Horse Sense on Immigration

Meg Whitman, a candidate for governor of California and a frequent critic of employers who hire paper-challenged workers, found herself in a paper jam of her own this month. It was revealed that Ms. Whitman fired her long-time housekeeper in June 2009 after a belated discovery that she had been dusting chez Whitman for years without legal residency. The champion anti-immigration bloviator Lou Dobbs had similar paperwork problems at his 300-acre New Jersey estate and horse farm. An investigation by The Nation magazine turned up undocumented workers tending its grounds and horseflesh and no doubt ducking every time the self-appointed border watchman made his rounds. It is always great fun to catch public figures in glass estates, but the apparent hypocrisy about immigration is a less striking aspect of these gotcha news stories than what they reveal about our national bipolar disorder on illegal immigration.