You may have heard about The Nation's exposé about Lou Dobbs, revealing that the crusader against illegal immigration has had undocumented workers cutting his grass and tending his show horses. Dobbs and the author of the piece, Isabel MacDonald, had a lengthy debate about it on Lawrence O'Donnell's program, and Dobbs' contention that it was a "hit job" revolved around the fact that though there may have been undocumented workers there, he didn't personally hire them, so his hands are clean. That's a debatable point, but there's something else that's worthy of note.
Again and again during the interview, Dobbs responded with outrage when MacDonald described him as an advocate of a "get tough" approach to illegal immigration, saying that for years he has been working with all sorts of people to find a comprehensive solution to the problem. If you never saw Dobbs' show on CNN, you might think he was a reasonable guy. But the truth is that his show, which was ostensibly about all kinds of public issues, could well have been called Lou Dobbs Tells You How Illegal Aliens Are Coming to Kill You, Steal Your Job, and Milk the Taxpayer. At my old employer, Media Matters for America, some colleagues and I assembled a report about the treatment of the immigration issue on Dobbs' show and some others. Every night seemed to bring a new tale of an undocumented immigrant committing a vicious crime, or the undocumented immigrants (inevitably referred to as "illegal aliens," by the way) scamming government services, or the latest insane conspiracy theory about the "North American Union" coming to destroy our sovereignty or the "NAFTA Superhighway," an imagined 400-yard-wide behemoth cutting across America from Mexico City to Toronto.
All of these things were mythical, but they all added up to a single message: Be afraid. The aliens are here, more are coming, and if they don't kill you, they'll destroy your way of life. It was no accident that Dobbs' show was a favorite of white supremacist groups and far-right extremists like the John Birch Society, whose websites would regularly cheer him on. So for Dobbs to now be portraying himself as someone who's looking for reasonable solutions is nearly beyond belief.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter all that much if the guys grooming Dobbs' show horses are documented or not. But we shouldn't forget that there is not a single person in America who has made a comprehensive solution to the immigration problem more difficult to achieve than Lou Dobbs.
-- Paul Waldman
