by Joel Millman
Millman is a correspondent in The Wall Street Journal's Mexico City bureau and the author of The Other Americans: How Immigrants Renew Our Country, Our Economy, and Our Values.

Every now and again a reporter sees a story that tells him what it is like to be an angry reader or viewer, incensed by the media's bone-headed misinterpretation of a community, an event, or a trend that he actually knows something about. For me, such a story ran a year ago in the U.S. edition of The Financial Times. On December 16, under the headline boston residents unsettled by influx, reporter Victoria Griffith described Framingham, Massachusetts as a town besieged. The threat, she explained, rose from the thousands of Brazilian immigrants who have inundated the "white-picket-fence" town of 65,000 in recent years.

"The rising foreign population in a place such as Framingham seems almost a recipe for conflict, as middle-class Americans -- many of whom thought they were opting for homogeneity by moving to the suburbs -- are thrown into contact with people from very different cultures," Griffith reported. "The local police department said crime has surged 27 percent in Framingham over the last three years, when crime in Massachusetts as a whole has declined."

In the FT version, Framingham's white middle class was on the run, fleeing a swarthy polyglot. This conjecture was supported by another, from a man named Thomas Moore who had recently sold his Framingham home: "Although he says the rise of the immigrant population had nothing to do with his decision, he thought many middle-class families are nervous about sending their children to school with so many immigrants."

In fact, Framingham's crime rate has been plummeting, with rates for some offenses down to twenty-year lows. The local Middlesex News reported that eight weeks before the FT story ran. Commercial real estate vacancies in the town had fallen to just 4 percent (a tenth of the rate five years before), something The New York Times reported the previous May. And, while immigrant children and the costs associated with providing bilingual education are real issues in Framingham, residential property values are rising, an indication that the middle class is buying in, not selling out.

Framingham's Brazilian immigrants are responsible for driving crime out of a formerly abandoned downtown. Their new shops fill the commercial strip that, in the early 1990s, had more empty storefronts than for-profit businesses. Better yet, the most successful of the arrivals have started buying homes.

Framingham is my hometown, and its recent run of immigrant prosperity figured in a chapter of a book I wrote on America's new immigrants, published in 1997. As in most communities, immigration has been good for Framingham, even if many people can't believe it.

So, why the negative story in the FT? Reporter Griffith did not respond to requests for an explanation. Her editor, Peter Martin, wrote from London that the paper's calculation of a 27 percent rise in crime was based on statistics Griffith got from local cops.

But, without setting a timetable for the Brazilians' arrival (they began coming in the mid-1980s), Griffith described a crime wave unfolding between 1994 and 1996 -- years falling smack in the middle of a dramatic drop in overall crime. Burglaries, for example, fell from 592 in 1990 to 347 last year. While they did rise (from 431 to 485) between 1994 and 1996, the years the FT chose to focus on, they immediately dropped the following year -- by more than 25 percent.

Framingham police chief Brent Larrabee says he has no idea how the FT could have calculated an extreme rise in crime. "We have a commuter-crime problem here, not an immigrant-crime problem." He explains that car theft has indeed surged, but that could be explained not by the rise of immigrants but by the re-opening after two years of Shoppers World, a vast mall whose parking lots have long been a hunting ground for auto thieves.

The report on Framingham was shoddy, but it is hardly unique. Why do so many journalists play immigration as a here-comes-trouble story?

Yes, perhaps a quarter of the million who have been coming here annually in recent years either snuck into the country or stuck around after their tourist or student visas expired. But the vast majority followed the rules. The last census, in 1990, counted 19.7 million foreign-born persons in the U.S., 34 percent more than in 1980. The number climbed to 25.8 million in 1997, according to the Census Bureau. And yes, some Americans are uncomfortable with changes in their towns and neighborhoods.

Still, reporters too often find nativist arguments, even bigotry, then "explain" them with facts that show the antipathy is rational. While the intentions may be well-meaning -- and honest, to the extent that some real people's real sentiments are quoted -- the effort breaks down when it leaves out facts that complicate and contradict the fears and resentments and simple prejudice.

Thus, we get the "Balkanized Society" stories, which tell how new immigrants are frightening native-born Americans into flight. But these stories tend to ignore inconvenient facts and present an immigration spin that is not warranted. Or they fail to do basic reporting.

Take, for example, USA Today's lead story of October 13, 1997 about Zip Code 11373 in Queens, New York. Reporter Susan Page opens with the explanation that it is statistically the most diverse neighborhood in America, with immigrants from 123 countries. "The corner bodega has a faded sign in the window announcing the grocery's willingness to accept checks from the federal nutrition program for needy pregnant women," she writes. "A steady stream of students heads to school."

This short description is immediately followed with a quote from one of the country's more outspoken anti-immigrant commentators, Peter Brimelow of the National Review:

‘The kids that we see on the street have been educated at the expense of the American taxpayer,' Brimelow says. The influx of immigrant children has overwhelmed schools and prompted native-born Americans to endure long commutes to work so their children can attend suburban schools instead. ‘You can't show that it benefits the Americans on the whole to have this presence here,' he says.

