Even Lou Dobbs Is Changing His Tune on Immigration

One of the topics I’ve written about over the past year is the growing influence of the Latin American community within the U.S. There are about 45 million people of Hispanic origin in the country, and that number is expected to grow considerably over the coming years.

This influx of Latin Americans into the U.S. has shaped America’s taste in music and even candy.

It played a role in the 2008 election, in which Democrats scored victories in Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada partly as a result of the number of Hispanics’ that shifted their allegiance away from the Republican party.

Sotomayor. It was also seen in the relatively muted opposition to the appointment of the first Hispanic U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. (However, all but 9 of the Senate’s 40 Republicans voted against her).

Another event that seemed to have broken in the Hispanics’ direction was controversial anchor man Lou Dobb’s resignation from CNN. Dobbs used his platform as news anchor for what was billed as an objective newscast to share his anti-immigrant rhetoric. While Dobbs characterized what he was doing as “advocacy journalism,” Latino groups such as Presente.org called it spreading “hateful and inaccurate myths about immigrants and Latinos.”

By most accounts Dobbs tended to be loose with important facts such as how many undocumented immigrants were in the United States. In a special edition of his program a few years ago he estimated that there were between “11 to 20 million” undocumented immigrants within the U.S. There seemed to be little basis for the high side of this range. The Columbia Journalism Review noted that nearly every major newspaper reported that there were between 11 or 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.

He touched off another furor by suggesting that undocumented immigrants were tied to a spike in leprosy cases.

Lou Dobbs. It seems unlikely that we’ve heard the last of Dobbs. He has reportedly had talks with other news networks such as Fox and CNBC.

More interestingly, Dobbs has floated the possibility of running for the U.S. Senate against New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez–the Senate’s only Hispanic and ardent immigrant rights advocate. Dobbs sees winning the New Jersey Senate seat as a stepping stone to the U.S. Presidency, according to the New York Times.

This might explain why Dobbs has apparently begun to tone down his anti-immigrant message.

The Wall Street Journal reported a few weeks ago that Dobbs told Spanish-language network Telemundo that he now supports a plan to legalize millions of undocumented workers.

In a little-noticed interview Friday, Mr. Dobbs told Spanish-language network Telemundo he now supports a plan to legalize millions of undocumented workers, a stance he long lambasted as an unfair “amnesty.”

“Whatever you have thought of me in the past, I can tell you right now that I am one of your greatest friends and I mean for us to work together,” he said in a live interview with Telemundo’s Maria Celeste. “I hope that will begin with Maria and me and Telemundo and other media organizations and others in this national debate that we should turn into a solution rather than a continuing debate and factional contest.”

Mr. Dobbs twice mentioned a possible legalization plan for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., saying at one point that “we need the ability to legalize illegal immigrants under certain conditions.”