Wow. Wow wow wow.
This tweet is just too much, given the undocumented labor scandal Lou Dobbs is now embroiled in:
Meg Whitman had an illegal immigrant maid for 9 yrs and fired her when she found out? She didn’t try to help her get legal status? Not good 2:20 PM Sep 29th via web from Midtown Center, New York
Now, he may be right about Whitman, but talk about casting the first stone… Today Lou Dobbs becomes the latest uber-wealthy public figure to shamelessly flog the immigration issue while simultaneously benefiting from undocumented labor in his home (or rather, estate).
The Nation has a devastating report out today, the result of a year-long investigation, on Dobbs’ use and abuse of undocumented workers. Five of Dobbs’ workers stated that the ex-CNN anchor knew that they lacked papers but looked the other way as they tended his multi-million dollar estate.
Watch the take-down video:
The reporter, Isabel McDonald, spoke to one immigrant worker, who she identified as Marco Salinas:
An old friend of Salinas’s worked as a groom with some of the horses owned by Dobbs, and he had sent word that Salinas could be hired on as a groom at the Vermont stable contracted to care for the Dobbs Group horses.
Salinas got the job, he said, and worked at it for more than two years without documents until he was finally able to obtain a guest-worker visa designed for seasonal foreign workers (the same kind of visa denounced as a form of “indentured servitude” on Dobbs’s CNN show).
I asked Salinas, still clad in his work clothes–a polo shirt and jeans–about Dobbs, the owner of the horses he cared for. But the father of three simply flashed a disarming grin, let out an easygoing laugh and politely declined to comment.
In addition to Salinas, the reporter interviewed a man named Rodrigo Ortega who worked in Dobbs’ gardens. Dobbs introduced himself in Spanish as “Luis” when he met Ortega and stated that Dobbs “knew very well that the majority of us didn’t have papers,” but that this “was never a problem.”
