Date of Graduation

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Degree Level

Undergraduate

Department

Communication

Advisor/Mentor

Dr. Lisa Corrigan

Committee Member

Dr. Meredith Neville-Shepard

Second Committee Member

Dr. Ryan Calabretta-Sajder

Third Committee Member

Dr. Lucy Brown

Abstract

This project examines former CNN and Fox Business anchor Lou Dobbs’s meteoric success to understand his rhetorical choices and appeals surrounding immigration discourse in the United States. As the first rhetorical assessment of Dobbs’s immigration rhetoric, this project centers him as a key figure who defined how U.S. culture operates within immigration discourses. The project relies on Michael Calvin McGee's work on ideographs to perform a close textual analysis of news programs featuring Dobbs to understand how ideologies about immigrants and immigration are built, circulated, and maintained in the Right’s media ecology. The project advances three arguments about Dobbs’s anti-immigration rhetoric. First, it argues that Lou Dobbs’ rhetorical style is defined by the characteristics of demagoguery. His demagogic rhetoric conceptualizes as and through subjective essentialism, weaponized communication, and attacks on the “regulative functions” of democratic institutions. Second, Lou Dobbs conceptualizes as and through populist appeals that target working-class Americans through direct address, nationalism, and fostering suspicion of the federal government. Third, Lou Dobbs’s anti-immigration rhetoric is foregrounded by Charles Mills’s concept of the racial contract, wherein the racialized “Other” (the immigrant) is consciously or subconsciously constructed as a threat to the institution of white supremacy. As the first rhetorical assessment of Dobbs’s impact on the immigration policy landscape, this project centers him as the vehicle through which the United States’s “culture of demagoguery” was expanded and amplified, positioning him and his rhetoric as a prototype for future rhetorical figures on the Right, especially Donald Trump.

Keywords

immigration; rhetoric; Lou Dobbs; ideographs; populism; demagoguery

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