Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Mediating Mexicans: Immigrant news portrayals time can’t erase

Long lines of people receiving food

Volunteers distribute food to migrants who crossed into the U.S. from Mexico on June 14, 2024, in Jacumba Hot Springs, California.

Qian Weizhong/VCG via Getty Images

A recent cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz, winner of the Herblock Prize, shows a brown-skinned man standing at a street corner and holding a large homemade sign.

As a couple in a red Volkswagen approach, perhaps expecting to be confronted by a panhandler. They instead read: “Exhausted Immigrant: I don’t want money! Just a vacation from being blamed for everything bad in the U.S.A.! P.S. We Don’t Eat Pets.”

It’s comical and absurd. It’s also an accurate nod to the onslaught of xenophobic media representations that have bombarded this country for decades, well before the results of the recent presidential election and the threat of massive deportations by the incoming administration.


This brand of racism traces back to the founding of the republic, when diplomat, Founding Father and newspaper owner Benjamin Franklin openly expressed in 1751 that too many German immigrants would spoil the English-speaking colonial zeitgeist.

“Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion,” Franklin wrote.

Following this trail of rabid rhetoric through American media history matters, because as legendary media theoretician and critic James W. Carey expressed in 1974, journalism of a particular age represents the consciousness of the people of that time.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

While modern consumers remain enthralled with each pivotal technological media development, from the telegraph — the wonder of its age — to artificial intelligence, the troubling sameness of the messages gets less attention. The medium may be modern, but the rhetoric circulating through it is merely recycled from earlier eras.

As the granddaughter of immigrants, a former immigration reporter, and now a scholar and professor in higher education of news as an agent of democracy — including how it defines who is considered American — I’ve had a front row seat on the impact of immigrant hate rhetoric.

What’s startlingly different now is that xenophobia and anti-immigrant policy are decoupled from severe economic strife. The hard times of the Great Depression were the catalyst for a repatriation campaign that sent at least 500,000 jobless Mexicans and Mexican Americans “back” to Mexico, even though some had never set foot in Mexico.

Local and state governments were involved in this repatriation effort, even though immigration falls under federal jurisdiction.

Likewise, during the Great Recession, December 2007 to June 2009, several states once again intervened, passing sweeping laws to restrict immigration. Some of these, such as Arizona’s SB 1070, were overturned by the Supreme Court in whole or in part.

Today, the economy is booming, yet the scapegoating of immigrants continues. And yet again, state governments are increasingly involved. Between 2020 and 2024, state-level anti-immigrant legislative proposals have increased 357 percent, according to a new report by the League of United Latin American Citizens.

Despite the fact that nearly one-third of the United States was once part of Mexico, America’s southern neighbor has historically taken the brunt of nativist sentiment, even now when the latest asylum seekers are coming from further south, including Guatemala and Venezuela, as well as from other continents.

Latinos, a majority of whom are of Mexican descent, now number 65 million people and account for 19.5 percent of the U.S. population.

The epithets and other dehumanizing rhetoric surfacing today are a throughline to media representations of years ago. The idea that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” directly ties to the eugenics movement popular in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

It mirrors the 1930s rhetoric of Rep. John C. Box of Texas, whose references to Mexicans as “mongrels” and “menaces” and “inferior” were printed regularly in newspapers at the time, arguments used in support of forced sterilization of Mexicans. Box was one of the most ardent proponents of legislative measures to keep Mexicans out for lacking the genetic stock to make good Americans.

Likewise, William Randolph Hearst, the “owner of the biggest pile of newspapers in the world” in the 1930s, echoed Box’s hate rhetoric on the editorial pages of his newspaper chain. Hearst editorials referred to immigrants from Asia and Mexico as “vermin” and “undesirables,” suggesting that immigrants should be swept out of the country the way a farmer cleans his barn.

Even language on ostensibly neutral news pages was patronizing and riddled with words that dehumanized while evoking the danger posed by Mexican immigrants. A 1931 wire service story datelined Brownsville — a Texas border city — referred to Mexicans diminutively as “our little brown brother.”

The headline of that story described Mexicans as a menacing force of nature: “Tide Which Brought Thousands North Across Rio Grande Now Recedes, Aiding Immigration Problem.” And that problem had been created when “thousands of ‘wetbacks’ streamed across the Rio Grande, and remained,” the story said. An accompanying photo showed a Mexican driving a rustic mule-driven cart and carried the mocking caption: “Returning home ‘in style’.”

