In 1948, Woody Guthrie wrote his haunting song “Deportee” after reading a New York Timesarticle that identified the victims of an airplane crash simply as “deportees” without names, but identified the names of the pilot and crew. Yesterday’s New York Times did the same thing in an article about a truck crash in Texas that killed 14 people identified in the headline and story only as “illegal immigrants.” I wrote about this disturbing parallel in theHuffington Post today in an article, “64 Years Later, Dead Undocumented Immigrants Are Still Nameless in the New York Times.”
The McAllen personal injury attorney points about the disturbing nature of the same how it can rip people away from their identity. Guthrie’s words, written 64 years ago about the mistreatment of Mexican migrant workers —“They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves” — are, unfortunately, hardly outdated.