Munro: NY Times Smears Tucker Carlson to Gag Americans’ Immigration Debate

The New York Times is trying to deport Tucker Carlson from his cable-TV job for the political crime of noticing mass migration hurts average Americans.

But the newspaper’s campaign to shut down Carlson’s televised debate on migration will fail because the reporters and editors cannot — or dare not — talk about Americans’ worry about migration economics. The editors’ refusal to engage with the voters about immigration’s economic reality still persists six years after Donald Trump cited those realities to get himself elected to the White House.

The Times’ April 30 article indicts and convicts Carlson as an “American Nationalist” under the headline: “How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable.”

But the huge 8,000-word articles include only a tepid argument against Carlson’s judgment that mainstream American prosperity is undercut by migration and cheap labor profiteering. The paper tries to cover up that tepid argument with a few bogus claims about Carlson’s management of reporters during the 2013-2014 “Gang of Eight” amnesty debate.

The paper wrote:

… economists broadly reject Mr. Carlson’s central argument that immigration to the United States “drives down wages for low-skilled workers nationwide,” as he said in a 2019 segment. …  While some studies have found that earlier waves of low-skill immigration may have had short-term impacts on the wages of one relatively small group — high school dropouts — other studies have found “small to zero effects,” as a landmark analysis by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine stated in 2017.

That quote — “small to zero effects” — is cherrypicked from a paragraph on page 248 of the report which actually says many Americans can lose wages due to migration:

Thus, the evidence suggests that groups [of Americans] comparable to the immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply, although there are still a number of studies that suggest small to zero effects.

The commission declined to state the dollar value of the 5.2 percent immigration tax. But commission member George Borjas, a Harvard economist, calculated the value of the tax at $500 billion a year. Nearly all of that $500 billion immigration tax is paid by American employees to their employers and investors because their wages are lowered by the increased supply of workers jostling and competing for jobs.

President Joe Biden's poll rating on immigration has slipped down to 35 percent, according to a survey by the Associated Press. https://t.co/3HrQZxenu8

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) October 1, 2021

Since the 2016 report reluctantly admitted the obvious, numerous other people — White House advisors, academics, politicians, executives, op-ed writers, staffers, and advocates — have acknowledged that immigration cuts wages.

So the NYT also tried to undercut Carlson by slamming his management of reporters at the Daily Caller, where this journalist carefully covered the “Gang of Eight” amnesty push in 2013 and 2014.

The NYT wrote:

At the start of Mr. Obama’s second term, a bipartisan group of senators known as the Gang of Eight tried to resurrect immigration reform. Mr. Carlson was already known to his staff as an immigration hawk; in office debates, he would sometimes invoke Lewiston as a kind of personal turning point, telling colleagues that he had watched Somali refugees ruin the city … Though Mr. Carlson allowed The Caller’s pro-immigration writers free rein, the site’s news coverage of immigration reform, led by a reporter named Neil Munro, was relentlessly hostile. Mr. [Stephen] Miller and his allies on the Hill fed Mr. Munro a steady diet of tips and story suggestions. The Caller’s audience loved it.

[…]

But The Caller’s immigration coverage set off intense debates among writers and editors there, reflecting the battle that would soon remake the Republican Party itself. One former writer recalled filing pieces about immigration that would come back from editors with supportive quotes stripped out. Some Caller staff members viewed Mr. Munro’s news articles as little more than opinion columns, with an obvious slant and often factual problems. Mr. Patel, himself an immigrant, pushed editors for more balanced coverage; Mr. Carlson, though, usually defended Mr. Munro’s stories, and plainly agreed with them, as did many of The Caller’s younger employees, former staff members said. On a group email list for editors, one argument culminated in a frustrated message from a longtime editor, Jamie Weinstein, asking whether The Caller now had an official editorial position against immigration.”

The NYT did not call this reporter for comment before describing my work for Carlson as “relentlessly hostile … little more than opinion columns, with an obvious slant and often factual problems.”

The NYT‘s claims are wrong. For example, one article by this reporter was initially criticized by pro-migration reporters at TheDC — but was subsequently confirmed when Democratic staffers changed the text of the bill:

The amendment is likely a response to concerns first raised by TheDC’s Neil Munro.

This strikes me as a good sign the Gang of Eight is listening to its critics, and is open to improving the bill.

Typically, my immigration articles were focused on government-provided analysis and data, the bill’s language, establishment polls, or the statements of pro-migration advocates.

The NYT also wrote that Carlson’s business partner, “Mr. [Neil] Patel, himself an immigrant, pushed editors for more balanced coverage.” Okay, but the NYT ignored the equally irrelevant fact that this author is also an immigrant, or more precisely, a former immigrant and current citizen.

More importantly, Patel is a long-time leader of a group that is seeking green cards for hundreds of thousands of Indian contract workers who have taken jobs, careers, and wealth from myriad U.S. graduates. This author has spent many months describing the group’s lobbying and showing the harmful impact of the contract workers on American graduates.

The NYT was correct — but also coy — when it said that “The Caller’s immigration coverage set off intense debates among writers and editors there, reflecting the battle that would soon remake the Republican Party itself.”

The newspaper coyly failed to note that the debates were also brief.

The debates were brief because the pro-migration advocates in Carlson’s newsroom tried to hide the evidence that mass migration does much pocketbook damage to the wages and wealth of ordinary Americans. Like the New York Times, their repeated claims that America was “a Nation of Immigrants” — or that more migration would expand the economy for Wall Street — did little to persuade anyone in the room.

