Here’s another newsitorial–this time from Catholic News Service.
It has the startling headline:
In immigration law, distinctions of ‘legal,’ ‘illegal’ fairly recent
Huh? Really? Nobody distinguished between legal and illegal aliens until recently?
How does this headline get justified? Let’s look at the opening of the story:
Here’s a little-understood fact about immigration law: Until well into the 20th century, pretty much anyone who showed up at a port of entry or walked across a border got to stay in the United States.
In other words, one reason so many people today can say "my ancestors followed the law when they came here" is because until fairly recently there was no distinction made about whether someone arrived legally or not. With few exceptions, anyone who got here was admitted.
You’ll note that I’ve put two phrases in blue here and two phrases in red.
The blue phrases are designed by the reporter (Patricia Zapor) to convey the impression that it is a "fact" that "there was no distinction made about whether someone arrived legally or not." That serve to justify the headline of the piece.
But the phrases in red indicate that the blue phrases–and the story as a whole–is creating an inaccurate impression. The reporter knows that there was a distinction between legal and illegal immigration, because she concedes that she says people got legally in "pretty much" of the time and that there were "exceptions."
That means that she’s deliberately slanting the news. She knows that the impression she’s trying to create isn’t accurate, but she’s creating it anyway because of her agenda.
Either that or she’s too slow witted to realize the contradiction.
It’s hard to credit the later idea, though, because the contradiction gets more blatant as the story goes on. Later we read:
"The number who got sent back at Ellis Island was less than 2 percent," Meissner told Catholic News Service in an interview, "possibly less than 1 percent."
And those rejections were almost always because the people suffered from an illness that might make them financially dependent upon the community, she said. For instance, a then-common eye infection left victims blind and presumably unable to support themselves. People who had it were turned away.
There were some exceptions to the open-door policy, explains an immigration law history article provided by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Bureau, as the agency Meissner headed in the 1990s is now called. An 1882 Chinese exclusion law that remained on the books until 1943 was originally aimed at limiting cheap labor.
Other laws of the era excluded polygamists, those with criminal records for "moral turpitude," people with contagious diseases or epilepsy, professional beggars, anarchists and those who were insane.
So it turns out that there were a whole bunch of categories of people who could not legally enter the country, meaning that if they did enter it that their entry was illegal.
The percentage of people who showed up and were disallowed entry may have been smaller than it is today–or it may not have been smaller at all. I don’t know that more than 1-2% of aliens who show up at U.S. airports today get turned away. The story doesn’t go into that. And it’s not the number of people turned away from Ellis Island that indicates how large a problem illegal immigration was, anyway. It’s the number of people who circumvented Ellis Island and similar institutions that’s an indicator of how many illegals there were.
In any event, the story contains abundant evidence that there was a distinction between legal and illegal immigration. "Pretty much anybody" is not the same thing as "anybody."
So what we have here is another instance of a unprofessional story that violates journalistic ethics with a blatant attempt to slant the news in favor of the author’s agenda.
