From the New York Times:
Broken Borders and Dover Sole: My Lunch With Lou Dobbs
So I was having lunch at the Four Seasons with Lou Dobbs the other day, locked in disagreement over who cared more about working people, him or me.
Him: CNN host, biggest and loudest gun in the battle for tougher immigration policies, leader of a nightly crusade to expose the misdeeds of those he views as elitist fools and scoundrels.
Me: editorial writer whose views on immigration qualify, to Mr. Dobbs and many others on his side of the debate, as elitist, foolish and scoundrelly.
Meeting at the Four Seasons was his idea, to continue a long, civil and inconclusive phone conversation about immigration. I got there early and waited at Mr. Dobbs’s banquette. I looked around the hushed room, full of dark suits and a wintry glow. Mr. Dobbs appeared and settled in, his drink, cranberry juice and seltzer, materializing at his right elbow.
In the spirit of the occasion, I ordered strictly within our borders: lobster bisque, filet of bison and New York tap water. He had the Dover sole.
Among people whose immigration views I admire, Mr. Dobbs has a reputation as a hopeless blowhard. I did not dwell on that at lunch. I was his guest, and I had seen what happens if you try to skewer him with insult or accusation. Mr. Dobbs is unencumbered by self-doubt. The granite fortress of his certitude is smooth and featureless, and whatever boulders you hurl at it will end up on your head. Besides, I was looking for something better than an argument. I wanted to convert him.
An honest person must concede a lot when arguing immigration with Mr. Dobbs: Yes, the borders and ports are insecure, and poor countries like Mexico have done too little to solve their economic and migration problems. Yes, illegal immigration hurts some Americans, globalization causes many global problems and big corporations love to stick it to the little guy.
My point to Mr. Dobbs was that the little-little guy — the “illegal alien” crossing our “broken borders” — was the wrong target. His overriding emphasis on solving globalization’s many ills by urgently sealing the borders strikes me as populism gone astray.
First, it’s ineffective, because the country will never be ziplocked as tightly as he wants it to be. The price of trying is too high, and it ignores the millions who enter the country legally but overstay. Most shamefully, it does nothing to resolve the fates of the 12 million undocumented already here.
Second, the obsession with enforcement dovetails with the agendas of some nasty people: the nativists for whom immigration is a simple case of brown and white, of preserving “American” culture by keeping Latinos out.
Third, it does too little to attack the evil corporate elites that are Mr. Dobbs’s sworn enemy. What makes illegal immigrants so delectable to big, bad business is their illegality — their willingness to work cheap and under the table. So why not legalize and tax them? Assimilate the good guys, as this country has always done, and save law enforcement for the bad ones.
The idea is to confront abusive corporate power with worker power. If day laborers end up in our suburbs, where the money and jobs are, then give them safe places to gather and help them work together to keep from driving wages and working conditions down. If companies take advantage of workers, empower the workers to fight back: as union members, legal residents, citizens.
But that’s “amnesty,” a Dobbsian expletive. It’s the opposite of the crackdowns endorsed by him and the hard-liners he praises, like the Minutemen.
Mr. Dobbs listened graciously and budged not. He said he respected immigrants, even illegal ones, who he felt had gotten an unfair shake from their governments. He reminded me of his fondness for Cesar Chavez.
Then he repeated his immigration credo. It went like this: the 1986 immigration law was an amnesty promoted by corporate interests waging war on the middle class. Thus the 2006 and 2007 reforms were also amnesty, pushed by the same self-serving plutocrats. So nothing they want is worth doing — at least not until the border is sealed.
That could be a long time. While we wait, I am going to keep trying to convince Mr. Dobbs that a comprehensive solution — enforcement plus assimilation — is the best expression of the populism he espouses.
Mr. Dobbs admits that mass deportation would never work, although if you press him on what to do about the 12 million, he has no answer. He wants to hold that question “in abeyance” until the border is sealed. I find that oddly passive for someone so convinced of the dangers from the aliens in our midst.
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/opinion/21thu4.html?th&emc=th