You can't? Is there another side? Reporter Page doesn't investigate. Nowhere in her 1,700-word piece do readers learn anything about the welfare or employment rates in Zip Code 11373, the number of new businesses that have been opened since the immigrant influx began, or the amount of taxes locals pay to support the many services their children require. Nor do they learn anything about local school test scores or graduation rates, or hear from any of those parents said to have chosen the suburbs.

A data box did run with the piece, telling that the median household income in the Zip Code is $36,382. That is less than $300 below the national median, and it suggests that the cost/ benefit ratio in zip code 11373 is just fine, although we have no additional reporting on that point. Just the flat opinion of a critic who asserts that he knows the score.

Sometimes the false anti-immigrant spin slips in with editing. In May the the Los Angeles Times's Orange County edition ran an article under the headline tb cases in county are up 21 percent. The alarming subhead stated that "Officials attribute last year's surge to immigration trends and better reporting. The number fell 7 percent nationwide in that time." Who could blame the casual reader for suspecting an immigrant-borne TB epidemic might be incubating nearby?

But it isn't. The 21 percent rise in 1997 amounted to fifty-seven cases of tuberculosis, this in a county with a population of 2 million. More important, as with Framingham's crime figures, Orange County's TB caseload had been dropping, as the article -- but not the headline -- explained. Officials, the piece said, "noted that the figures are still far lower than the high of 430 reported in 1993." In other words, despite massive immigration, tuberculosis is less of a problem in Orange County than it had been. And at the end of the story the Times noted that through the first third of 1998, TB cases were down from the year before.

As treacherous as statistics can be, reporters don't always avoid immigration pitfalls by hitting the streets. Elsa Arnett of Knight Ridder's Washington bureau presented a skein of urban ills in a piece that appeared in some of the chain's papers last February. In The Seattle Times it ran under a headline home-grown residents fleeing immigrants. She started this way: "A few immigrants move into a neighborhood, often huddled together in homes meant for one family." Then, "Unfamiliar music echoes in the streets, and strange foods appear in the groceries."

From there, it gets worse: "Public schools become crowded with children who speak many languages. Ordering a pizza becomes a hassle because the clerks can barely understand English. Some residents lose their jobs, replaced by immigrants who will work for lower wages . . . . In cities like Miami and Los Angeles, speaking Spanish can become a job requirement. Some people seek refuge by running."

The message couldn't be clearer: "Bar the Door! The Immigrants Are Coming!" Yet while the reporter cites several "immigration experts," nowhere is there a real American who lost a job or, for that matter, failed to communicate an order for pizza.

Instead, we hear from people who just don't like immigrants. In San Gabriel, California, a man named Cloyd Moody gripes that his hometown "used to be a white, middle-class bedroom community. Now you go down the main street and virtually every store sign is written in that Oriental chicken-scratching."

To balance such sentiments, Arnett could have found out -- as I did in researching my book -- that the town's middle class is now much richer and better educated, on average, than it was before the town emerged as a haven for Taiwanese-born Americans.

A few miles away, Arnett finds a forty-one-year old African-American woman fleeing South Central because of all the "Latinos." South Central, Arnett writes, has "changed from a middle-class black community to a lower-income Latino one." No mention is made of the Crips, Bloods, the Rodney King riots, or any suggestion -- even if the sources don't raise them -- that something other than "immigration" might drive people from South Central.

This kind of breakdown often occurs in the "Balkanized America" form of national-trend story, even when the form includes "experts." For readers with a betting instinct, here's a lock: wherever you find a Balkanized America story, be sure that a quote from University of Michigan demographer William Frey is coming, probably before the jump.

Elsa Arnett's piece quotes from Professor Frey, as do dozens more that surfaced in a Nexis search of major newspapers. From Jonathan Tilove and Joe Hallinan's concerned immigrants spur latest white flight (The New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 8, 1993) to William Booth's contemplative one nation, indivisible: is it history? (The Washington Post, February 22, 1998), journalists have swooned to the findings of this researcher.

In the page-one Post piece, reporter Booth quotes Frey: "For every Mexican who comes to Los Angeles, a white native-born leaves."

That quote is meant to support the reporter's thesis, stated in the next paragraph, that "this is an entirely new kind of ‘white flight,' whereby whites are not just fleeing the city centers for the suburbs, but also leaving the region and often the state."

Using comparative figures from the last two censuses, 1980 and 1990, Frey determined that in the top immigrant-receiving states (including California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and Illinois), some 3.3 million recent immigrants arrived while some 3.6 native Americans departed. But his work, while intriguing, is far from conclusive.

"What Frey never makes clear is causality," argues Frank Sharry of the National Immigration Forum, a Washington-based pro-immigration group. "He says in the early 1990s white people left California because of the immigrants. But people were leaving California because the economy tanked. Now that they're coming back in droves, you don't see him saying people are moving to be nearer the immigrants."

