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December 26, 2008

Miriam Jordan Wins VDARE.COM 2008 Worst Immigration Reporter Award!

By Joe Guzzardi

VDARE.COM bestows its 2008 worst immigration reporter to the Wall Street Journal’s Miriam Jordan

That our Fifth Annual award goes to a Wall Street Journal reporter is fitting. The WSJ,  in the opinion of most, publishes the most biased, tendentious immigration stories and editorials of any mainstream print newspaper.

Jordan is a reliable soldier for the Journal in its never-ending war against immigration patriots. The Journal’s mission is to open up global borders for the purpose of bringing in the cheapest labor available for its business-based readership.

Predictably, Jordan earned her journalism wings at the Columbia School of Journalism. If Columbia teaches fair and balanced reporting, it can’t be proven in a review of any of its graduates' immigration stories.

But before we get on with dissecting Jordan, let’s look back at some of the 2008’s highlights…or should I say lowlights?

Our 2007 winner, the New York Times’  Nina Bernstein, perhaps chastened by the dubious distinction of our Worst Immigration reporter award, wrote a mere fifteen stories about so-called immigrant plights.

Amazingly—or maybe not—nary a one of Bernstein’s archive of 2007-2008 stories contained even a hint of a single adverse effect of Open Borders. Bernstein’s two-year tally—42 last year plus 17 this year—ended in an aggregate of 59 rah-rah stories versus zero that contained even a shred of an immigration negative.

No matter how you slice it, Bernstein commitment (and that of her several layers of editors) to single-minded propaganda is staggering.

No wonder the New York Times is bankrupt. When a company’s major product—news in the Times case—is twisted to fit its own narrow agenda, people look elsewhere.

Another 2008 development was brought to our attention by our faithful North Carolina Reader John J. Pershing: an astonishing first in immigration reporting ineptitude—the same story published twice within three months about illegal alien Moises Campos Palencio, written by the same reporter Jason Hardin (e-mail him) and accompanied by the same photograph!

Perhaps Hardin has started a trend. If so, VDARE.COM will be obligated to create another award to recognize what is either an extraordinarily heavy-handed reportorial effort to portray aliens sympathetically or such a lazy and sloppy approach to one’s craft that immediate dismissal should be the appropriate recourse.

Let’s get back to Jordan.

The UCLA Anderson School of Management with its focus on the "emerging global economy" advertises Jordan’s immigration stories as coming from "a grassroots perspective."

Jordan and UCLA must define "Grassroots" as meaning stories wherein the alien is cruelly oppressed by an America that is too harsh on immigrants simply looking for the proverbial better life.

Over time, Jordan, a fifteen-year Journal veteran has compiled a nauseating portfolio of pro-immigration stories that are all cut from the same pattern: illegal immigrants get a raw deal.

Here are a few examples:

• In 2004, Jordan wrote a sloppy, unprofessional piece bemoaning a proposed cut-back in Colorado and other states in illegal alien pre-natal care. Although she quotes some who favor restricting benefits—including the Center for Immigration Studies’ Steven Camarota—Jordan cites twice as many who favor sustaining subsidies to illegal aliens.

According to Jordan, reductions in benefits to alien mothers: "has sparked an outcry among medical workers and others."

Maybe…but most medical care workers would be the first to tell you that providing a host of benefit to aliens has strained their hospitals, driven some emergency clinics out of business and prevents decent care from going to Americans.

In an unconvincing effort to make her point that Americans are obligated to provide free medical assistance to the entire world, Jordan writes that advocates: "… point to studies showing that every dollar spent on prenatal care saves $3 of postpartum care." [Prenatal Care Is Latest in State Services to Illegal Immigrants, by Miriam Jordan, Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2004]

If you are interested in the study’s name so you can do your own research, you’re out of luck as far as the Wall Street Journal is concerned. Jordan doesn’t name it, but it's a 22-year-old report from the Institute of Medicine called Preventing Low Birthweight, The Los Angeles Times has referred to this as an "often cited" report. Of course, it's "often cited" because it gives immigration enthusiasts the answer they want to hear. A study on how much more money could be saved by deportation would be "rarely cited."

• In 2007, Jordan co-authored a favorable story about a new Bank of America credit card program that:  "…is open to people who lack both a Social Security number and a credit history, as long as they have held a checking account with the bank for three months without an overdraft." [Illegal Immigrants Offered Credit Cards, by Miriam Jordan and Valerie Bauerline, Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2007]

Jordon wrote about a typical Mexican credit card applicant, Antonio Sanchez, who had no social security number, no credit history and whose only collateral was his ten-year-old Ford that he drove to his two restaurant jobs. Sanchez earned $25,000 annually to provide for his three children. Nevertheless, Jordan viewed the card as an excellent first step to help aliens develop a credit history and also as an imaginative new business tool for the Bank of America.

Showing her enthusiasm for the credit card program despite its meager screening, Jordan quoted (painfully in retrospect) Liam McGee, the Bank of America's consumer and small-business banking chief: "If we don't disproportionately grow in the Hispanic [market] . . . we aren't going to grow" as a bank.

Listen  to Jordan on National Public Radio defend the Bank of America’s "pioneering" effort to bring credit to "worthy undocumented borrowers" who will "perform well" as credit card and home mortgage holders.

Note that Jordan predicts—100 percent incorrectly— that if alien borrowers default on their credit obligations, the burden will not fall on the taxpayers but on the Bank of America.

I’ve saved Jordan’s "best" for last.

• In October, she wrote a preposterous story about Jose Luis Hernandez, an illegal alien vegetable chopper who had accumulated $100,000 but was bent out of shape because he couldn’t buy a house! [Mortgage Prospects Dim for Illegal Aliens, by Miriam Jordan, Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2008]

This was when the mortgage market had entirely collapsed in large part because Hernandez’s fellow illegal aliens had gone deadbeat and vanished into the night!

In a story that is completely insensitive to the real pain of honest, law-abiding Americans (like me) who are saddled with a house they cannot unload at any price and who have been financially devastated by the “Minority Mortgage Meltdown”—the promiscuous extension of mortgages to illegal alien agricultural workers and others of doubtful credit worthiness—Jordan has the audacity to lament the loss of the Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) as a suitable substitute for a Social Security number.

Jordan goes on to suggest that hatemongers are behind the recent decline in illegal alien lending. As Tim Sandos, a former Citibank employee (remember, you’re bailing that bank out), said according to Jordan: "I got hate mail, including death threats, from people hostile to immigrant lending."

Poor Hernandez! Poor Citibank! Poor Sandos!

All of it is so sad!

Concludes Jordan: "Meanwhile, Mr. Hernandez says he has no choice but to leave his cash in money-market and savings accounts in two banks. ‘I have a lot of money but I cannot invest it...’ he says. ‘It's frustrating.’"

As usual, before we picked our winner, we combed over many other worthy candidates.

And, less than a week ago, in what proved to be a preview of our award, James Fulford blogged about another outrageous Jordon story with a ridiculous premise—Americans are stealing jobs from illegal aliens.

Here’s Jordan’s kicker from that story, the closing line journalists use in their stories to drive home their point:

"People [aliens] are on their last hope." [U. S. Workers Crowding Out Immigrant Laborers, by Miriam Jordan, Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2008]

Jordan’s unapologetic pro-immigration propaganda,  coupled with her determination to ignore the ample evidence that foolish lending to bad credit risks, many of them illegal aliens, precipitated America’s financial crisis made her our easy 2008 winner.

(e-mail Jordan).