Politics and immigrants

There’s a certain irony to reading a New York Times article about the irrelevancy of the Web to Iowa caucus-goers online. The article proclaims that old media live on in Iowa, where the age demographic of those who will vote in the caucus are older than in other states. There are plenty of anecdotal examples of Iowa voters who say they prefer television, newspapers, radio and magazines, and a statistic from an Iowa newspaper backs up this claim. The article also questions the campaign managers for several of the presidential candidates, but it does not overdo the questioning by including every candidates’ media strategies in Iowa. The balance results in an interesting article that can be consumed quickly—before readers decide to click onto the next website or blog.

Looking at local elections, The Boston Globe writes about the increasing importance of reaching out to immigrant communities in Quincy’s city council elections. The article starts out seeming surprising: it reports that candidates are bringing Cantonese translators to their debates, but says nine percent of Quincy’s voters are Asian, which seems like a small number. Later, the article reveals that there are 17,000 Asians in Quincy, which is 20 percent of the population, a number that seems more substantial. The article does well to situate this trend in terms of the history of immigrant groups’ adjustment to Massachusetts politics, explaining that it took over a hundred years for Italian and Irish immigrants to elect a politician from their community.

The Washington Post offers commentary on Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize, but it seems to present it in the guise of a news story. The article appears in the Politics section, not Opinion, but it suggests that Gore’s Nobel was politically motivated and proposes more directly that Gore’s loss in the 2000 presidential election ended up bringing him more success than Bush’s victory. The article does include quotes from the Bush administration to contradict what the reporter suggests, but the overall tone of the article is clearly biased. I agree with everything it suggests, but this is not a news story and should not be presented as such.

A thoughtful article in The International Herald Tribune raises questions about global issues of citizenship. The story of Mohsin Hamid, a novelist of Pakistani birth, could apply to any Muslim immigrant. The interview with Hamid reveals that he feels more accepted in the U.S. than in Europe, particularly London, where he lives now with a British passport. Given London’s huge Muslim population, this seems surprising, but the article represents Hamid’s situation as indicative of European attitudes in general, which are reluctant to accept foreigners as one of their own.