People may leave the states that Frey cites for any number of reasons. For one, since America is aging, more are decamping to the Sunbelt. For another, technology has allowed more educated professionals to choose to live and work in more bucolic settings. Frey's findings, too, could reflect another brand of prejudice than the anti-immigrant kind: the color and diversity some white Americans are fleeing may be home-grown.

Frey himself seems somewhat at odds with the way his studies have been presented in the mainstream press. "It is not true that ‘Balkanization' is largely a result of white flight," he wrote me in an exchange of e-mails. "My studies show some whites (and blacks) certainly are leaving high immigration regions because of prejudice, but these are a small segment. Others are leaving because there are better employment opportunities in non-immigrant regions, such as small cities and rural areas."

He also sounded a hopeful note. Continued immigration, he said, would also mean "high intermarriage, eventual residential integration with young, vibrant populations, which will experience the usual interracial conflict but also eventual assimilation." That's just about the opposite of what Booth predicted in The Washington Post.

Another widely-quoted academic is George Borjas, a sociologist at Harvard's Kennedy School. Among other things, Borjas is the chief source for stories that show a marked rise of recent immigrants receiving welfare.

He is often quoted as saying that 21 percent of the country's foreign-born residents get some form of public assistance, versus about 7 percent of native households. Those figures are challenged by other academics -- but almost never by reporters -- for mixing two sets of immigrant groups to make one misleading statistic. Borjas himself recently noted that the difference between acceptance of public assistance in native-born and immigrant households is negligible when the immigrants are Mexican, Korean, Haitian, Filipino, or Western European -- groups who make up more than 80 percent of all U.S. immigrants. Households where welfare use does soar are found among arrivals from Cuba, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, the former Soviet Union, Laos, and Cambodia -- with rates reaching nearly 50 percent in the last two groups. There is a reason. Except for the Dominicans, most of the immigrants arriving from these countries are classified as "refugees," with the majority receiving welfare and other assistance as a condition of their resettlement.

"Very few papers even have a reporter dedicated to the immigration beat" complains Ying Chan, a free-lance writer who has spent more than two decades covering immigration. Part of that time she was at the New York Daily News, where she won a Polk Award for investigating the smuggling of human cargo by Chinatown gangs. Before that, gangs covered her -- with death threats -- when she worked as a reporter and an editor at the Center Daily News in Chinatown.

While the immigrant press should be a fertile ground for recruitment, and an antidote to myopic coverage, only a handful of immigrant journalists have entered the mainstream. Most papers rely on metro-desk reporters to cover the beat. Some of them tend to see immigrants as a glaring reminder of an urban underclass that seems to be further victimized by competition with immigrants. "Journalists say, think, and write horrible and inappropriate things about immigrants, particularly Latinos, that our liberal sensitivities would never allow us to say, think, or write about blacks," says Ruben Navarrette, Jr., who has covered immigration for The Arizona Republic.

Still, some excellent work is being done, and more papers are adding regular immigration reporters.

Garry Pierre-Pierre of The New York Times stands out for his coverage of the Haitian and West Indian communities, while Peter Canellos of The Boston Globe has written engagingly of how ambitious, often highly-educated immigrants from Asia adapt to the opportunities of the new service economy. George Ramos, writing last December in the Los Angeles Times, showed great enterprise in reporting on immigrant assimilation and the rise of a new Latino middle class.

Abigail Goldman, in a front-page Los Angeles Times story in November '97 headlined a hidden advantage for some job seekers, performed an excellent service. Rather than portray African-Americans as the pushed-aside victims, and immigrants as the workaholics doing the pushing, she describes the realities behind the cliches.

Goldman portrays two residents from the same poor Los Angeles community as they approach the job market. Flossie Bradford, 19, a single mother on welfare, was contrasted with Pablo Cifuntas, 47, an immigrant from Mexico. In careful, probing prose, the reporter laid out the structural realities for both job-seekers: Flossie had never known a family member who worked on a steady basis; Pablo had no shortage of family and friends who not only knew how to work, but also how to get him introduced to the bosses doing the hiring.

Nor did Goldman skirt the negatives on both sides: that Cifuntas is working in the underground economy (she doesn't say whether he arrived in the U.S. legally) and that Bradford dropped out of a local job-training program a few months after joining.

While also consulting the academics, Goldman went an extra mile to explain how even small things in a household make the difference between who can climb the ladder and who never seems to find the first rung. Mexicans, she wrote, "were far less likely than poor African Americans to have had their phones and electricity shut off for lack of payment or to have been evicted. Almost half of the immigrants had savings accounts, compared to not quite a third of poor blacks . . . A higher proportion of people in Mexican households and neighborhoods were wage earners, meaning more sources of money to help tide a family over during a tough month and more sources of information to solve financial problems."

Rather than showing two halves of an urban community in conflict, the story revealed something more subtle: two parallel communities, with very different problems, between which little contact is being made.

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