 -0400

Gabe Gonzalez of the Center for Community Change leads a panel discussion on how progressives can forge common ground on an immigration reform strategy. The panel includes Angelica Salas of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, Ali Noorani of the National Immigration Forum, former Labor secretary Ray Marshall and Eliseo Medina of the Service Employees International Union.

Detention Retention

Isaiah J. Poole — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:12:49 -0400

Home Again?

OurFuture.org Staff — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:47:48 -0400