What’s New in Fake News: Choosing Our Facts (2) —by Jinny Batterson
In an earlier blog post, written not long after last fall’s elections, I retold a surprise encounter with a Trump supporter while visiting family in California, the “left coast.” This veteran of stints in the Marines and the U.S. Coast Guard played down Trump’s divisive rhetoric. (“He’s just a brash New Yorker,” the man told me.) He was upset about Hillary Clinton’s misuse of a private email server and, above all, concerned about illegal immigration. He quoted facts and figures, both historical and current, to bolster his anti-immigrant arguments. He claimed that 750,000 “illegals” made up 10% of the population of New York City, taking jobs and housing from more deserving legal residents. When I mentioned the proportion of our national food supply harvested by immigrant labor, he shunted my concerns aside—that was old news, he said. During World War II, there was a shortage of native-born farm workers, so immigrants were brought in to pick crops, but nearly all of them had been sent home during the Eisenhower administration. I did not have ready answers, but thought some of his statements were likely exaggerations.
Shortly after our conversation, I used a borrowed computer to look up figures via Google for “illegal immigration to New York City.” The closest match I could find was a Newsmax article from September, 2015 that appeared near the top of the retrieved list. It mentioned the 750,000 figure, but for New York State as a whole, in 2012, with an undocumented proportion of less than 4%. Since the new year, I’ve repeated my “illegal immigration to New York City” query, and also done further Internet research on farm labor trends. As of January 19, 2017, the lead site from a Google search on New York City illegal immigration was a sponsored advertisement for an immigration lawyer. The second highest site came from Wikipedia, with a host of disclaimers at the beginning of the article, much of which was written in 2014. This article cites a 2005 estimate of 535,000 “illegal immigrants” in New York City, sourcing the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a lobbying group formed during the 1980’s to advocate for reductions in both legal and illegal immigration to the United States.
Further research about immigrant farm labor trends produced the information that a “bracero” program (from the Spanish term for manual laborer) for Mexican temporary farm workers was in place from 1942 to 1964. The number of braceros peaked at 445,197 in 1956, during the Eisenhower administration. The program was replaced in 1965, as part of an overall reform of the immigration system, by a program of temporary “H-2A” visas for immigrant farm workers. Recent estimates from multiple sources put the proportion of undocumented workers in the seasonal farm labor force at over a million—somewhere between 50 and 70% of 2.4 million temporary farm workers. According to a Wikipedia article most recently updated on January 17, 2017, there were approximately 140,000 seasonal farm workers certified under the “H-2A” program in 2015.
Most “news” articles these days have an explicit or implicit editorial slant. Each of us is enabled to “choose our facts,” about immigration or any other issue, from among a huge number of available sites, given the continuing explosion of information in Internet, television, radio, and print sources. It becomes more important than ever to attempt to develop a balanced perspective. As I continued struggling to expand my views after my encounter with the Coast Guard veteran, I found a brief online talk by Swedish journalist Andreas Ekstrom about bias in Google search results. Two of the most important factors in Google rankings of the relevance of a query result, he explained, are: 1) similarity of search terms, and 2) the number of accesses to a particular site. Relevance is monitored and recalculated frequently, so the same query done several weeks apart can produce widely differing results. For example, the 2015 Newsmax immigration article for New York that showed near the top of my results list in November, 2016, no longer made the first screen of results in January, 2017.
If we are to maintain a representative democracy, Americans of all political persuasions will need to become more diligent about how we access news. It may take some time in our hurried lives to distill actual information from the plethora of opinions and “fake news” that so often masquerade as the real thing. It will be increasingly important to distinguish the trustworthiness of news sources; often, we’ll need to pay more attention to when an article was published and how recently it has been updated. Above all, we will need to continue to choose our “facts” carefully.