Media coverage of illegal immigration serves primarily to obfuscate and distract from what should be the most important question: How many illegal aliens live in America, and what do they cost us? Instead, the media manipulates our emotions with fantastic descriptions of children in cages, the terrors of the Darien Gap and Alligator Alcatraz, and the tragedy of the deportation of virtuous “undocumenteds,” who upon further investigation often turn out to be MS-13 gangsters or child molesters.
Last year, the Pew Research Center estimated that America’s total illegal population actually declined to 10 million from 12 million between 2005 and 2019. Then it surged during Biden’s presidency, hitting 14 million by 2023, the last year for which data was available. On the campaign trail, President Trump repeatedly asserted that the total number of illegal aliens had reached 20 million, and each time the media tried to “fact check” him with Pew’s estimates, even though Pew’s report admits it doesn’t have all the data for Biden’s presidency, and the data they do have confirmed a hockey-stick like upward surge in illegal immigrants between 2021 and 2023.
Even moderate elements of the conservative movement have long been aware of the media’s duplicitous tendencies. Back in 2012, Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, ranked as a “moderate Republican” by Ballotpedia, attacked the media’s coverage of illegal immigration, rightly pointing out how they obscure the difference between legal and illegal immigrants. The media doesn’t need to ignore the immigration problem, nor does coverage of it need to be directly censored. Instead, it prioritizes the struggles of sympathetic illegal immigrants and highlights purported enforcement overreaches. Meanwhile, the immigration court system prevents or reverses the administration’s enforcement of immigration laws.
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