Why Can't CNN Tell The Truth About Immigration

CNN delivers another fraudulent 'fact check' on immigration and it backfires.

CNN appears to have botched a recent correction of President Donald Trump on the hot-button issue of immigration.

A “fact check” article titled “Your complete guide to tariffs: How much you’ll pay, and when,” made unfounded assertions about immigration to negate the president’s points on tariffs.

The article said “And Trump has repeatedly (and incorrectly) said that “the tariff sheriff,” former President William McKinley, ushered in an era of American prosperity at the end of the 19th century by going all-in on tariffs. Though the US economy was growing strong in the 1890s, that was largely on the back of practically unrestricted immigration, among other factors.”

While the United States did experience a period of increased immigration in the latter part of the 1800s, it was not “unrestricted.”

“The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Alien Contract Labor laws of 1885 and 1887 prohibited certain laborers from immigrating to the United States. The general Immigration Act of 1882 levied a head tax of fifty cents on each immigrant and blocked (or excluded) the entry of idiots, lunatics, convicts, and persons likely to become a public charge,” the United States Customs and Immigration Service website states.

Notably, each of these laws reduced the inflow of unskilled labor primarily flowing to the railroads and heavy industry at the time.

The State Department’s Office of Historian website indicates that the flows of Chinese and other labor that came into the US before the 1880s suppressed working-class wages and decreased the working conditions of the extant laborers. “Non-Chinese laborers often required much higher wages to support their wives and children in the United States, and also generally had a stronger political standing to bargain for higher wages. Therefore many of the non-Chinese workers in the United States came to resent the Chinese laborers, who might squeeze them out of their jobs,” an entry on the State Department’s Milestones blog reads.

The Alien Contract Labor laws of 1885 forbid companies from bringing foreign labor into the country under contracts and it changed the profile of the type of immigrant that could enter the country. The law made exceptions for “for foreigners recruited to do domestic service, skilled workers needed to help establish a new trade or industry, professional artists, lecturers and actors,” a summary of the law provided by ImmigrationHistory.org says.

Aside from raising revenue from foreigners, the Immigration Act of 1882 forbade the type of immigrant that could be a burden to public services, a departure from the profiles of immigrants admitted entrance to the US, today. 54% of households headed by immigrants (naturalized citizens, legal residents, and illegal immigrants) used one or more major welfare programs, a 2022 Center for Immigration Studies study revealed.

The article does not attempt to explain why wages have largely been stagnant in the United States for decades years when America has experienced sustained waves of both legal and illegal immigration since the mid-1960s.

Many Texans might recall when Former Congresswoman and Civil Rights Icon Barbara Jordan (D-TX) chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform in 1994. During one speech she said, “The commission finds no national interest in continuing to import lesser skilled and unskilled workers to compete in the most vulnerable parts of our labor force. Many American workers do not have adequate job prospects. We should make their task easier to find employment, not harder.”

She recommended that levels of immigration be cut every year by around a third. Around thirty years later, her recommendations have not been implemented.

The 1880s were not the only decade where legislation was passed to throttle immigration. There was another round of immigration restrictions in the 1890s. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1891 which added further restrictions to contract labor and expanded the class of people that could be deported to include the insane, paupers and those suffering from infectious diseases, among others.

Although immigration laws were more lax in the North during the Civil War as the Union sought to spew a wave of manpower at the Confederacy— this is hardly a policy to be upheld as desirable. The indiscriminate and predatory recruitment of Irishmen and Germans took advantage of the unsuspecting enlistees and enabled war crimes against the South, as Cowtown Caller previously reported.

(READ MORE: Beware, America's Illegal Immigrant Army)

The remainder of the article, while more even-handed, failed to explore places where tariffs placed on steel and washing machines had been successful during his first term in office. Despite specifically discussing steel and appliance tariffs multiple times in the story, CNN does not consider whether the tariffs achieved the goals the 45th president laid out when he imposed them against China.

Even organizations typically antagonistic to Trump such as the leftist Brookings Institute conceded the efficacy of the steel and appliance tariffs imposed by the president in the late 2010s. A commentary from Jeffrey Gertz, a former Brookings Expert, on Brookings’ website concedes that Trump said he intended the tariffs to create American jobs and “[while ]it is difficult to pin down exact numbers, the tariffs on steel products appear to have helped create several thousand jobs in the steel industry; similarly, tariffs on washing machines are associated with approximately 1,800 new jobs at Whirlpool, Samsung, and LG factories in the US. In these specific industries, then, tariffs have probably been good for workers.”

The commentary later notes that these tariffs likely raised some consumer and labor prices, although in some places it is hard to quantify.

Misleading fact-checks on the 47th president appear to have become a feature of the corporate press, in recent years.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, the ABC presidential debate moderator was widely panned for repeatedly “fact-checking” the then-candidate with errant information including a claim that crime was going down in the United States.

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