Lou Dobbs

OK, OK, I understand, Mr. Dobbs, that there are problems with our immigration policies. Frankly, I think the importation of Mexicans is not the most serious; as memorialized in the title of John Eisenhower's history, Mexico has the misfortune to be "so far from God, so close to the United States." If only they were Poland. Maybe they want us to invade them, so that a generation of "refugees" we will thereby create will have an easier time getting in. Remember the Vietnamese? What do you expect Iraq's biggest export to the U.S. will be, ten years from now? Oil? Or maybe people?

But, Mr. Dobbs, I think you're a little shrill. You've managed to make an "issue" no one ever thought about a few years ago into the crisis of the hour, with people who scarcely even come into contact with a Mexican itching to man the barricades. And you've not been entirely honest, either: why not acknowledge that the US farm policy of recent years has driven scores of thousands of Mexican small farmers off their land, impoverishing them and creating the very problem that concerns you so in the process.

Beyond all that, though, is the problem of your rhetoric. You talk constantly about "illegal aliens." Do you intend to offer a contrast with "legal alien?" Is the use of "alien" --a concept that would seem pretty anomalous in a "melting pot" society such as ours-- a conscious attempt to stigmatize, to dehumanize what are, after all, the people we've allowed and encouraged to come here for generations? Is your next step to join Pat Buchanan's xenophobic, racist campaign against everything not white bread? Or are you just careless with your language?

I think your critiques of American corporate greed and lawlessness, and governmental rapacity and corruption, are much more useful to us right now, thank you. When I voted last week, the ballot was in English, with smaller-type Spanish words beneath, and yet the English language seems fairly secure in Hyde Park; no tremors of incipient upheaval were noted. And we still managed to elect a County Board President who acts as if he can't read any language at all.

One of the great things about America is that anybody who wants to belong here, can do so. Are you arguing for changing that? I really have no patience with the people who want to deny emergency medical care, or education, to people who live here, and I don't really care how they got here. We already have a shockingly low high-school graduation rate (about 86%); we don't need to make it harder for those who wish to get an education. And I also don't think we want to have dying indigents littering our streets, do we? So unsightly!

While I admit that we probably cannot allow the admission of the (by one survey) one-third of Latin American people who would live here if they could, I don't think fences and vigilantes along the border are the answer. Why don't we try, for a change, to raise the quality of life in the home countries of these desperate people, instead of assassinating or otherwise overthrowing their leaders for the benefit of American Companies? Where do you think the phrase "banana republic" came from? Much of what is wrong south of our border has to do not so much with our neglect, as with our interference. It is emblematic of this that Vicente Fox is a former executive with an American company.

So, Mr. Dobbs, try to hit the demagogue button a little less often, can you? You've got much bigger fish to fry.