The New York Sun on an immigration tear.

In every issue of the neocons’ hometown paper, the New York Sun, there are journalistic gaucheries, odd misuses of language, and instances of sheer cluelessness I’ve never seen a tabloid, let alone in a “respectable” newspaper. The Sun’s latest foolery has been to liven up their front page by putting the lead article’s headlines in huge typeface, not just somewhat larger, but vastly larger than any other headline on the front page. Nothing wrong with big headlines, of course. The oddity is that the stories they honor with these huge headlines tend to be obscure and unimportant—or not even to be news stories at all. The result is a bizarre disproportion between the screaming headline and the utter lack of urgency of the actual article, creating the impression of a newspaper edited by people who are visuo-spatially retarded.

The Sun’s latest and weirdest was the lead headline in the issue of Friday November 23 (try to imagine the headline being about ten times larger than it appears here):

Immigrants
Await Boost
From Pontiff

By SARAH GARLAND
November 23, 2007

Illegal immigrants and their advocates, disappointed after a string of policy and legislative defeats this year, are now looking to Pope Benedict XVI’s visit this spring as the best hope for a boost to their cause.

Some Catholic immigrants, along with advocates and representatives of the church, are predicting that the pope could take up the plight of illegal immigrants in America during his trip, reopening national debate over a touchy political topic as the presidential campaign heats up.

“We hope that he speaks for us, because he’s someone who is higher up than we are. He can give us a hand,” a Mexican immigrant, Andy Benitez, 26, said as he left morning Mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church at 14th Street on Sunday.

“He has a lot of power. He could help us if he talked about it,” Rodolfo Huepa, 38, also from Mexico, said. “It could finally be a positive thing.”

Some advocates now say that a change to the immigration laws is unlikely until the end of the presidential campaign, as politicians try to avoid an issue that has its perils. Efforts to win congressional passage of a “comprehensive” immigration law that would have provided illegal immigrants with a path to legalization collapsed this summer, and Governor Spitzer earlier this month abandoned his plan to give driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

Now that is a non-story if there ever was one. News is about things that have happened. But there is nothing that has happened here. The “story” concerns certain people’s hopes about possible consequences that may result from an event that will not even take place for another five months, the visit of Pope Benedict to New York City. People’s speculations and hopes are not news, and certainly not lead headline news. But the neocons at the Sun don’t get this. Their desire for open borders trumps the most basic rules of journalism and common sense.

Moreover, the image conjured up by the headline—of poor, distraught “immigrants” (i.e., illegal aliens) who are so without hope now that the American people have thunderously rejected amnesty that their only hope is to wait for some foreign leader, namely the Pope of the Catholic Church, to come to America and rescue them from America’s heartlessness—shows how the supposedly patriotic neocons really feel about this country.

Ever since neoconservatism came into existence, its political lodestar, its ultimate way of validating neoconservative ideas, has been the fact that that the American people supported them. Thus, in the eyes of the neocons, Ronald Reagan’s two overwhelming victories for the presidency proved that the American people were really conservative not liberal. Neocons have repeatedly appealed to the opinions of the American people as the proof that a particular view was correct. But now that a bill containing amnesty for illegal aliens and a vast increase in legal immigration was rejected by the strongest outpouring of grassroots opinion in the history of the country, do the neocons say, “the American people have spoken”? No, they say that they’re waiting for the Bishop of Rome to come here to set right what the American people have set wrong.

This story, as I said, is not about news, but about the neocons’ desperate (an overused word I rarely use, but here it’s justified) attempt to pass an amnesty after their thundering failure to do so for the last two years. That impression was backed up by the next issue of the Sun on Monday November 26 (the paper doesn’t publish on weekends), with this front page lead headline (which was, however, in normal size):

Immigrants Are Seen as a Boon to City’s Economy

By SARAH GARLAND
Staff Reporter of the Sun
November 26, 2007

Immigrants are responsible for close to a quarter of New York State’s economy and are not only 70% of New York City’s cooks and construction workers and 90% of its taxi drivers, but half of the city’s doctors and accountants and a quarter of the CEOs, according to a report to be released today.

The report, by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank backed by public employee unions, found that foreign-born residents were responsible for $229 billion of New York’s economy last year—more than the individual gross domestic product of 30 states.

The number of immigrant-owned businesses also climbed rapidly in recent years, and immigrants have branched into top occupations, according to the report, which based many of its findings on Census data.

The following issues had further articles by Garland on the immigration situation.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 03, 2007 10:17 AM | Send