I thought that Julia Preston’s piece was an extremely elegant and accessible look into the divisive choice that voters were making in regard to immigration policy during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. I found that the historical context, existing policies, the moral dilemma of immigration, misinformation, and ideological conflict of the issue were effectively condensed into an extremely easy-to-follow piece.

 

At a fundamental structural level, this article makes me think about the writing structure articles we are assigned for class. The piece starts with a lede that situates the reader in the present, and the most urgent issue of the article which is the impending decision that the American population had to make. Preston spotlights the central question which is that the views of Harris and Trump on immigration seem to have converged to a certain extent. However, she makes clear that this is only a surface level analysis of their take on border policy, and begins to delve into the main body of the article.

 

Once the reader has been taken through her outlining of migration policy history and each candidate’s vision, she returns to the starting idea of this decision–-one that initially seemed to be rooted in a clash of beliefs, but more fundamentally is established in “a battle of competence” between the two. I found that these insights really sorted out the questions I had about how different these administrations’ approaches to immigration were, and this wrapped the article up in a very neat way.

 

I do not believe that this piece is labelled strongly as an opinion piece, yet at times, to me it comes off as one due to how anti-Trump policy the messaging is within the writing. The core of the piece rests in a factual foundation: of how border strategy has evolved across these two administrations and the offensive, misleading rhetoric that Trump has spurred is quoted.

 

This led to me to think about a broader question about journalistic integrity, which is how journalists manage the seeping through of personal opinion within writing. Obviously, based on when we spoke to Julia Preston in New York, she was a strong advocate of the Harris campaign. However, with immigration correspondence covering the election, talk about “nativism” and Trump’s rhetoric has bred distrust within right-wing supporters; fact-checking is seen as a violation of free speech and rests at the core of a lot of right-wing criticism about how the presidential and VP debates were conducted.

 

A statistic that I found quite surprising and pivotal was the Gallup poll this July that revealed 5 percent of adults said they favored lower immigration, the first time since 2005 that a majority held that negative view. This echoes a global shift that is breeding an anti-migrant sentiment, so how much can this shift be attributed to the Biden administration’s failures at the border? How about to Republican efforts to spread this opinion, like Greg Abbott’s bussing efforts?