No Amnesty for Lepers

...Leper waitstaff aren't actresses or ballerinas waiting for their ships to come in...

...It doesn't really matter if you have leprosy when you're operating a leaf-blower," says a Rancho Caliente, Colo., environmentalist outraged by the "army" of alien leper gardeners who have invaded her community...

...Yet, amazingly enough, anecdotal evidence seeping in from the trenches suggests that Dobbs may be on to something, after all...

...Because of his refusal to back down from what Joe Queenan is the author, most recently, of Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country seems on the face of it to be a preposterous allegation, Dobbs was recently the subject of a withering New York Times column which deftly but decisively portrayed him as a charlatan, a xenophobe, a blowhard, and a liar...

...Ditto private equity firms...

...And, if you've seen his show lately, you can understand why...

...On a scale of one to 10, enforcing village noise ordinances ranks about 23 around here," says Rancho Caliente police chief Dirk Carmody...

...Adds Beaumont: "Most of the top interest-rate forecasters at hedge funds are foreign-born lepers...

...When these shocking numbers were challenged by 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl, no math whiz herself, and were also questioned by mystified experts in the public health field, Dobbs stuck to his guns, insisting that if he reported something as a fact, then it was a fact...

...they're lepers...

...BY Joe Queenan Two years ago, CNN heavyweight Lou Dobbs inexplicably began propagating the theory that illegal aliens were unleashing an epidemic of leprosy in this country...

...But white-collar lepers with their papers in order make a great contribution to America, and earn more than enough to cover all their bills for medicine and skin-care products and disguises...

...But these are all lepers that have a right to be here...

...This seemed to tie in with his theory that illegal aliens were systematically wrecking the American economy...

...Half the people writing for Comedy Central are top-flight stand-ups from Pakistan and Venezuela who came down with leprosy," says Natalie Beaumont, media coordinator for the Fibonacci Institute, a Washington think tank that specializes in dubious statistics...

...Gaston Fenelon, a Dijon native who recently took over as head chef at New York's trendy Vendredi de Trop, says that leper chefs are in great demand in New York because they will work for far less money than nonlepers...

...With the exception of PJ...

...So this could all come down to one thing: Lou Dobbs isn't so much afraid of illegal aliens with leprosy...

...It's a Hansen's Disease Thing" T-shirt...

...Most waiters and waitresses have attitude problems because they're only waiting tables until their acting careers take off," explains Phil Kaplan, who opened Vendredi de Trop in 1998 after his bistro Sans Pretension closed two years before—because of labor unrest...

...Industry after industry is now reporting that foreign lepers with or without work papers are putting able-bodied Americans out of work all across the nation...

...In an April 14, 2005, broadcast that was recently exhumed by 60 Minutes, the man who has become a champion of the middle class in the autumnal phase of an otherwise humdrum career announced that 7,000 cases of leprosy had been reported in the United States in the previous three years, as opposed to 900 cases in the previous 40 years...

...Leper aliens are also making an impact in the food services industry...

...Several commentators have suggested that Dobbs's obsession with disease-plagued illegal aliens may stem from his own fears that a charismatic leper newscaster might one day take his place at CNN...

...But mostly, we work cheap...

...We work cheap, we don't mind putting in huge amounts of overtime because we have such constricted social lives, and we have a wonderful esprit de corps rarely found in the food preparation business...

...Remember: No one knows what a satirist looks like, so being a leper doesn't hurt their careers...

...What irks me is when Dobbs starts mixing apples and oranges: lumping lepers and illegal alien lepers together because he knows it plays well in the heartland...

...Lawn-care companies hire lepers because they know angry neighbors won't confront them about noise pollution, fearing that they will be pilloried as enemies of the epidermally challenged, while also catching leprosy...

...O'Rourke and David Sedaris, I can think of almost no major satirist in this country today who is not an Eastern European leper...

...Anderson Cooper would probably put a few perky leper correspondents on his show just to remind the public that he's a champion of the sick, as well the poor, the black, the Hispanic, and the entire population of sub-Saharan Africa...

...he's afraid of illegal aliens with pizazz...

...And the police won't go anywhere near leaf-blowing lepers...

...You toss in the whole leper thing, and you're sending coals to Newcastle...

...Local authorities confirm this assertion...

...But CNN has an ancient audience, and as Americans get older and their vision gets weaker, I'm not sure that most viewers would even notice if a leper was manning The Situation Room...

...Dobbs is engaging in a kind of halefellow-well-met way, but he's still basically your chubby, middle-aged, blow-dried newsman," says Chick Gallagher, a media trainer specializing in finding work for news anchors with bad skin...

...The real payoff is when the entire staff walks out, and the restaurant can replace them with leper chefs, leper bus-boys, and even leper waiters, though not yet leper maitre Cs," says Fenelon, sporting a jet-black "You Wouldn't Understand...

...Experts agree that the number of illegal lepers seeping in across the border is less important than the skills the lepers bring with them...

...It's true that tens of thousands of unskilled, low-paid alien lepers entering this country illegally would traumatize our health care system...