Thursday, Sept. 27, 2007 | Re: “Fellow Academics Question Validity of Illegal Immigration Study.” Of course they question this study. It doesn’t fit their liberal narrative.
Overall, it was a pretty poor excuse for a story. I particularly liked this paragraph:
While county taxpayers may see some of their property taxes diverted to paying for illegal immigrants, those same taxpayers reap benefits elsewhere. Many immigrants pay into Social Security but do not receive it; they spend money in local businesses; they have payroll taxes withheld.
Reporter Rob Davis offered this with absolutely no evidence, support or attribution whatsoever. This paragraph is nothing more than an editorial masquerading as news.
Davis also alluded to payroll taxes but doesn’t mention the number of illegal workers who are paid on a cash basis and thus pay no taxes.
He also makes no mention of the billions illegal workers send home to Mexico each year suggesting that perhaps conditions aren’t quite as dire as academics, or even reporters, would have us believe.
Finally he let SDSU’s James Gerber twist the issue with this quote: “that people are pissed off about immigration and the county is trying to leverage that in some way.” Of course, it’s not immigration that, as Davis so eloquently put it, “pisses people off:” it’s illegal immigration. Liberals have a difficult time with the illegal part as it suggests opposition might be based on rule of law instead of seething bigotry. Hard to condemn your opponents if you can’t call them racists.
This was nothing shot of a hit-job written by a reporter with an agenda using other ideologues in academia to slander one of their own when he didn’t toe the company line.
If the voiceofsandiego.org is going to be nothing more than another Liberal mouthpiece, I see no reason to read or contribute.