The fact that Lou Dobbs, who is responsible for some of the absolute worst lies about illegal immigrants actually hired some should come as a shock to no one:
But with his relentless diatribes against “illegals” and their employers, Dobbs is casting stones from a house—make that an estate—of glass. Based on a yearlong investigation, including interviews with five immigrants who worked without papers on his properties, The Nation and the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute have found that Dobbs has relied for years on undocumented labor for the upkeep of his multimillion-dollar estates and the horses he keeps for his 22-year-old daughter, Hillary, a champion show jumper.
Dobbs lives in a sprawling white mansion on his 300-acre estate in Sussex, New Jersey, where he and his family run a horse farm. In 2005 he acquired another house—a spacious multimillion-dollar winter holiday home in Eagle Isle, the most exclusive enclave of the Ibis Golf and Country Club, a gated community in West Palm Beach, Florida. It offers his daughter a place to stay during her competitions at the Wellington Winter Equestrian Festival, one of the most important events in the horse show world.
Dobbs deserves to be raked over the coals for this. He’s spent the last several years of his career doing his best to dehumanize illegal immigrants, from popularizing the myth that immigrants cause leprosy, mainstreaming the conspiracy theory that Mexicans are seeking to annex the American Southwest through “Reconquista” and laundering the arguments of hate groups through his evening program on CNN.
The problem is by fixating on the personal hypocrisy of border hawks like Dobbs and California Republican Meg Whitman threatens to obscure the larger problem, which is that our current immigration system doesn’t remotely recognize the realities of domestic demand for unauthorized immigrant labor. Instead there’s a lot of posturing about the border, despite the evidence that increased spending on border security doesn’t reduce unauthorized entry, because as long as there are jobs here to get desperate people will cross an increasingly dangerous border to come to get them. The only thing that seems to have substantially reduced illegal immigration since 1993 is the worst recession since the 1920s, and I think we can all agree that cure is worse than the disease.
Sure, Whitman and Dobbs deserve the public criticism they’re getting. The bigger issue remains, as I wrote last week, that “as a country we dehumanize undocumented immigrants even as we demand and depend on their labor. We beckon them with one hand while trying to crush them with the other.” No one is more emblematic of this dynamic than wealthy border hawks who hire undocumented immigrants, but they’re not the problem–they’re the symptom of a problem, and we shouldn’t get so caught up in their personal hypocrisy that we lose what should be a teachable moment about how broken and useless our current immigration system actually is.