Posted by I made my views on immigration and refugees very clear in this previous article. “There really is no point in debating the issue as there is no common ground to be had. Liberals want to save and give the good life to every last perceived poor and persecuted person on the planet which, despite being a noble goal, is unachievable. Those of us who want more realistic and sensible long-term policies on immigration, not knee-jerk reactions to Donald Trump’s latest crazy tweet are automatically branded as racist, xenophobic, etc. As I wrote in my piece about Sweden, a recent government sponsored survey of over 1,000 Ontarians revealed that the vast majority support immigration and believe immigrants bring positive things but also believe we should be more selective in who we admit. For that “radical belief” they have been labelled racists and islamophobes by the media. Yup, that’s seriously what the left-wing thinks so do you really want to engage in a conversation with these nutters just so they can accuse you of being a Nazi? I have better things to do with my time… Unfortunately, the left wing of western democracies are called bleeding heart liberals for a reason. They are often foolish and prone to making rash decisions based upon a short-term emotional response than any sane rational long-term policy making. It is precisely because of the ease that guilt can be thrust upon a Western liberal population that caused the current Syrian refugee problem to expand dramatically and become a ‘European refugee crisis’.”
Fast forward a few years and we are faced with another spate of pompous moral high ground sputtering by the left (with a healthy dollop of virtue signaling thrown in for good measure) and the sycophantic media – this time in the United States and Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy. The New Yorker did a pretty good job of reviewing the history behind Trump’s zero tolerance policy leading up to the recent decision to officially separate children from their families at the border. While I support controlled immigration and the need to crack down on illegal migration and fake refugee claimants; even I am appalled at an official policy aimed at separating children from their parents (over 2300 cases since April) as a “deterrent”. I noted previously about another Trump ban on muslim travellers that, “my point of view remains unchanged in that [Trump’s] order is mean spirited and unlikely to achieve the goals that it is supposed to so therefore its resurrection is just a spiteful act to show that President Trump is still ‘the boss'”. So no, I don’t support Trump’s actions on this because they are once again mean and spiteful (and probably quite immoral) but also ineffective as well. But unlike the left who not only thought it immoral and reprehensible, I never thought that his second go around at the ban would be illegal. Indeed, the US Supreme Court has finally come to a decision on this matter more than a year later and has upheld his travel ban order. In regards to the more recent zero tolerance policy, even first lady Melania Trump, not known for taking vocal and public stands on such things, stepped up and criticized her own husband’s policy. Trump, after his usual hard nosed refusal to change, staged an abrupt volte-face and signed an executive order to stop children being separated from their parents at the border. Score one for sensible and moral policies.
Because what I do support is the need to realistically and effectively controlled immigration (both legal and illegal) which seems to be a massive problem plaguing all Western countries. As I pointed out previously, pretty much all of Asia (even the rich democratic parts) has a very different view on immigration and refugees than the West. Amazingly, while I believe the West could probably learn a few things about controlled migration from Asian countries (ie, only allowing temporary working visas without permanent residency or citizenship rights), I’ve never heard of any Western politician or the media consider such options. We know that most illegal immigrants from south of the Rio Grande cross into America in search of work and a better life. We also know that they often fill a gap in the workforce (the so-called 3D jobs – Dirty, Dangerous and Demeaning) that locals don’t want to do like cleaning toilets, picking fruit, slaughtering animals in abattoirs, etc. Why not just document them, given them temporary work visas (so they can pay taxes as well) but not give them the right to permanent residency or citizenship? Granting “Einstein Visas” to well qualified, educated and experienced skilled workers is an obvious benefit to any country; I would argue that the opposite end of the spectrum would also be beneficial but that area is currently what causes the problems the Western world currently faces. However, I’m not going to go down this rabbit hole again because that’s not the main point I want to make this time.
By now, most people have seen and commented on a viral photo of the crying Honduran child making the headlines in the press and being passed around the internet through social media. As Vox points out, “It became the viral symbol of Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy: a toddler from Honduras in a pink sweatshirt, just taller than the knees of her mother, who’s being searched by border patrol agents. The girl’s face is frozen between a cry and scream, so intense you can almost hear it through the still photograph.” Such is the power of imagery – like the photo of three-year old Alan Kurdi’s body on a Greek beach galvanized Europe into a brief period of insanity and bad policy making that led to the Syrian Refugee Crisis. The problem is, the way the photo has been portrayed by the media (and the social media) is patently false. Time magazine, a publication I rarely read because it is superficial pap, photoshopped the photo and made it its cover:
There is nothing wrong about the original photo itself; what is wrong is the narrative that accompanied it in so many media reports including Time that purported that the girl was crying as she was ripped away from her mother by US border agents in the inhumane implementation of Trump’s zero tolerance policy separating children from their parents and throwing them in jail. Time did manage to print a retraction after it was pointed out that no such thing happened.
