Border Issues Fair
Jan 19th, 2008 | By Michel Marizco | Category: General News, Immigration, Politics
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THE BORDER REPORT
Okay, so it went much better than I anticipated. Good Lord that was a large crowd today, 400-some odd people at the Santa Cruz Valley Border Coalition’s Fourth Annual Border Issues Fair in Green Valley. And they were capable of some intelligent discourse without devolving into the rhetoric-screaming whackjobs that immigration and the border itself usually invite during these things. A few of you asked me about good border newspapers. For purposes of calming down the hackle-risers, I define "good" newspapers by proximity, mainly because I don't feel any beat can be adequately covered from more than ten minutes away I recommend the San Diego Union-Tribune's Tijuana site. The paper has a small, but rather effective, staff in Tijuana. Their reporters are familiar with the politics in Tijuana and Baja California and have consistently dedicated strong coverage to the beat. Also, the Dallas Morning News. They're down to two reporters in Mexico but both men have been there a number of years and the paper does some great work covering organized crime in Mexico and along the border. South of the line, there's a plethora of papers to follow the coverage on. You can find the ones I read and trust under my Links Page. Beyond that, if you're going to read these papers online, you should support them. Part of the reason we're in the mess we're in with the lack of border coverage in the first place is because papers keep giving away the store for free – and consumers keep going back for more. Otherwise, you may end up with the situation we're in on the Arizona-Sonora border – when I moved here in 2003, there were six border reporters at four different Arizona papers. Now there are two border reporters in the entire state. The resulting coverage is a catastrophe – the Sonoran papers refuse to track organized crime, some out of fear, others out of ineptitude, still others out of corruption, while the Arizona papers pretend organized crime doesn't exist.-- Michel Marizco
