Amy Taylor

Reaction to Lou Dobbs Town Hall on Broken Borders

Last night Lou Dobbs held a town hall style show on the "broken borders" issue live from San Antonio, Texas. To his credit, his guests included folks from both sides of the debate. Although hostile to their views and at time unbelievably patronizing, he did give airtime to proponents of comprehensive immigration reform as well as to the hardliners for border control. The show hit on a number of issues, so let's look at them one at a time.

Undocumented Workers and Native Wages: Lou Dobbs has a knack for characterizing this issue as one that should make the public angry. In fact, he said last night that employers, when they hire undocumented immigrants, are blatantly discriminating against U.S. citizens. The segment addressed some legitimate concerns of U.S. workers including contractors who cannot compete with businesses that hire undocumented immigrants and outbid competitors who don't. Mr. Dobbs took issue with the argument that immigrants fill jobs that Americans don't want. The narrator of this particular segment said to the contrary, "Americans are not lazy, Americans are willing to work hard...for a fair wage." This is exactly the argument that DMI has outlined in our report "Principles of an Immigration Policy to Strengthen and Expand the American Middle Class" In the report, we argue that because undocumented immigrants live here under a constant threat of deportation, their ability to enforce their own workplace rights and demand fair wages and fair treatment is greatly diminished. As a result, the situation threatens to push wages down across entire industries. The only way to address this issue is to strengthen the workplace rights of these vital workers, who we need to keep our economy strong and growing, and thereby raise wages for all workers. We agree that the middle class should be angry about the dismal state of wages and the ability to earn a living as a worker in this country, the question is whether an enforcement-only immigration policy will raise wages.

The Border Fence: The enforcement-only agenda of Congress will not address the issues discussed in the previous section. History has taught us that building a wall will not keep out workers that our economy relies on to the degree that it currently does. With the Secure Fence Act of 2006 set to be signed into law today, it seemed Mr. Dobbs was much more focused on conjuring up supportive votes for the Republican Congress than with realistically looking at both sides of this issue. In fact, he mentioned the fact that elections are a mere two weeks away numerous times throughout the show. When talking about the bill signing event he even said that Republicans wanted a high profile event before the elections. So, even Lou Dobbs admits that the Fence bill is more of an election-year strategy to mobilize voters than to tackle the real issues that Americans are concerned about --how to reform our broken immigration system.

Costs and Benefits of Illegal Immigration: On the show last night, Lou Dobbs engaged in an extremely one-sided rant about the high costs of illegal immigration. He presented it as an unfair deal where immigrants cost local governments "literally billions of dollars", "employers love it" because they profit from it, and "the middle class gets stuck with the tab." Now, I have to hand it to him because he is very skilled at getting people to direct their anger about economic insecurity at immigrant workers rather than at a broken system that needs reform. It is outrageous that he would present statistics on these costs in such a confident, one-sided manner when economists agree that actual costs are nearly impossible to calculate. Economists who have attempted to calculate these costs must speculate about the three main variables --the number of undocumented immigrants living here, the volume of local services used and the revenue generated by this population. Because there is no formal data on any of these factors, economists are not in agreement on the actual costs of illegal immigration. Lou Dobbs presented statistics on the costs to local governments of educating immigrant children as well as healthcare and incarceration costs. And, yes, the tabs were "shocking." However, they were incomplete. He did not look at the revenue generated by immigrant consumers, taxpayers and entrepreneurs. Current studies show a range of results -- including that immigrants are a net benefit to the economy --which certainly was not presented on the show.

One guest of Lou Dobbs, Rosa Rosales, the president of LULAC, did manage to mention how immigrants benefit the economy by paying billions of dollars into Social Security, paying taxes and stimulating growth. She actually was given time to make her arguments, at the end of which she questioned whether the anti-immigrant camp was, in fact, worried about the rising voting power of the Latino population in the United States. This is when the patronizing tone of Mr. Dobbs became unbearable, "Rosa, I was so proud of you and then you bring up race!"

Race: When called a racist on these issues, Lou Dobbs had his ready response, "Racism is the last refuge of people without arguments and without facts." He actually went on to accuse Ms. Rosales of being patronizing, condescending and racist!? He called on folks to remove race from the dialogue about immigration. His comments, in fact, ignore the fact that race has always been an integral part of debates around new immigrants since immigrants first came to the United States. New immigrants have always been looked at as "other", "non-white", and unwilling to learn English. To give no credence to this important issue is itself extremely patronizing.

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Posted at 5:00 PM, Oct 26, 2006 in
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