TV REVIEWS : Cronkite Looks at ‘The Uninvited’

Trying to keep up with the mounting numbers of global refugee and immigrant populations isn’t an easy thing, judging by the latest “Cronkite Report” titled “The Uninvited: Immigrants at the Gate” (8 p.m. tonight, Discovery Channel; repeats at 11 p.m.).

Flooding the viewer with statistics--take U.S. Border Patrol claims that it is outnumbered by illegal immigrants eight-to-one or Gov. Pete Wilson’s claim that there has been an 18-fold increase in state services recently to these immigrants--is no path toward enlightenment. And when it comes to the immigration issue, we need all the enlightenment we can get.

To be sure, the global crisis of refugee movements, overwhelming even wealthy nations like Germany, is so vast that Walter Cronkite’s modestly scaled report smartly concentrates on the U.S. border. Before it does, however, it provides the bitterest of ironies: U.S. Immigration Commissioner Doris Meissner muses on how the former Soviet bloc’s clamp-down on borders actually served Western interests by controlling disruptive immigrant flows.

“The Uninvited,” alas, offers a deeply mixed message of the realities of the U.S. immigration problem. Early on, we’re told correctly that most immigration, legal and illegal alike, moves through airports and by sea. Yet TV being a visual medium, the juicy images of people climbing Border Patrol walls in the Tijuana night or of patrol helicopters spotting them with infra-red cameras easily dominate the sober comments of Meissner, the Urban Institute’s Michael Fox and Roger Winter of the U.S. Committee for Refugees.

Cronkite’s report has its mind on proposed solutions--cut population growth and deforestation while increasing global economic opportunity--but its eye keeps going for scary, distorting pictures.