When Lou Dobbs took $8-million and walked out the studio door at CNN, I wrote that his parting comments sounded an awful lot like not just a politician announcing his candidacy–it sounded like he was running for president. Turns out I was right (why is it so easy to read the minds of egomaniacs?):
The Lou Dobbs-for-Senate rumor had barely crested when the Lou Dobbs-for-president rumor suddenly overtook it this week.
…On Monday, Mr. Dobbs said he had been urged to ponder a White House run, and was indeed thinking about it. “Yes is the answer…”
…Mr. Dobbs [said] he did not know which way he was leaning on a presidential bid, but said he would “be talking some more with some folks who want me to listen to them the next few weeks.”
Apparently, Dobbs lives on a horse farm in wealthy suburban northern New Jersey. Can anyone tell me how his presidential campaign would be much different from that other wealthy horsey New Jersey former Republican presidential candidate, Steve Forbes?? I guess Dobbs will add hatred of Hispanics and dark-skinned immigrants to his platform. But other than that??
Maybe Lou’s campaign slogan can be: “Save America from the wetbacks!” Is this any way to run a presidential campaign? If you’re a Republican I guess it is. With wacky, single-issue candidates like this the Republicans will be in great shape in 2012.
Given that Dobbs is married to a Mexican woman, that graphic is more accurate than you might think.
He would also be president of Mexicans who don’t wish to have their wages depressed by an expanding labor pool, ditto for blacks and anyone else on the lower income scales.
I’m also half-Mexican, just in case you wish to lump me in with the rest of WHITE AMERICA.
Lincoln Rockwell, the notorious American Nazi of the 1950s was part-Jewish. Why doesn’t it surprise me that he’s married to someone who is Mexican. Did he check that she had a green card before he married her??
Yr knowledge of immigration & its impact of our economy is pathetic.
It seems almost entirely beyond your ability to think that someone could oppose mass immigration AND not be racist. Actually, my knowledge of immigration and its impact on the economy is well informed. George Borjas (another one of those “Lincoln Rockwell” names), economics professor at Harvard, has shown that mass immigration contributes little to the economy while simultaneous depressing wages of those on the bottom. It’s economics 101–if you increase the supply of something, the price of that something will go down.
Your militant open-borders ideology hurts more people than you think.
I suppose it’s possible someone could hold those 2 principles. But unfortunately for you it’s not Dobbs, who IS racist. He’s a smooth-talking racist wearing nice suits and slicked back hair. But he’s still a racist. I suppose there are gradations of racists & he’s not David Duke or Meir Kahane. But he’s definitely related to them ideologically.
We have a little rule at this site. We don’t trust people to characterize the views of others. We ask for sources & quotations to document claims. I’ve never heard of the economist you mention. I don’t know whether he teaches at Harvard or Podunk U. I don’t know whether he says what you claim or the opposite. But neither you nor he will be taken seriously based on the non-evidence you present here.
Besides, for every economist who will say what you prefer him to say I can find five or even ten who say the opposite. So what does it prove? History is against you I’m afraid. Immigration has made this country great. To the extent that we allow our doors to be open to new immigration we will refresh & replenish our working class and the innovation that these new Americans bring & have always brought to this country.
You anti-immigration types are little more than the Know Nothings & Klansmen of the 19th and early 20th centuries opposed to the yellow or black hoards or whatever wave of immigration happened to be “flooding” the nation’s shores at that particular moment.
OMG that picture is a crack up! But please, Richard, could you photoshop the chijuajua out? It resembles my pound dog too much and I wouldn’t want her reputation as a GOOD doggie possibly sullied by a look alike.
Sorry Richard but there are problems with immigration, whatever the country or source. Read Christopher Jencks and others. It really may lead to a depression of wages. One does not have to support Lou Dobbs to believe this.
And it also leads to a suppression in the cost of the goods that we purchase. California at one time (don’t know where we rank now) was the ninth largest economy in the world, much of it due to agriculture. “Americans” need to get over themselves and realize that our standard of living depends upon cheap labor in certain segments of the economy. Please do not take this to be an endorsement of such practices, it is just a fact. To focus entirely on the negative concerning illegal immigration is to completely overlook the fact that your head of lettuce costs less because of it, the dishes you ate off of at that restaurant just might have been cleaned by an illegal immigrant, on and on. Honest work is honest work despite immigration status. Depression of wages=depression of COST. When you are willing to 100% accept what goods would cost without the depressed wages of illegal immigration and what it will do to your pocket book and YOUR standard of living, let us all know. Again, this is NOT an endorsement of this, it’s just a wake up call to all the bigots who on a daily basis benefit from this phenomena. If you think that Lou Dobbs approach will not hit YOU in the pocket book, think again. One of the places it truly does have a huge impact is in education. Now if you want to talk about that, it’s a part of the WHOLE picture and cannot be taken out of context when understanding the impact of illegal immigration. If you don’t have a solution for it other than to send them packing which is not only simplistic, but non-realistic considering that our economy DEPENDS on this cheap labor, I suggest the entire argument at it’s core is that of “the other”.
Again, NOT an endorsement of illegal immigration/cheap labor, just an attempt to bring it to a more academic discussion than the rantings of Lou Dobbs and his ilk.