Correction (Posted June 19): The original version of this story misstated what happened to the girl in the photo after she was taken from the scene. The girl was not carried away screaming by U.S. Border Patrol agents; her mother picked her up and the two were taken away together.
So the more accurate photo of this particular situation is probably this one:
The problem is that this photo doesn’t evoke the same visceral emotional response that the other more famous one does (they were taken by the same photographer, John Moore) so nobody uses it. In other words, we are being manipulated and lied to in order to make a point. But does emotional manipulation and lying bother the media or the left? Not in the slightest because the truth doesn’t seem to matter in their quest to push their agenda. While it published a correction, Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal doubled-down and stood by and justified the use of the photo on its cover and its erroneous depiction of the situation:
The June 12 photograph of the 2-year-old Honduran girl became the most visible symbol of the ongoing immigration debate in America for a reason: Under the policy enforced by the administration, prior to its reversal this week, those who crossed the border illegally were criminally prosecuted, which in turn resulted in the separation of children and parents. Our cover and our reporting capture the stakes of this moment.
Of course, Time is a pillar of the mass media because they are so ethical and unbiased. Oh wait…
At least somebody on the left still has some ethics though. Vox, has the moral courage to call this travesty of reporting for what it really is in an article with the title: “Time magazine’s cover isn’t bold or brave. It’s exploitative… When a heart-wrenching photograph isn’t enough, it tells us something distressing about society — and media.” To its credit, the Washington Post echoed these sentiments in this article, “The image is a sad one, but it is of a rather standard occurrence at the border: A mother and her daughter attempted to immigrate illegally and were apprehended. The mother, in fact, had tried this before and was deported in 2013. The photo says virtually nothing about Trump’s now-aborted policy. In fact, it’s an example of how not all young children were separated from their parents.”
So I guess journalistic integrity in America isn’t completely dead, thank God for that. Unfortunately that isn’t the case for Canada and our state-sponsored liberal propaganda machine the Canadian Brainwashing Corporation that chose to go with the headline “A viral photo of a crying Honduran girl didn’t tell the whole story. Does it matter?“. Does it matter? Really? Hell yes it matters. The job of the media is to report on events as accurately and truthfully as possible. But the article goes on to quote Barbie Zelizer, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, “In this particular case, does it really matter in the end result as to whether or not that child was only put down for a second or picked up a moment later or left on the ground and taken away? That doesn’t matter because we know that she is representative of other kids to which that did happen… The picture reflects the activities that are going on at this time. Even if the actual representation did not represent what people assumed.” Wow. I hope journalism students studying under her don’t take her lessons to heart because that’s a huge leap of justification for lying (essentially its Machiavellian and says that the ends justify the means). So if a man gets badly beaten in a drunken bar fight with other patrons and when the police arrive I snap a photo of the cops standing over his bloody body on the ground and then publish an article that reports “man brutally beaten by police” its OK because while those particular officers didn’t beat the man, “the picture reflects the activities that are going on at this time” because cops are beating somebody somewhere else.
Sadly, that is the state of journalism today and then reporters and editors wonder why people are increasingly sceptical of the news.
I recently got into another climate change debate online where I basically said what I always say:
Let me start off by stating I do believe in climate change and that man has some role to play in it. My problem is that we don’t know how much of it is natural (solar) and/or what can we really do to prevent or mitigate the effects of this… I do think industrial activity has had a huge impact. Just that the outcomes are unpredictable because the system is so complex and variables so huge, it’s impossible to model accurately. Let’s say that they are correct and temperatures will rise a few degrees (the models have a huge variance in any case) over the next century. Does this necessarily mean catastrophe or is our money and effort is better spent at building dykes like the Dutch to stop Miami from becoming Atlantis… I also think “climate science” is about as “black boxy” as you can get because nobody has great data series simply because we haven’t been measuring stuff that long. Arctic ice and CO2 core samples point to increased “greenhouse” gases in the atmosphere is not direct observations. That there is more today is obvious because we have been burning the stuff like crazy for the last 200 years. Don’t need NASA to tell me that. Now the real question is is this leading to catastrophic climate change and/or at what rate. This is not a pithy question. Many leading scientists on polar bears have released research saying the population is doing surprisingly well despite the impact on their habitat is happening just as predicted. In other words, less arctic ice has not resulted in near extinction (in fact the opposite has happened) of polar bears. But that doesn’t stop all the fund raising using the same one “iconic” photo of an emaciated polar bear saying we have to save the arctic and the polar bears. Heck we don’t know if that polar bear was sick for other reasons but of course he is the poster bear for the whole environmental movement so it’s still being used.