A 1951 five-part New York Times special project, known as “the wetback” series, helped bring this objectifying term to a national audience. Two years later, broadcaster Edward R. Murrow produced an episode of “See it Now,” a special report on “Mexican Wetbacks,” crediting the Times for its series.

Murrow’s program likened apprehended Mexican workers to fish, calling them the latest “catch.” The border patrol’s effort to stem illegal immigration was like trying “to scoop the tide off the page and pour it back into the ocean,” Murrow said.

The following year, in 1954, the Eisenhower administration initiated Operation Wetback, a heavily publicized deportation program that was more public relations effort than effective border control. Thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans from the U.S. were deported amid a post-Korean War recession.

To be sure, “wetback” is rarely seen in print today and has long been barred in newspaper stylebooks along with the term “illegal alien.” The words may have changed, but the sentiment and the objective remains the same. The media are modern, but today’s messages reveal an antiquated consciousness.

To forge an equitable and sound immigration policy, journalists, politicians and the public must excise loaded language and recognize immigrants as people, not mongrels, vermin or fish.

Garza is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana – Champaign, author of “They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression,” and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project.

Read More

Innovative Local Solutions Can Ease America’s Housing Crisis
aerial photography of rural
Photo by Breno Assis on Unsplash

Innovative Local Solutions Can Ease America’s Housing Crisis

Across the country, families are prevented from accessing safe, stable, affordable housing—not by accident, but by design. Decades of exclusionary zoning, racial discrimination, and disinvestment have created a housing system that works well for the wealthy but leaves others behind. Even as federal cuts to public housing programs continue nationwide, powerful, community-rooted efforts are pushing back and offering real, equity-driven solutions led by local voices.

Historically, states like New Jersey show what’s possible when legal advocacy and grassroots organizing come together. In 1975, the New Jersey Supreme Court’s Mount Laurel ruling established that every municipality in the state has a constitutional obligation to provide its fair share of affordable housing. This landmark legal ruling reshaped housing policy and set a national precedent. Today, organizations like Fair Share Housing Center continue to defend and expand this right, ensuring that local governments are prohibited from using zoning laws to exclude working-class families or people of color.

Keep ReadingShow less
Trump Welcomes Salvadoran President, Continuing To Collaborate With Far-Right World Leaders

WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 14: U.S. President Donald Trump meets with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador in the Oval Office of the White House April 14, 2025 in Washington, DC.

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Trump Welcomes Salvadoran President, Continuing To Collaborate With Far-Right World Leaders

WASHINGTON D.C. - President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would try to deport “as many as possible” immigrants or criminals to El Salvador. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele met with Trump at the White House to discuss the ongoing deportations of MS-13 and Tren de Aragua gang members to El Salvador’s notorious Center for Terrorism Confinement (CETOC).

Trump has now deported 238 individuals to El Salvador under the 1879 Alien Enemies Act without notice or due process of law. President Bukele has agreed to help Trump with his deportation goals and received $6 million from the White House to continue these efforts.

Keep ReadingShow less
Quiet Death of Dissent
woman in black hijab holding white and black printed board
Photo by Justin Essah on Unsplash

Quiet Death of Dissent

There is something particularly American about the way we're dismantling our democracy these days – we are doing it with paperwork. While the world watches our grand political theater, immigration agents are quietly canceling visas, filling out deportation orders, and reshaping the boundaries of acceptable speech without firing a single shot.

I think about Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and Columbia graduate who committed no crime beyond speaking his mind. I think about Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts whose academic career hangs by a thread. I think about the estimated 300 international students whose visas are under review or already revoked for daring to participate in First Amendment exercises on campus across the United States. These stories are not just about immigration status but about who is American enough to participate in its democracy and under what conditions.

Keep ReadingShow less
hundred dollar bills.
Getty Images, boonchai wedmakawand

Congress Bill Spotlight: Donald J. Trump $250 Bill Act

The Fulcrum introduces Congress Bill Spotlight, a weekly report by Jesse Rifkin, focusing on the noteworthy legislation of the thousands introduced in Congress. Rifkin has written about Congress for years, and now he's dissecting the most interesting bills you need to know about but that often don't get the right news coverage.

Trump reportedly tips his Mar-a-Lago groundskeepers with $100 bills. What if his own face appeared on them?

Keep ReadingShow less