This article was written by a Fox News representative and focuses on the Biden administration’s immigration laws and the influx of asylum seekers in the United States at the beginning of the fiscal 2023 year which took place last October. The article is written by Fox News reporters Adam Shaw, a graduate of the University of Manchester in politics and religion, and Griff Jenkins, a graduate of the University of Mississippi with a degree in English. The article reviews the number of asylum seekers immigrating illegally into the U.S. and talks about the perceived risks of illegal immigration with the new Biden initiative.

This article heavily utilizes a rhetoric used to sympathize with border patrol agents, combined with the use of the phrase“fiscal 2023” as a way for readers to believe that it is significantly more people in a much shorter amount of time. The use of phrases such as “slipped past”  and ‘gotaways” gives inherent criminality and dehumanizes asylum seekers coming across the border. Using generalization and speculation, the authors perpetuate the idea of the “unknown” to stoke fear, especially the wording of “where they are trying to get to (in the United States)”. Now that they have criminalized this group of people, they use the targeted rhetoric to their audience (fearful ‘often white’ conservatives) that these people could be coming into anywhere for any purpose. 

Ironically enough, the article offers little to no information or statistics on the influx of immigrants, and instead uses assumption-based reasoning with an inherent negative light on immigrants instead. Ironically enough, new study research from the Cato Institute, which studies immigration statistics in Texas, shows that criminality in illegal immigrant populations (782 per 100,000)  is strikingly similar to that of criminality in legal immigrant populations (535 per 100,000), with native-born U.S. citizens holding significantly higher rates of crime than both of the two aforementioned groups (1422 per 100,000).

The statistics that are provided are either along the lines of quantitative numbers of immigrants or on the dissent of separate Republican states that reject Biden’s immigration laws. The information provided from immigration research such as that of the institute referenced helps to paint a more accurate picture of the situation in the U.S. However, it was likely omitted due to the author’s confirmation bias on their persuasive rhetoric.

The journalists both use evidence from individuals or individual cases, with the only exceptions being in the references to dissenting legislature. This article, despite being from a popular news source, offers little to no quantitative nor qualitative statistical evidence, and with no reference to sources for the evidence they did provide.