Masako Melissa Hirsch on Muck Rack

Masako Melissa Hirsch

(She/Her)
New York
As seen in: Vox Media, MSN, Business Insider, Vox, The Dallas Morning News, ProPublica, Times Union (Albany), The National Memo, Niagara Gazette, Investigative Post
journalist. video at @voxdotcom. lots of past lives. New Orleanian always. she/her

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Masako Melissa Hirsch’s Biography

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Senior researcher at Vox Video. @Columbiajourn Stabile alum and former post-grad fellow.

Articles

Why the US has so many undocumented immigrants

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By Madeline Marshall Verified, Masako Melissa Hirsch
| Vox Verified
Immigration looked very different before 1996, when President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). The law was supposed to stop undocumented immigration by increasing enforcement and punishing people for being in the US undocumented. Instead, it did the opposite. Before 1996, Mexican immigrants who came to the US unlawfully were about 50 percent likely to return to Mexico within a year.
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How radical gardeners took back New York City

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By Ranjani Chakraborty, Masako Melissa Hirsch
| Vox Verified
In the 1960s and 1970s, New York City faced a sharp economic decline and white flight. Buildings were abandoned or burned down, particularly in the city’s lower-income neighborhoods. Communities faced mass disinvestment — and what was left was urban decay. It was around this time that Hattie Carthan, a 64-year-old woman living in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, began a grassroots effort to transform that urban decay into green space.
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How Native Hawaiians fought the US Navy for Kaho‘olawe island, and won

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By Ranjani Chakraborty, Masako Melissa Hirsch
| Vox Verified
On January 4, 1976, a fleet of boats headed toward the Hawaiian island of Kaho‘olawe. The goal: take the island back from the US military for the Hawaiian people. Since World War II, the US military had used the island for bombing practice and had decimated its land. But the story of the taking of this one island was part of a bigger history of the taking of all of Hawaii.
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