His reply was this:
Climate science doesn’t make predictions like the weather guy on the evening news. It predicts general trends in the climate over the whole world. So we can’t say that this population of polar bears will die or that one will thrive. However, we can say that the environment to which the polar bears are adapted is going to change as the climate gets warmer. As for the photo of the “emaciated” polar bear, I’ve never seen it, but even if it was used in a misleading way that doesn’t change the data supporting anthropogenic climate change.
If you also haven’t managed to see the photo (which would be surprising since it is kind of iconic like the photo of the crying Honduran girl), here it is as published in the National Geographic article:
If you don’t want to click through the article, this is basically what the photojournalist who took the picture had to say. “There is nothing worse for someone who loves wildlife and nature than to witness the suffering of an animal. That is why photographing the distress of this polar bear, and being unable to help it, was so hard. Weak muscles, atrophied by extreme starvation, could barely hold him up. It was clear that, even if I had fed him the handful of nuts I had in my backpack, without sea ice from which to hunt, his prospects of survival would be slim.” Of course, the photo and video of the bear scrounging around has become the new “poster bear” for climate change and the media has done its usual half-assed job of propaganda masquerading as reporting with articles like this one in the Guardian with the headline “‘Soul-crushing’ video of starving polar bear exposes climate crisis, experts say“. So when my counterpart in the internet debate makes the statement that “Climate science doesn’t make predictions like the weather guy on the evening news” he’s completely wrong. They make predictions all the time (often sensational and apocalyptic) and most of the time they are just plain wrong as well.
Then there are the real scientists and polar bear experts who don’t get the same shock value as a National Geographic photojournalist’s iconic emotionally heart-tugging video and photo. I wrote about the polar bears and the bad science and sensationalistic journalism surrounding it previously in this article about a whacked out idea to save the Arctic Ice.
“The video shows what appears to be an old male in declining health, but clear clinical signs of starvation aren’t obvious (e.g. convulsions),” said longtime polar bear biologist Andrew Derocher in an email
Arctic wildlife biologist Jeff Higdon similarly speculated that the animal could be suffering from an aggressive form of bone cancer. “That bear is starving, but (in my opinion) it’s not starving because the ice suddenly disappeared and it could no longer hunt seals,” he wrote, noting that bears routinely survive long stretches of ice-free water during the summer. “It’s far more likely that it is starving due to health issues,” he added.
University of Alberta polar bear researcher Ian Stirling disputed that it was an older bear, pointing out the lack of scarring around the animal’s neck. In an email, Stirling added that it’s impossible to know for sure what caused the bear’s emaciation, but it “is what a starving bear would look like, regardless of the cause.”
You know these are real polar bear scientists and experts because they contradict each other and question the accuracy of the judgment and conclusions of their own colleagues. This isn’t the first starving poster-bear for the environmentalist and climate change movement. A previous one in Norway several years ago garnered similar coverage and headlines about how climate change was going to result in the extinction of polar bears. Then, as it is now, quite a few scientists came out to question the headlines accompanying the photo like this NBC article with the headline “Starving Polar Bear Photo: Don’t Blame Just Climate Change.”
Just like the photo of the crying Honduran girl, the Globe and Mail asks the question “The starving polar bear raises a question: Is fake news okay for a good cause?“. Here’s the gist of it:
Mr. Nicklen’s heartbreaking video, posted a few days ago has now gone viral. It has received more than 1.3 million views, and the story has generated widespread news coverage. He and his team at the conservation group SeaLegacy have done interviews from around the world. “National Geographic photographer films polar bear succumbing to climate change,” read one typical headline. Even Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna tweeted about it.
“All of our team was in tears,” team member Cristina Mittermeier told the CBC’s As It Happens. “We hear from scientists that in the next 100 to 150 years, we’re going to lose polar bears …We want the world to see what starvation of a majestic animal like this looks like.” Only later, when pressed, did she admit that it was “impossible to tell” why the animal was dying. That shocking video is a classic example of fake news – a phenomenon that’s depressingly common in the environmental business, even at a leading brand such as National Geographic. So what if it isn’t true? If it’s all for a good cause, the facts don’t matter. “The point is that it was starving,” explained Ms. Mittermeier. “As we lose the ice in the Arctic, polar bears will starve.”
Well, maybe. But even concerned scientists agree that one emaciated bear is not evidence of climate change. “It’s far more likely that it is starving due to health issues,” tweeted Arctic wildlife biologist Jeff Higdon. As apex predators, polar bears live long enough to get old and sick, just as people do. Starving polar bears are the stuff of periodic propaganda shots. In 2015, another polar bear in Norway became the temporary poster animal for global warming, and tugged heartstrings around the world. Not so fast, said Ian Stirling of the University of Alberta. “A difficulty hunting could be involved,” he said. “I don’t think you can tie that one to starvation because of lack of sea ice,” he said.
