Immigration reporting should include the people who are most affected by the policies we write about. This means reporters need to actually talk to the people who are most affected by the polices we write about. A thread.
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Most English-language immigration stories center court documents and/or data. Lots of words and lots of numbers. But no human beings. Too often, our reporting renders people invisible.
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When immigration reporting does include quotes from interviews with actual people, it’s from people reporters have just met. Most recently, reporters staked-out Greyhound bus stations to meet reunited families... as if we’re going to get a good (or ethical) interview out of that.
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What kinds of interviews are families that were just reunited going to give reporters at bus stations? And what kind of free and informed consent are those families providing reporters? My guess is there is no consent. It’s just sound bites under duress.
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Other times, an immigration attorney will make available a client whose story you can tell. This is great. You get good access — but it’s mediated by another person. So there’s that.
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Separated families were reunited? Just go to a bus station. Children forcibly drugged in shelters? Just go quote a lawsuit. The best we get is a client through an attorney. I get it that it’s hard, sometimes impossible, to get most-affected sources. But reporters don’t even try.
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It might seem unreal until you consider most immigration reporters are not immigrants; they don’t speak the languages the people they write about speak. They don’t know how to interact with the people they write about. Reporters talk *about* people without taking *to* people.
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The result is incomplete stories that de-center the people who are affected by policies. We desperately need first- and second-gen Kaqchikel and Mam researchers and reporters. But newsrooms generally don’t even recognize, much less cultivate, Central American indigenous journos.
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We do a disservice to all readers when we are unable to root any of our reporting in the communities we write about. Yet this is the standard in immigration reporting—largely because of the lack of diversity on this beat. We need to change that. Quickly.
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