{"id":67858,"date":"2024-10-02T14:22:20","date_gmt":"2024-10-02T21:22:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=67858"},"modified":"2024-10-02T14:22:20","modified_gmt":"2024-10-02T21:22:20","slug":"immigration-misinformation-targets-decisive-u-s-latino-vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=67858","title":{"rendered":"Immigration Misinformation Targets Decisive U.S. Latino Vote"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Selen Ozturk<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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If not countered, misinformation targeting immigrants and Latinos will be make-or-break this election year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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If not countered, misinformation targeting immigrants and Latinos will be make-or-break this election year.<\/p>\n

Although the political use of immigration as a scapegoat for hate is nothing new, the Latino vote \u2014 the largest-growing U.S. voter demographic, with currently 36.2 million Latinos representing\u00a015%<\/a>\u00a0of all eligible voters \u2014 able to decide elections in large states like California, Texas and Florida, and swing states like Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin and North Carolina.<\/p>\n

At a Thursday, September 26 panel held by CAL\u00d3 News and the Latino Media Collaborative, ethnic media leaders explained the trending misinformation tactics used to undermine electoral trust among Latinos, and discussed ways to fight this misinformation.<\/p>\n

\u2018Undermining the voice of a decisive vote\u2019<\/h2>\n

\u201cMillions of immigrants are living quietly in harmony with native-born residents. We\u2019re neighbors, co-workers and friends, and we\u2019re caring for each other across racial, ethnic and bipartisan lines \u2014 yet we rarely see those stories on the front page,\u201d said Jessica Gonz\u00e1lez, co-CEO of Free Press.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead, we see stories that exploit and demonize immigrants. We see the lie that non-citizen immigrants are voting in droves, fabrications about Haitian immigrants, false claims such as that the U.S. election will be extended this year,\u201d she continued. \u201cThe intent is to scare voters of color from the polls, to pander to anti-immigrant sentiment by stirring up fear \u2026 and to legitimize authoritarian power-grabs by sowing distrust in our electoral process.\u201d<\/p>\n

A 2024 Free Press\u00a0poll<\/a>\u00a0of 3,000 Americans found that 79% were \u201cconcerned that the information they see online is fake, false or a deliberate attempt to confuse people,\u201d while 76% were concerned about 2024 presidential election misinformation.<\/p>\n

\u201cI became politically active organizing 10,000 students to march out of LAUSD schools during the \u201990s in California\u2019s Prop 187 era,\u201d said Jennie Carre\u00f3n, principal of public affairs firm Carre\u00f3n Group. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to believe that it passed. It denied undocumented immigrants access to public education and social services, and it also required police to report and verify the immigration status of all individuals.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThankfully, Prop 187 was struck down by the courts, but 30 years later, here we are hearing the same anti-immigration stories, but this time it\u2019s at a national level,\u201d she added. \u201cLatino voter misinformation is undermining the voice of a decisive vote in 2024 \u2026 and we need to show its impact in a digestible way, so that a generation of new voters doesn\u2019t feel so apprehensive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trending misinformation<\/h2>\n

\u201cThese messages with the purpose of creating hate and fear are no longer just about undocumented immigrants. We\u2019re now seeing attacks on legal immigrants \u2014 such as DACA and other legal pathway programs, and recently the Springfield, Ohio Haitian community, most of whom had Temporary Protected Status,\u201d said Vanessa C\u00e1rdenas, executive director of\u00a0America\u2019s Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In tracking media coverage of immigration reform, America\u2019s Voice found two common ideas behind these attacks, she explained, the first being a \u201creplacement theory \u2026 that immigrants are here to replace \u2018real\u2019 Americans and ineligible immigrants are going to vote in our election, seeding doubt as to whether we can trust the outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n

State-led investigations by Republican and Democratic officials, news organizations,<\/p>\n

law enforcement and universities have found that noncitizen voting is extraordinarily rare.<\/p>\n

For instance, a 2016\u00a0Brennan Center<\/a>\u00a0survey of 44 election administrators overseeing 23.5 million votes across 42 states saw 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting \u2014 or .0001% of all votes.<\/p>\n

A state-led audit of 1.1 million ballots in Nevada that same year identified three noncitizens who had voted, amounting to .0003% of all votes.<\/p>\n

