Beck's emotional Bash on Obama

Roy Beck's article "What A Jobs-Focused State-of-the-Union Address Ought to say about Immigration" gives his opinion on what to do about jobless Americans. He believes that legal and illegal immigrants are taking jobs from Americans. He appeals to his audience through their emotions (pathos), and metaphors and personification (language tools). Unfortunately for him, he also has some fallacies.

Good Pathos should use the audience's emotions to persuade them to side with the author and take action. An example for this would be a presidential candidate visiting an elementary school, reading a book to the kids, and giving them hugs and handshakes. American voters who are parents of little kids will be touched that this candidate cares about kids. Those parents will most likely vote for that candidate. An other form of pathos is getting to the audience's angry emotions. This is what Beck does in his article.

Beck immediately grabs the audience's angry emotions by opening his article up with "What Pres. Obama says -- or doesn't say..." By telling the audience that President Obama is not saying something, he is implying that Obama is keeping something from U.S. Citizens. Hearing that the leader of America was not telling the people something would upset the reader. Especially if the reader was an American citizen.

Word choice is very important when it comes to Pathos. Beck claims that "Americans are suffering catastrophic unemployment" because the "illegal immigrants" are stealing jobs (para. 4 & 11). The two phrases "catastrophic unemployment" and "illegal immigrants" should grab the reader's attention and emotions. The words catastrophic, unemployment and illegal describe negative actions or situations. When putting them in his sentences, Beck has been able to create negative emotions about immigration.

Paragraph 12 is just full of negative emotions towards the government and immigration. Beck talks about “chain migration.” Chain migration is pretty much an immigrant receiving a green card in the U.S. They then can bring their family into the U.S., and their spouse can bring their family, and it just keeps going. Beck does not give any opinion on the matter, but he doesn’t need to. Just these facts alone will create negative emotions.

Beck also uses a metaphor and an example of personification. The metaphor in paragraph 16 is really good. “… suffering U.S. workers begging for jobs just outside their hiring gates.” If the reader takes this sentence literally; they should imagine people dressed in ragged clothing pressed up against a locked gate, begging the key holder to let them in. But as most of us know, a metaphor is not supposed to be taken literally. So the reader would then know that the sentence simply means that many Americans are applying for jobs and not getting hired.

In paragraph 5, Beck uses an example of personification to try to get his point across. Personification is when a human characteristic or trait is given to something that is not human; like an animal or object. The sentence is “Every principle of justice calls for those jobs to be transferred to 7million unemployed Americans.” “Calls for” is the human trait and “principle of justice” is the nonhuman thing.

As good as Beck was with his pathos and language tools, he also had some fallacies in his article. The title of the article is “What A Jobs-Focused State-of-the-Union Address Ought To Say About Immigration.” The title tells the reader that the author has an opinion about immigration that they feel the president whould address. However, Beck uses his article on immigration to bash the president. He seems to be trying to trap the president into saying something – or not saying something – that could get him into trouble. Beck has three obvious attacks towards President Obama in his article. His first attack is the very first sentence of the article. “What Pres. Obama says – or doesn’t say – about immigration wil be the easiest tip-off to whether his first priority truly is putting Americans back to work.” He is already implying that Obama is not telling the whole truth and possible not care about Americans getting jobs.

In paragraph 8 he then says “This should be easy for Pres. Obama…” Beck is pretty sarcastic throughout this article, so he most likely does not believe that what he wants Obama to do will be easy for him.

His third attack is in paragraph 13. He starts off the paragraph by saying, “No president whose top concern is putting his unemployed fellow citizens back to work would allow this to continue.” As there have been no major movements to stop immigrants being hired in place of Americans, he has now “proved’ that this is not a top concern of Obama’s. But he trapped Obama with the “poisoning of the well” fallacy. Obama can’t defend himself without somehow proving Beck to be right. The reason there was any fallacy was because Beck led the reader to believe that he wanted to give an idea about immigration, when he really used it to Bash Obama as a president.

Acting for Themselves

When one thinks of a fallacy, they often think of a lie— an untruth. Sometimes it may be a blatant lie and other times it just may be that its something that hasn’t been proven to be true yet. In writing oftentimes a common logical fallacy is to state their own personal opinion instead.

In Roy Beck’s article What a Jobs-Focused State-of-Union Ought to Say About Immigration he oftentimes makes the mistake of telling the audience what to think. He says “The President should tell the Members of Congress that if they aren’t willing to gather their unemployed voters, look them in the eye and explain why illegal aliens and new foreign workers have precedence over the 500,000 unemployed in every district” (par. 29). Instead of giving the facts and letting the readers decide what they should do, he tells the what course of action they should take. Even at the very beginning of the article when he says “be sure to send this fax to President Obama with State of the Union suggestions” (par. 1), he’s telling his readers how they should behave instead of letting them figure out for themselves what they should do.

Absurd or obscured?

Bordering on Absurdity is an article which rants on how Americans are too caught up in their own self-interests to care for the self-interests of others, and in this case especially immigrants. He presents a somewhat powerful argument from an economic standpoint and tries to convince his audience to have an open view on immigration because they will in reality benefit our economy. In so doing, he leaves out some important information, perhaps obscuring the truth.

The writer makes his first point by saying "Immigration policy should facilitate the movement of people, just as trade policy facilitates the movement of goods.

From an economic perspective, this is a no-brainer. Right now, there are massive differences across countries in the rewards that skills garner. According to a new paper from Mark Rosenzweig, an economist at Yale, immigrants to the U.S. who are high school graduates earn far more than they did in their home countries. The same is true for college grads. An immigrant from Mexico with a college degree can earn almost 10 times more in the U.S. compared with what he or she would receive in Mexico."(Par. 3-4)

Now that would be a fine statement to make if it wasn't for the fact that the writer is trying to use it to prove immigrants will benefit our country. His fallacy is that he uses a hasty generalization. He tries to prove from this quote that immigrants will benefit our economy because they make more money here than in the country that they left, but he doesn't take into account what they will do with the money, or the fact that if they didn't come to the U.S. that an
American would have that job and would be making that money. Instead he just generalizes and obscures the information by not specifying how them making more money here would benefit our economy.

Another fallacy which I found a little more comical came out in the latter part of his article. He says this:

"Another objection is that a higher number of immigrants will add to the country's fiscal burden, through higher future medical and education costs. There's more validity to this argument. It costs local governments a lot to educate immigrant children, and future Medicare and Medicaid expenses could effectively bankrupt the government(italics added), according to current projections.

But these problems are not as big as they seem. As the children of immigrants grow up, their contributions to the overall economy should exceed the costs of their education(italics added), even though that may not help the finances of the towns or cities where they grew up. And the long-term state of Medicare and Medicaid is an issue that is going to have to be dealt with regardless of whether or not there are immigrants here."(Par. 8-9)

Here I just have to pause and grin because it seems that the writer tries to slip in unawares that simple line that immigrants could effectively bankrupt the government. I mean maybe I'm just overreacting, and it's a common occurrence that our government goes bankrupt, but something tells me that that could be a very big deal. Later the writer tries to justify his words by saying that their contributions should exceed the costs of their education, but once again I feel as if I have been robbed of some key point, and I was; he never explained whether or not their use of health care would cause us to go bankrupt. That's a very interesting fallacy because he is appearing to stack the issue, but at the same time he wants to show that he is not being partial to one side or the other. The ensuing result is confusion on the side of the readers, or just humor from his obscure hypothesis.