I recently asked students in my race, ethnic and community reporting class at American University to think about the immigration stories that stood out in their minds.
The stories they recalled were about workplace raids and the border fence;
Elvira Arellano, the single mother who took refuge in a Chicago "sanctuary" church to avoid being separated from her 7-year-old son; and a
crackdown on illegal immigrants in Prince William County, Va., one of several local municipalities that attempted to take matters into their own hands.
They concluded that undocumented immigrants are portrayed either as noble heroes or as dangerous lawbreakers; that coverage assumes the only immigrants affected by the policy debate are Latin Americans; and that stories tend to quote "bleeding-heart supporters" contrasted with "anti-immigrant bigots," though most people are somewhere in the middle.
Finally, a student raised her hand and said, "I sometimes feel like I'm just reading the same story over and over."
"I felt like I was writing the same story over and over!" I blurted out.
It's true. For 13 years I covered a wide range of immigration issues for newspapers in Los Angeles, Hartford, Conn., and Portland, Ore. I've stood in a coyote's safe house in South Central Los Angeles, walked miles alongside immigrant-advocacy marches and interviewed Minutemen in enough depth to know that most are not angry bigots.
In 2001, when President George Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox were discussing the possibility of a wide-reaching amnesty act, I wrote a story for
The Oregonian that invigorated me because it was different from all the rest. As the paper's race and ethnicity issues beat reporter, I found many immigrants who had received amnesty through similar 1983 legislation and learned that their lives did not drastically improve, even after becoming U.S. citizens.
It felt like the United States was on the cusp of a major shift in attitude and policy about immigration, and I looked forward to the broader range of stories it would open up. The date my amnesty story ran? Sept. 10, 2001.
Needless to say, policymakers and journalists shifted gears, big-time. But when the old debate came back into the national spotlight, with the passage of the harsh
Sensenbrenner Bill in the U.S. House of Representatives and the nationwide protests that followed, it seemed like a setup to lure the news media into the polarities that my students described.
I left daily journalism for teaching in 2007, but before I did, frustrated with writing the same story all the time, I produced a short article that attempted to break the mold. The story was about dueling demonstrations between pro- and anti-illegal immigrant groups in the wake of a factory raid. To get at the silent middle of the debate, I talked only to uninvolved passersby.
Exploring the nuances and complexities of the immigration debate has become all the more challenging as reporters have to do more with less and as beats like my old one are slashed amid budget cuts.
Gosia Wozniacka, my former colleague at
The Oregonian who covers the paper's immigration and Latino affairs beat, regularly meets this challenge.
In response to nearly every immigration story she writes, she receives angry comments and e-mails, most of them accusing her of being too sympathetic to illegal immigrants.
Instead of just reading them, Wozniacka logs some of the hundreds of responses, such as the ones she received in response to
this recent story about a local coalition forming around immigration reform, and contacts the callers, e-mailers and online commenters with a deal:
"I want to sit down and talk about the issue," she tells them. "No insults, no shouting and you have to present solutions."
"It's easy for reporters to disregard those people" who vent their frustrations at reporters, she told me. "It will help me to understand better the reasoning behind the anger."
It's an unconventional approach, but that's what journalists need to do to get beyond the shouting.
