Practice: Lateral Reading (4)

Let's repeat this exercise in lateral reading by engaging with a blog post from The Center for Immigration Studies: "Religious Leaders and Their Constituents Do Not See Eye-to-Eye on Welcoming Refugees Links to an external site.."

Open the blog post in a separate window and let's ask some questions about it. 

• What is The Center for Immigration Studies? Are they trustworthy? How do we know?

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) is an organization that advocates for much less immigration to the U.S. Its anti-immigration stance makes it controversial; for example, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has labeled CIS a “hate group." According to the SPLC website, "what precipitated listing CIS as an anti-immigrant hate group for 2016 was its repeated circulation of white nationalist and antisemitic writers Links to an external site. in its weekly newsletter and the commissioning of a policy analyst who had previously been pushed out of the conservative Heritage Foundation for his embrace of racist pseudoscience. These developments, its historical associations, and its record of publishing reports that hype the criminality of immigrants Links to an external site., are why CIS is labeled an anti-immigrant hate group Links to an external site.." For its part, PolitiFact reported that it found the “hate group” designation “based on some of its associations rather than its current work.” 

With this information in mind, what do we need to keep in mind when we read the blog post?

(text adapted from Stanford History Education Group. "Lateral Reading - Resources & Practice Lesson Plan." In Civic Online Reasoning. Accessed 24 July 2020. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PpDnaf6LpRkoy_3-43F-0NCBBEWLWUqq5z1UyNdSkco/edit#heading=h.1mk4maa7ueop Links to an external site.)