But never mind. The news media can’t resist. In this case at least one news outlet embellished the story by telling us that the bear “struggles to find food across a barren landscape that should be covered in ice.” That’s ridiculous. The bear is on the land. It is summer. That’s what the tundra looks like in the summer.
In other words, National Geographic, not a publication you would think would give into sensationalistic untrue propaganda, is not immune to the current trend of the media being fast and loose with the facts. They must have trained with professor Barbie Zelizer. You know, if they interviewed her about the polar bear photo, she probably would have said “In this particular case, does it really matter if the polar bear was starving because of climate change or because of other reasons? That doesn’t matter because we know that it is representative of other bears to which it did happen.” Except that it kindly ignores the fact that the actual polar bear scientists can’t reach a firm conclusion that climate change and receding arctic ice is having a devastating impact on polar bear populations despite what the “climate models” say should have happened by now. But why let facts get in the way of a great iconic photo and sensationalistic propaganda.
UPDATE 1 (01/07/18): Just to add more clarity and flavour to my point, this recent article was published in the South China Morning Post with the headline “Japan’s open to foreign workers, just don’t call them immigrants.” The subline reads “Facing an ageing, shrinking workforce, Tokyo flirts with breaking a taboo surrounding immigration by preparing to welcome half a million low-skilled foreign workers.” Japan is Asia’s largest developed and democratic country and their demographic time bomb is well in advance of the West as not only is the population aging, it has already begun to decline. But their solution, like most of Asia, is not to allow wholesale migration and “refugees” but to import temporary workers of all shapes and sizes. As usual, the SCMP can’t get away from the fact it is an English language publication catering primarily to Western expatriates. So it goes on to say:
Japan has long lagged other developed countries in integrating foreign workers into local communities… Many experts are concerned about the ad hoc policy. “It should be noted that the argument for accepting immigrants based solely on economic necessity can lead to the logic of excluding them if economically unnecessary,” says Dr Yusuke Mazumi, a lecturer at Kanazawa University’s Institute of Liberal Arts and Science. Suzuki also warns that the new visa status could create a class division, since unlike low-skilled foreign labourers, high-skilled workers can potentially renew their visas and even live in Japan permanently.
No duh… That’s exactly the point. To create a two-tiered system where low skill migrants are not supposed to be allowed citizenship and permanent residency. While this may offend liberal views of fairness and equality, it does acknowledge and attempt to address the issue of the need to import low-skill (and by definition probably low paid) 3-D workers without forcing them to come across the border illegally. Again, I say the West could learn a thing or too from such Asian policies but I’m not holding my breath that such a solution would be acceptable to the “liberal elite”. Instead of considering a solution that would probably be acceptable to the conservative right, they would rather continue the humanitarian tragedy of illegal migration from south of the Rio Grande or in leaky rubber rafts across the Mediterranean because in their screwed up sense of fairness and equality, they somehow believe that is the more moral option.
UPDATE 2 (01/07/18): One of the most insightful and thought provoking articles I have seen about the migrant problem in American came (surprise surprise) not from a reporter or op-ed but from a letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal. I reproduce it in full below:
Regarding your editorial “The GOP’s Immigration Meltdown” (June 19): I am a criminal defense attorney and can say with confidence that hundreds, if not thousands, of parents and their minor children are separated in this country every day by the criminal justice system. What was happening at our southern border is routine. It is not uncommon for criminal defendants to bring their minor children to court with them for bail hearings, revocation of bail hearings, revocation of probation hearings and sentencing hearings. Perhaps they think that the presence of their children will influence the judge. It has been my experience that it will not.
If a criminal defendant is denied bail, has his bail revoked (as Paul Manafort recently experienced), has his probation revoked or is sentenced to prison, he will be taken into custody and, by definition, separated from his children (the children don’t accompany the defendant to prison). If a family member or other guardian isn’t present to take the children, the children will be taken by a state agency that is charged with caring for children who have no adult to care for them.
Illegally entering the U.S. is, by definition, a crime. If the parent is taken into custody by law enforcement for the crime of illegally entering the U.S., that parent will be separated from his minor children, just as any other criminal defendant in the examples above.
As an attorney, I don’t understand the current outrage. Parents have been separated, are being separated and will continue to be separated from their minor children by the criminal justice system. Why should there be an exception for noncitizens who have been arrested for the crime of illegally entering the U.S.? As far as I know, there is no exception for any other crime.