The Abominable Mr. Dobbs

yareni De Anda
10/30/09
3:47pm

The article/newsletter talks about the news host Lou Dobbs from CNN and his extreme and false claims about undocumented immigrants that live in the US. The Author mentions that Dobbs illogically blames undocumented immigrants or as Dobbs calls them “illegal aliens” for all of U.S. problems, “from crime to disease, from the recession to the so-called erosion of American values”. Huerta says that everybody is entitled to their opinion but they are not supposed to provide inaccurate information that makes anybody, in this case the immigrant community, look bad. Huerta goes on to talk about all the false statements that Dobbs has made on TV and proves him wrong by giving the actual numbers/statistics for these claims. The author also points out and reminds us how silly it sounds when people like Dobbs and other supposedly highly educated people, claim that undocumented immigrants “present a threat to America’s economic prosperity”. It does not make sense how people who are willing to work in “service-oriented jobs that most Americans avoid”, can be harming the economy. The purpose of his article is to get people to complain and to encourage pro-immigrants advocacy groups as well as the general public to try to stop people like Dobbs from feeding anti-immigrant sentiments to the publict.
I chose this article because it is representative of a lot of the very common stereotypical and extreme views about the immigrant community. It’s these types of people who create fear and hatred among the public which leads them to believe that immigrants are nothing but a problem to the country. They do not show or even recognize any of the positive things and benefits from having an immigrant population be part of the economy. It has been done in the past, and we all should look back at our history closer to try to pick up on patterns of discriminatory behavior towards minorities. There has always been as it is now, a “scapegoat “, a disadvantaged and needy group of people that it’s taken advantage of and exploited in some way. We should always question what we hear and not overlook where such information is coming from. We tend to believe everything our preferred news source tells us but this article shows us that not always are they giving actual facts. The reasons behind this false delivery of information, we do not know, it could be racism, or that he gets something out of it as the author suggests, it could be that telling the truth will make people question and want to change things so they make things up to try to trick us and scare us. Remember that Fear is one the most effective ways to keep people from thinking critically. But then we question what are they not wanting us to realize and why are they not wanting us to think critically?

http://www.counterpunch.org/huerta10302009.html