Legitimizing the Lie: Migrants Cause Housing Crisis

A recent article from Newsweek highlights how hateful and racist lies are manufactured and later legitimized for corporate profits

Photo by Blake Wheeler on Unsplash

Last week, Newsweek published an article titled, “Migrants May Be Causing U.S. Housing Shortage: J.P. Morgan.” The article, by Newsweek’s senior editor Robert Thorpe, argues that the racist lie about migrants causing the housing crisis might be true. While the J.P. Morgan report briefly mentioned the possibility that migrants “could be” causing the housing crisis, and even though most economists have shown they aren’t, you’d think a senior editor at Newsweek would not be legitimizing it with such an inflammatory headline.

Before Newsweek, Thorpe was employed at Bankrate, a consumer financial services company. So it seems his bias is ‘on the nose,’ so to speak. But to participate in perpetuating a lie because it’s good for your portfolio embodies precisely everything that ever ailed this country with pinpoint precision. But let’s face it, the truth never stopped anyone from putting their money behind a lie. Hate is big business after all.

From the genocide of Indigenous people and slavery to Jim Crow, redlining, and the mass incarceration of Black people and Latinos, lies have always been…