AFP
Listening to
Behind the Numbers, a digital media and marketing podcast was one of Swara’s (name changed) favourite routines on her way to work. Swara is a senior marketing professional in San Francisco with a masters degree from a US university. In July 2020, she was offered a new job with good pay and benefits.
A couple of days into her new position, she had to stop working as her work permit renewal was not adjudicated in time by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. She filed for her renewal in May 2020 and has not received a decision as of February 2021. Swara is on an H-4 visa as the spouse of an H-1B visa holder.
Molly Butler/Media Matters
The Associated Press, one of the most prominent news agencies in the world, has regularly used far-right, nativist groups as sources for reporting on immigration.
The AP is a newswire service with immense reach. It claims 15,000 outlets use its journalism and more than half of the world’s population engages with AP content every day. It is a vital resource especially for local newsrooms, which can rely on wire services for more than half of their coverage of national issues. However, AP articles are so widely used that it can be difficult to issue corrections. Mistakes corrected on its main website often persist in other papers in the AP network. Errors in its reporting can live online for years at other outlets, which makes the AP’s use of extremist organizations as a source all the more concerning.
Major news outlets in Arizona, California, and Texas are regularly citing nativist organizations founded by a white nationalist and eugenicist in their reporting on immigration, occasionally giving members of these organizations a platform to write commentary. These reports often present such groups as being in favor of merely “reducing overall immigration” or describe them as “restrictionist” without context or reference to their racist history, effectively laundering anti-immigrant talking points to local audiences.
The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), NumbersUSA, and the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR) are all extremist anti-immigrant organizations, and CIS and FAIR have been classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. All three groups were founded by white nationalist and eugenicistJohn Tanton, who explicitly wanted to keep the U.S. a majority-white country through limiting immigration. Two years after Tanton’s death, the organiz