It did little because the listening reporters and interns were more interested in the pocketbook and economic-class evidence offered by Carlson’s immigration reformers. Their evidence showed how migration cuts wages and spikes housing costs for the young — while it fattens the investment portfolios and real-estate holdings of many Baby Boomers, progressives, Fortune 500 executives, company owners, and their fortunate sons and daughters.

The mass migration lobby, with financial ties to billionaire George Soros, is using Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to demand the United States open its borders to refugees from across Eastern Europe. https://t.co/RJXyJkrnwo

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) February 25, 2022

The evidence was increasingly shared among and by the GOP’s voters, partly because President Barack Obama refused to enforce the nation’s popular and pro-American immigration laws. In turn, those voters collectively killed the Gang of Eight amnesty in 2014 by defenestrating the GOP’s business-backed, pro-amnesty leader, Rep. Eric Cantor, in his Virginia primary election.

A Daily Caller poll served as one factor in Virginia’s invigorating exercise of democracy. The poll question was suggested by one of Carlson’s staffers, and it revealed that “eight days before polling day on June 10, Cantor had firm support from 40 percent of 583 active primary voters, while challenger Dave Brat has firm support from 28 percent of those voters.” That poll evidence of Cantor’s weakness helped boost the activists’ confidence in Brat’s insurgent campaign — and that confidence helped to create the upstart victory.

Since Carlson’s open, fair, and undirected newsroom debates in 2013 and 2014, and amid much work by mainstream media outlets, Americans have far advanced in their long-delayed reckoning with the 1964 and 1990s immigration expansions.

Understandably, primary and national voters have had to shove the immigration debate over the establishment’s security guards in the media and into the center of the nation’s politics. Or, as the New York Times resentfully describes it in 2022, “Mr. Trump ran for president and won, thrusting anti-immigration fervor to the heart of American politics.”

Trump’s 2016-2020 populist pressure against migration — and now Biden’s invited migration — have pushed many media-hidden aspects of migration into the public square. The reckoning with those secrets may soon crystalize a national consensus for higher wages by lower migration.

Those once-hidden secrets of migration include the establishment’s colonial-style Extraction Migration strategy, the decades-long Cheap Labor Bubble, the Coastal Migration Subsidy, the Green Card Workforce, the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy, immigration’s impact on housing and productivity, the Catch and Release Network, the Mayorkas Escalator, and the investors’ shameful preference for stoop labor:

Carolina has been harvesting Ventura County radishes for the last 18 years. She has a lot of experience and is very fast. Her co-workers say she is a champion. #WeFeedYou pic.twitter.com/qxGLe68Wu4

— United Farm Workers (@UFWupdates) April 3, 2022

Other exposed aspects of migration include the cooperation between federal agencies and the drug cartels, the destructive workplace politics of visa workers, the huge death toll inflicted by progressives’ narcissistic policies, the likely triumph of populist pocketbook voting over investors’ race-based appeals for greater immigration, the irrelevance of race and ethnicity, the economic damage inflicted on poor countries, immigration’s damage to national exports, and the Fortune 500’s debilitating use of visa workers to subordinate professionals’ priorities to their stock-option rewards.

And, amusingly, the turmoil has exposed the near-complete inability of proud professional journalists to escape their editors’ forced suppression of any debate over the economics of migration. Their powerlessness is displayed by their silence as government-directed labor inflation displaces and impoverishes their economic class — and their siblings, college friends, and children.

These Twittering journalists remain silent even though President Joe Biden and part of his divided White House, Jeff Bezos’ editors at the Washington Post, and hired-gun immigration lobbyists, admit that migration hurts Americans’ wages.

It would be easy to blame the NYT‘s reporter, Nicholas Confessore, for the missed hit on Tucker Carlson. However, he works in a newspaper whose national editor is an exemplar of the progressives’ disdain for the decent mutual obligations of citizenship.

The editor, Jia Lynn Yang, has shown herself to be a fervent advocate for importing unsullied immigrants to redeem Americans’ homeland from Americans’ sins, whatever the economic damage to Americans. In her 2020 pro-migration book, titled “One Mighty and Irresistible Tide,” Yang wrote:

The image of the Statue of Liberty, the Emma Lazarus poem at the statue’s base, the notion of America as an eternal “nation of immigrants,” — these make up an intoxicating part of this country’s mythology. Set against all the sins of America’s past — from slavery to the removal and genocide of American Indians — the arrival of open-hearted immigrants, grateful for a chance at a new life on our shores serves as a constant renewal of hope in the American project. If there is salvation for this country, it very well may lie in the underlying gratitude of a refugee whose life has been saved by the granting of a visa.

Yang’s parents migrated from Taiwan, and she wants to mobilize migrants to transform America — quickly and permanently — regardless of Americans’ concerns:

For those Americans who want ethnic pluralism to be a foundation value of their nation, there is unfinished work. The current generation of immigrants and children of immigrants — like those who came before us — must articulate a new vision for the current era, one that embraces rather than elides how far America has drifted from its European roots. If [immigrants] do not, their opponents can simply point out to the America of the last fifty years as a demographic aberration, and they would not be wrong.

“It’s a choice,” Yang told a friendly interviewer from Goldman Sachs, adding, “That’s the thing, I think, we have to collectively talk about and deal with together as a democracy.”

Breitbart News — and Carlson — are leading that full, fair, and democratic talk because they are following the money as it is diverted away from ordinary Americans. 

Follow Neil Munro on Twitter.