The American Dream?

When journalists aren’t lazily reciting lines from some pressure group’s press release, they sometimes try to tell the true story of a “real person” to illustrate a favored pressure group’s point. In this Sacramento Bee story the pressure group is clearly pro-immigration activists, and the real person is Victor Yovzhiy, who arrived in California from Ukraine in 1996. Yovzhiy isn’t like those mass-murdering anti-American immigrants you’ve been hearing about. He’s a sort of uber-American because “America, seen through an immigrant’s eyes, is a far different land than the place so many native-born Americans take for granted. We tend to underestimate the extraordinariness of our freedoms and opportunities, even now, little more than a year after America came under attack,” Bee Staff writer Anita Creamer tells us.

Yovzhiy’s story starts out like the conventional immigrant morality tale. He flees persecution, works in a hotel while taking classes at a local community college, stays with relatives until he moves with his wife into a small apartment and has a couple of children. But then he is overcome with “anxiety,” stops working and starts getting welfare. Six months later he finds employment—for the California Department of Social Services’ civil rights bureau.

To paraphrase Mickey Kaus, it’s one thing for a reporter to think the way to cover the immigration story is to phone the various pro-immigration interest groups or their captive government agencies and write up their arguments. It’s another thing for the reporter to accept as her “real person” an immigrant who is obviously handed to her on a platter by one of those interest groups or agencies. It’s yet another thing entirely for her real person to be someone who actually works for an interest group or agency. Isn’t it obvious that Ms. Creamer was handed this story by the civil rights bureau?

Even as propaganda, the story fails. What kind of immigrant success story is finding a job as an office assistant with a state bureaucracy? If this is the best the civil rights bureau can do, things are even worse than we thought.
Posted by at October 25, 2002 08:05 PM | Send