Watchdog Journalism Missing from Immigration Debate

By Joe Guzzardi
December 12, 2011

Immigration is one of the hottest topics in the presidential debates. Attention to this critically important subject is long overdue. For years, politicians refused to say anything negative about immigration for fear of losing votes. Once elected, officials turned a blind eye toward immigrants growing numbers. But now that the Census Bureau reported that the decade between 2000 and 2010 saw more immigrants coming to America (13 million) than at any other time in the nation’s history, ignoring immigration is impossible.

Because of their increased mobility, legal and illegal immigrants have spread out across the nation in search of jobs. Sheer numbers have converted every state into a border state. You don’t have to live in California or Arizona to see the impact that immigration has on your community.

But things might have been different.

Imagine for a moment that the mainstream media, one of society’s supposed watchdogs, had maintained it professional standards by reporting the immigration argument from both sides. If journalists had done in depth, fair and balanced, investigative analysis on immigration’s consequences, it’s possible that the federal government, in response to the heightened awareness among its constituents, would have emphasized enforcement instead of pushing for open borders. Anyone who reads a newspaper or watches television has known for years that immigration is only covered only from the positive perspective: hard working immigrants do jobs Americans won’t, immigration adds much needed diversity to the population and so on.

Stories consistently ignore the negatives: school and hospital overcrowding, the fiscal drain and the inability, in too many cases, to assimilate.

Here’s a good example of how the lack of diligent media follow up precipitated a major displacement of American workers.

In 1993, two years after the regulations governing the H-1B non-immigrant worker visa were liberalized, 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl went to Silicon Valley to tape a segment titled “North of the Border.” 60 Minutes has long been considered the quintessential investigative news organization.

In her introduction, Stahl said: “At a time when thousands of American computer programmers are having a tough time finding work, some of America’s biggest companies are hiring cut-rate, foreign programmers to take their jobs.” Wondering out loud how “it could possibly be legal” to “take Americans off the payroll and bring in someone who they’ll pay half or less than half,” Stahl called the H-1B visa “a joke.” As for the provision that foreign-born workers be paid the “prevailing wage,” Stahl confirmed that “it is completely ignored and never enforced.”

Stahl expressed shock that the number of foreign-born computer programmers might be “as high as 100,000.” Two decades later, there are several million who came in on H-1B visas and never went home.

Eager to learn more, Stahl requested interviews with Hewlett-Packard “and everyone else in the industry” without success. When Stahl tracked down HP chairman Lewis Platt at a Washington D.C. conference, he said that he had “no comment” on his company’s extensive reliance on foreign-born workers.

Throughout the broadcast Stahl repeated that “huge loopholes” in immigration law enabled corporations to abuse the H-1B visa.

Stahl’s report could have provided fodder for dozens of stories about displaced American workers, wage abuse, immigration fraud and corporate greed at the expense of gullible immigrants and unemployed U.S. workers. But it didn’t. Instead, the H-1B stories that followed were boilerplate stuff that all tried to make the point that the United States didn’t graduate enough qualified engineers.

A true accounting about the corporate misuse of the H-1B visa would be more compelling than the trite stories so carelessly mass produced.

In too much of today’s journalism, truth is a missing ingredient.

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Joe Guzzardi is a Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Writing Fellow. His columns about immigration and other social issues have been syndicated since 1986. Contact him at [email protected]