Lou Dobbs’ America
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When Lou Dobbs stepped away from his desk at CNN, where he
was a founding anchor, for the last time, the headlines buzzed
with speculation about what might be next for the controversial
commentator. National Public Radio, for instance, reported
that Lou Dobbs Tonight was
ended so that its erstwhile host could “seek new ways to advocate
his often inflammatory views.”
Nobody suspected that the next chapter might entail a
bigger departure than leaving CNN—a possible break with the
immigration hawks who had fueled the latest stage of Dobbs’s
career. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States,
Dobbs took a more populist turn on issues involving trade,
globalization, the middle class, and above all illegal
immigration. Dobbs’s immigration commentary made him more popular
than ever before. As TAS
contributor Jeffrey Lord, Dobbs’s final on-air guest,
reported at length, it also made the talking head a frequent
target of liberal, multicultural, and Hispanic groups,
culminating in a Drop Dobbs campaign calling on “advertisers to
stop advertising on the Lou Dobbs program because of his
misstatements about immigrants.”
Even ACORN and mainline Protestant churches eventually got
into the act. “Because if they can silence Lou Dobbs,” Lord
wrote, “they will eventually try to silence you.” The
immigration-related controversies inflamed tensions between Dobbs
and CNN executives, who claimed to be trying to push the network
away from commentary to stake out an objective niche distinct
from Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left. Although CNN
president Jonathan Klein praised Dobbs and publicly described the
parting as amicable, he also said pointedly, “We are a very
profitable company because of our commitment to journalism. So we
don’t want to do anything that is off-mission—and we’re not going
to be.”
For his part, Dobbs—who had a previous stint away from CNN
to start a short-lived Internet venture a decade ago—said he was
going to seize an even bigger platform to advance his favored
causes. “Some leaders in media, politics, and business have been
urging me to go beyond the role here at CNN,” he told viewers,
“and to engage in constructive problem-solving, as well as to
contribute positively to a better understanding of the great
issues of our day.” But shortly thereafter, Dobbs began to tone
down what NPR described as his “often inflammatory views” on his
signature issue.
First came this statement on Dobbs’s website: “Ethnocentric
special interest groups often mischaracterize Lou’s position on
illegal immigration. The left routinely ignores the context of
everything Lou has said about illegal immigrants.” A compilation
of less-than-inflammatory quotations followed. “I’m absolutely
one of the most passionate opponents of illegal immigration,”
Dobbs said during one of his broadcasts, “but I’ve also made it
very clear I’m also one of those who respects most the illegal
aliens, I’ve described them on numerous occasions as the only
rational actor in this crisis.”
“You’ve heard me say time and time again that the only
rational actor in this is the illegal alien trying to improve his
or her life,” reads another Dobbs blurb. “You’ve heard me say
time and time again that the illegal employer of the illegal
alien deserves the greatest sanctions in this mess.” Dobbs
continued, “I have great respect for the people who make up the
preponderance of the illegal alien population in our country,
that is Mexican migrant workers.”
Dobbs went so far as to say in one immigration discussion,
“I think I’m the only one on this panel who’s actually worked
with migrant workers in the fields, with beans, potatoes, hay in
my youth. I know them to be good and decent people.” Then
the Wall
Street Journal—a well-known home for
pro-immigration conservatives whose editorial page once annually
called for a constitutional amendment decreeing, “There shall be
open borders”—quoted Dobbs as saying “we need the ability
to legalize illegal immigrants under certain conditions.”
The WSJ found this statement in a
Dobbs interview with the Spanish-language network Telemundo,
where the former CNN commentator told host Maria Celeste “I am
one of your greatest friends” and even apologized for his
inability to address the audience in Spanish.
The reaction in restrictionist circles was swift. The Americans
for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) withdrew its call for Dobbs to
run for president on an anti-illegal immigration platform. “While
Mr. Dobbs claims his positions have not changed, however, that is
not the perception of many of our mutual supporters,” said
William Gheen of ALIPAC in a statement. “His recent comments on
Telemundo and his national radio show supporting some kind of
path to citizenship for illegal immigrants are inconsistent with
positions of ALIPAC and the views of most American citizens.”
