Michael Galant on Sanctions and Immigration / LaToya Parker on Budget’s Racial Impacts

KPFA - CounterSpin

This week on CounterSpin:

We’ve always heard that racists hate quotas, yet Stephen Miller’s “3000 a day, however which way” mandate is terrorizing immigrant communities — brown immigrant communities — around the country. The response from people of conscience can look many ways: linking arms around people in danger, absolutely; vigorously disputing misinformation about immigrants, whether hateful or patronizing, also.

But another piece is gaining a deeper, broader understanding of migration. News media could help answer one implied question — “Why is anyone trying to come to the U.S. anyway?” — by grappling with the role of conditions the U.S. has largely created in the places people are driven from. We talk about that largely missing piece from elite media’s immigration coverage with Michael Galant, senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Anyone who pays attention and cares can see that the Trump budget bill is a brazen transfer of resources from those that are trying to meet basic needs to those that can’t remember how many houses they own. But corporate reporting rarely breaks out economic policy in terms of how it affects different people — especially how it affects communities for whom they show no consistent concern. Economic policy is itself racialized, gendered, regionalized, targeted. Humanistic journalism would help us see that.

LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.”

The post Michael Galant on Sanctions and Immigration / LaToya Parker on Budget’s Racial Impacts appeared first on KPFA.