Jason Song of the Los Angeles Times offers "For an illegal immigrant, getting into UCLA was the easy part" (link), a PIIPP-like story of a woefully unprepared illegal alien's trials and tribulations raising money to attend that school. It has some of the components of other PIIPPs, such as her worries about no one being willing to hire her for her chosen profession after she graduates due to her status. However, unlike other such articles it doesn't advocate for the DREAM Act or similar.
What the article does unwittingly disclose is the anti-American lunacy of UCLA's selection process, under which a very under-qualified student with a (to them) compelling story deprived much more qualified Americans of a spot at a highly-regarded school. Song didn't look into that angle, despite how easy it would have been to find a U.S. citizen with better grades and higher test scores who'd been rejected by UCLA during the same period. Song could then look into their trials and tribulations, and whether any of them were forced to attend lower-ranked schools. For extra credit, Song could have asked the Mexican consulate how they'd feel if an underqualified American student had deprived better qualified Mexican students of educations at a Mexican university.
Obviously, Song isn't that type of reporter, and the LAT isn't that type of paper. Their goal is to print heart-warming tales designed to mainstream massive illegal activity and promote unworkable, anti-American policies.
I'm going to outsource discussing the rest to this and to this. Note that neither article bothers to mention the name of the reporter, and the latter link from Patterico is, as could be expected, little more than demagoguery.
Tue, 02/03/2009 - 09:47 · Importance: 4