“I really don’t know what to make of all this, but that utterly
ridiculous statement about the illegal alien being the only
rational actor proves, to me, that Lou has gone rogue,” Isabel
Lyman, a conservative activist who is herself Hispanic, told
TAS. “Try telling that to the
grieving families of Kris Eggle, Dustin Inman, Lila Meizel,
Robert Rosas, and Leonard Dykstra—Americans who were needlessly
killed by criminal illegal aliens who shouldn’t have been here in
the first place.”
Immigrant-friendly sentiments, however, are actually not
that uncommon among moderate restrictionists. Mark Krikorian of
the Center for Immigration Studies has called for a
“low-immigration, pro-immigrant” approach to the issue. “It’s not
the immigrants—it’s us,” he argued in his book
The New Case Against Immigration.
“What’s different about immigration today as opposed to a century
ago is not the characteristics of the newcomers.”
Nor is a nuanced approach necessarily limited to highbrow
immigration reformers. No less a populist than Minuteman leader
Jim Gilchrist once told me he was personally sympathetic to the
plight of illegal immigrants, even as he found illegal
immigration contrary to the American national interest. Gilchrist
had no reason to soft-pedal to ingratiate himself to me—I was
interviewing him for Pat Buchanan’s American
Conservative magazine, where I then worked and
was (rather hostilely) covering proposals to give amnesty to
illegal immigrants.
Let’s not get carried away, wrote Joe Guzzardi, a columnist
for Peter Brimelow’s restrictionist webzine
VDare. Calling the idea that Dobbs
now supported amnesty “the most extreme conclusion any viewer
could come to,” Guzzardi argued, “My interpretation: Dobbs means
that if the border were successfully secured, he might support
amnesty, depending on how the legislation was
written.”
Yet Guzzardi’s fellow
VDare scribe Brenda Walker detected
Dobbs going wobbly more than a year before his post-CNN apology
tour. Dobbs told liberal writer David Sirota he’d be open to
tripling legal immigration if “we make a judgment that we’re
going to raise immigration levels.” “There’s nothing in me that
is a restrictionist whatsoever, and I realize that separates me
from others who are against illegal immigration on the basis that
there is too much immigration,” Sirota quotes Dobbs as saying in
his book The Uprising. “I
don’t believe that.” It is merely Washington’s lack of control
over immigration that “leaves [Dobbs] in despair.”
BUT DOBBS MAY WANT TO DO MORE than clarify his
position. It’s not just obscure activist groups that are
contemplating a Dobbs presidential bid — the
Wall Street Journal reported that
Dobbs may be considering a run for the White House or the U.S.
Senate himself. The late columnist Robert Novak wrote about this
possibility as early as 2008. The
Journalthan clarify his position.
It’s not just obscure activist groups that are contemplating a
Dobbs presidential bid—the
noted Dobbs “is working to repair his reputation for antipathy
toward Latino immigrants” which his associates consider “a
glaring flaw” in his ability to seek public office.
Skeptics remember that before briefly leaving CNN the first
time in 1999, Dobbs was a supporter of free trade and free
markets—the kind of conventional pro-business Republican one
might expect the network’s chief economics anchor to be. One
doubter in the Washington business press opined that Dobbs’s
immigration conversion “always smelled fishy to me.” When Dobbs
returned to the network and was trying to regain audience share,
my correspondent recalled, “He thrashed around for a while until
he started hitting the anti-immigration drum and his ratings
perked up.” Might his current makeover be similarly
motivated?
Either way, Ross Perot was able to tap into popular
concerns about immigration without eliciting many accusations of
racism (his “you people” address to the NAACP notwithstanding).
But will the kinder, gentler Lou Dobbs sell? “Lou, Lou, Lou,”
says Lyman, a longtime fan. “The man has been causing my head to
spin.”
