National Public Radio’s This American Life promotes anti-immigrant propaganda
By
Eric London
13 December 2017
On December 8, National Public Radio (NPR) ran an episode of This American Life titled “Our Town,” which legitimized workplace raids against immigrants and justified tougher sanctions for employing undocumented workers.
The program’s host, Ira Glass, is not a far-right talk show host, but a favorite of affluent Democrats. His show has 2.2 million listeners.
The episode titled “Our Town” could very well have been aired on Breitbart Radio. Couched in the language of nationalist populism, the episode advanced an anti-immigrant agenda by blaming corporations for giving jobs to immigrants instead of US citizens.
In the episode, Glass describes Albertville, Alabama, a small town that is home to poultry processing plants, as having been overrun by immigrants. It “got a flood of outsiders,” Glass says, using the language of nativists to describe the influx of Latino workers seeking employment in the poultry plants as “immigrants pouring in,” “a ton of immigrants” and “tons of Mexican workers.”
Toward the beginning of the episode, Glass gives airspace to Roy Beck, the founder of NumbersUSA, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has denounced as part of the “nativist lobby.” Beck has spoken before the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens and is the protégé of the fascist anti-immigrant advocate John Tanton. Glass uncritically quotes Beck while introducing him simply as “the founder of a group called NumbersUSA.”
Glass then references the massive “SouthPAW” workplace immigration raids during which hundreds of agents descended on small southern towns in 1995 and deported 4,000 workers. PAW stands for “Protecting…