Op Ed on Outsourcing and Lou Dobbs (draft form)

Brace yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, for the imminent alien invasion. Well, at least, according to CNN news show host and winner of the 2004 Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration.

“Tonight,” announces Lou Dobbs at the top of his show on March 21, 2005, “illegal alien invasion.”

Should we, and Lou’s half a million daily viewers, for that matter, pull out our machetes and join the Minutemen project, patrolling the Arizonian border for cold-blooded extraterrestrials?

All word play aside, Lou Dobbs has been using his soapbox on CNN—“Lou Dobbs Tonight,” to sow paranoia in the viewing public. Whether he’s reporting on outsourcing—the “assault on the American middle class”—or the issue of illegal immigration from Latin America—the “illegal alien invasion”—Dobbs seeks to divide, to isolate U.S. and THEM. Feel violated, he drones into the nation’s airwaves every weekday evening. Feel angry and mistreated, and afraid.

And he is winning national awards for his work.

True, no one can fail to give Dobbs credit for bringing two important issues into national political discussion. By single-mindedly pursuing these two causes, making them permanent segments on his news show, Dobbs has amassed a remarkable collection of coverage on the subject.

But something seems amiss when the Broken Borders series begins to connect every single problem plaguing American society—including terrorism and education—to the problem of illegal immigration. As recently as the March 29th show, Dobbs claimed that the public school systems are “losing their battles” because they have been “inundated with illegal immigration.”

“A few generations ago, you'd be talking about the Irish flooding our schools, and breaking down the educational standard,” replies his guest Cesar Perales, president and general counsel for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.

To this, Dobbs answers: “...too many people, it seems to me, are coming to this as a racial issue rather than as a social, an American issue, that's fundamental to understanding what is in our national interest.”

Lou Dobbs is in a serious state of denial. His rhetoric is filled with antagonistic sound-bytes such as “alien invasions” and “inundations.” How could anyone have the “temerity” to speak out in defense of “porous borders”? How could banks offer aliens home loans, and how could realtors sell them houses as if they had a right to even breathe American air? Why, this is simply “madness.”

In between the dry segments of news and peppered rhetoric, Lou Dobbs peddles a latent racist agenda that is an easy trap in today’s global economy.

On an international level, the gap between rich and poor nations has become devastatingly apparent. The United States is not the only country seeing a large influx of illegal immigration: Western Europe is also facing a similar dilemma. The economic elite need hands for their manual labor, but turn their noses at the idea of naturalizing the inferior masses as citizens. What, those aliens, Americans? Like us? In our neighborhoods, our supermarkets, our very workplaces?

With outsourcing, the aliens no longer threaten to infiltrate our daily lives as Americans, but terrorize instead our livelihoods. They will soon make our skills irrelevant and we will all grow hungry, if Dobbs is correct. (As he once put it, “the dollar [is] under assault by both the euro and the yen.”) Like our currency, we are under assault from people who don’t understand our way of life, who are fundamentally different, and because they are not American do not deserve “American jobs.”

What should bother us not as Americans, but as human beings, is that he implies there are people who should have jobs, who have a right to certain work, and there are others who simply do not. They are have-nots. They don’t deserve something that is fundamentally American.

In this day and age, globalization has made that nationalistic claim obsolete.

I’d like to point out that, as a Taiwanese American who lived for several years in Taiwan, I myself am a witness to what outsourcing can do to an economy. Taiwan developed into an “Asian tiger” economy long before China became the world’s rising economic star. In the 1995 movie Toy Story, Buzz Lightyear opens the flap on the arm of his space suit to read “MADE IN TAIWAN,” not “MADE IN CHINA” or “MADE IN KOREA.” But as we entered the new millennium, the manufacturing of cheap goods became more and more irrelevant as an industry in Taiwan. Companies in China made the same goods faster and cheaper. A lot of paranoia ensued: what are we to do? Are we going to starve? Are we going to be swallowed whole by the Mainland?

Taiwan’s financial difficulties are far from over. But the attitude in Taiwan has slowly switched from hysteria to pragmatism. Farmers cultivated unique new hybrid produce selections to introduce to the world market. Towns known for traditional crafts cast themselves as tourist attractions. Industry leaders began to seek niches in high-tech research, development, and creative design. The semiconductor manufacturing companies responsible for Taiwan’s quick rise have moved quickly to diversify their services.

The Chinese may be political enemies to some in Taiwan, and economic enemies to some in America, but in the end, they just do some things better. So does India, Dobb’s other scapegoat for the “assault” on the American middle class. Instead of pointing fingers, America’s best and brightest should be looking for new ways to shine. And if the poor “middle class” is not hopelessly complacent and incompetent, as Mr. Dobbs seems to believe, it will also reinvent itself. I have faith that American society can reassert its resilience, just like the Taiwanese.

Competition with people of different race, culture, and nationality is a challenge, not a menace. Will America rise to meet it, or simply pile accolades at the feet of those, who like Lou Dobbs, make their living blaming bad times on the mysterious Other?