A 2020 state investigation in Ohio referred 104 cases of alleged noncitizen voter registration and 13 cases of alleged noncitizen voting for prosecution; because the latter would amount to .00016% of all votes, Ohio\u2019s own secretary of state\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0\u201cvoter fraud is exceedingly rare.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second idea behind trending misinformation \u201cpits Latinos who\u2019ve been in the U.S. for generations against new migrants \u2026 through a notion of scarcity, crime and racial tensions, particularly in communities in blue cities, like New York, where migrants were sent from Texas,\u201d C\u00e1rdenas explained. \u201cThese narratives are setting the stage for the idea that it is okay to deport people en masse because these folks are not desirable, not American.\u201d<\/p>\n

Economists\u00a0estimate<\/a>\u00a0that a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, of the kind proposed by Donald Trump\u2019s 2024 presidential campaign, would entail economic losses between $711 billion and $1.7 trillion, at 2023 levels.<\/p>\n

Given a removal of 11 million people, this would entail a shrinking of the U.S. economy between 2.6% and 6%.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason why so many undocumented immigrants are coming to the U.S. is because the U.S. has destabilized their economy and governments,\u201d added Anshantia Oso, senior director of Black history project Media 2070. \u201cU.S. foreign policy is a pull factor for immigrants to come to the U.S., and our political candidates are manipulating ideas of scarcity to keep the population scared and divided.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fighting misinformation<\/h2>\n

\u201cIn having conversation with folks who may be repeating this misinformation, it\u2019s important to understand what their concerns actually are,\u201d Oso continued. \u201cOften, political rhetoric plays on valid concerns around housing, jobs or finances \u2026 and it\u2019s not about being anti-immigrant, but having a government that\u2019s actually going to work for us. We need to speak to those concerns and point towards actual solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

A demographically representative Harvard Kennedy School poll found that 49% of Americans were exposed to some form of misinformation intervention, like social media fact-checking.<\/p>\n

However, these interventions triggered significantly polarized responses between Democrats, who supported the intervention overall, and Republicans, who opposed content evaluation on the grounds that it was biased.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne approach to countering disinformation is not getting bogged down in tackling specific claims, but rather exposing their motives of division,\u201d said Roberta Braga, founder and executive director of Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA).<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have to correct the record on every single thing we see. Instead, we should focus on changing the conversation by telling real stories about the impact of deportation policies,\u201d she continued, \u201cand by telling stories about what a functional migration system would look like by telling immigrant success stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe issue is that fighting misinformation doesn\u2019t work the same way for everyone,\u201d said Braga. \u201cSomeone who believes one in 15 lies may need a fact check, but someone who believes 14 out of 15 lies, that\u2019s not what they\u2019ll respond to. Beyond content-oriented factors, we need to consider the real day-to-day concerns that people have.\u201d<\/p>\n

A June 2024 DDIA\u00a0poll<\/a>\u00a0found that most Latinos targeted by misinformation don\u2019t outright believe it. Among the 3,000 Latino adults polled, 62% were either unsure of, or rejected, media misinformation claims.<\/p>\n

Although the DDIA findings, like the Harvard Kennedy School poll, saw consistent correlation of Republican party affiliation with \u201clower levels of trust and confidence that one\u2019s vote will count,\u201d low trust in the system wasn\u2019t correlated with voter turnout for Latinos.<\/p>\n

In other words, many Latinos less likely to perceive their vote to matter would still vote despite this ambivalence.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a large group of Latino voters out there that are undecided or ambivalent, and I think that\u2019s where we should be spending most of our time sharing our information and ideas,\u201d C\u00e1rdenas said. \u201cThese are people that we could really move to our side.\u201d<\/p>\n

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This resource is supported in whole or in part by funding provided by the State of California, administered by the\u00a0California State Library<\/a>\u00a0in partnership with the\u00a0California Department of Social Services<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs<\/a>\u00a0as part of the\u00a0Stop the Hate<\/a>\u00a0program. To report a hate incident or hate crime and get support, go to\u00a0CA vs Hate<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BySelen Ozturk Oct 1, 2024 If...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67858"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67859,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67858\/revisions\/67859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}