An American Vote Lost

It was one of those coincidences that has happened to me often in life.  Not but two days after Khizr Khan, with his wife, Ghazala, standing by his side in stoic support, delivered his jaw-dropping defense of the Constitution at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, I boarded the Southwest flight home to Austin via Dallas.

I had noticed what seemed to me was an Indian family in the waiting area.  They easily could have been Pakistani like Mr. Khan.  I took my aisle seat and knew the middle seat would not remain empty.  Indeed, while looking out the window for that unseen cloud formation that I always fear is going to force a screw out of the wing and send us plummeting to earth, a young man took the window seat.  And not long after him came another young man who I came to know by his nickname, Nish.  He was part of the family waiting to board in the last group.  He took the middle seat.

I soon learned that Nish, his parents and a brother after landing in Dallas were driving to Oklahoma City for a wedding, well, two weddings, really: the first a Christian ceremony and then another of the same couple he said would be in Hindu.  I immediately warned him to get on Interstate 35 quickly to try to avoid the construction mess near Denton, 30 miles north, where my sister lives, lest they add an hour or two to their trip.

With the plane rising into the clouds, I also learned that this young man was hell-bent on a military career, not unlike Captain Humayun Khan, who had died a hero in Iraq in 2004 helping defend his fellow soldiers and whose valiant legacy as embodied by his father at the convention might have been the turning point of the 2016 presidential race.  I asked Nish if he had watched the Khan speech.  He said yes, and the conversation, of course, quickly careened into all things Trump.

I was intrigued by Nish, who said he works as a paralegal at a law firm in northern Virginia while working to figure out a way to get into the Army’s officer training program.  His youthful earnestness and ambition were endearing, and so knowing something of how these things can be short-circuited, I began to give him some advice about how he might be able to jump-start the process of gaining entry into the military at the officer-training level.  He grew greatly enthused.

As we talked, he confirmed he was Republican at heart but that Trump was beyond the pale.  I got the sense he could easily vote for a Ryan-Rubio ticket in 2020.

I found his enthusiasm ennobling but also troubling.  I usually have not counseled young men or women to pursue careers that might cost them their lives.  But one cannot deny a patriot his calling whatever his political persuasion or his religion, something Trump, who would purport to be Nish’s commander-in-chief, does not.

Nish’s parents were born in India; Nish and his siblings here.  But Nish like so many products of immigrant parents knows instinctively that there is no escaping being labelled an immigrant in a land in which minorities are singled out for attack – even minorities who were here before the founding of the country.

Republicans like Trump and the know-nothing wing of his party do not realize that attacking minorities re-enforces the ethnic, religious and cultural constructs that support their different roots and identities.  Attacks on minorities even overcome sentiments within immigrant groups, for no one should doubt the sometimes real animosity that exists between Indians and Pakistanis.  In the fight against Trump, there is no difference among minorities.  Ask Cuban Americans who year after year increasingly are joining every other Hispanic/Latino group coalescing against recalcitrant Republicans.

Public opinion surveys reveal that an incredibly high number of Americans — as many as 40 percent! — believe most Hispanic/Latinos in the United States are immigrants – and ‘illegal immigrants’ at that.

In today’s toxic environment, Nish will remain ever the son of immigrants – even were he, God forbid, to perish somewhere like Capt. Kahn did for his country.

Were that horrible fate to await him, he with grim coincidence would join the thousands of Hispanic/Latino military service men and women who sacrificed their lives for a country that produces the Trumps of the world.

All of these thoughts were going through my mind as I listened to Nish soberly yet excitedly talk about his future.  What an incredible young man.  Trump does not know what he is losing.

But in Trump losing the American votes cast by Nish and millions more like him, America gains and the legacy of Capt. Khan and thousands of Hispanic/Latinos heroes vouchsafed.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

When Small Should be About Something Bigger

The political bickering over the fiscal cliff looks small, and it is, in comparison to the larger demographic cliff the country already has sailed over with greater implications by far.  The fiscal crisis in Washington today is just the beginning of the deeper financial plunge ahead – unless the economy is transformed to create new jobs with better-than-average wages to increase revenues, that is to say, expand the middle class.  The Congress and the President can negotiate tax rates but they can do little about the birth, death and obesity rates changing the country and its fiscal foundations far more profoundly than current balances in the federal government’s accounts.

The largest of the combined financial problems, of course, are Medicare and Social Security – whose futures look problematic since the elderly are living longer, minorities are not earning enough to support these programs and the young are incurring obesity-related health-care costs scores of years before they should.  When looked at analytically, the precise importance of the HispanicLatino population to the nation’s future becomes glaring.  You do not have to know the actuarial and budgetary numbers to understand that the current fiscal abyss is part of the much larger problem.  You cannot expect a growing HispanicLatino population with low, static incomes to support the growing cost of everything.

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Dying Inside the Border Should Be Enough

The recent fire in a factory in Bangladesh that claimed the lives of114 garment workers generated international headlines and calls for reform of working conditions in similar plants in Asia.  Yet the ongoing human tragedy along the border with Mexico somehow escapes notice.  Scores of mostly Mexican immigrants are dying trying to get across along the frontier.  More than 120 bodies of human beings once treking through Brooks County alone in South Texas have been found this year.  They died of exposure to harsh conditions, rattlesnakes, dehydration and foul play.  The number of victims more likely reaches 500.  Authorities estimate that only one in four victims is ever found.  The chances of surviving are low.

This ghastly, sad human toll is only one of the imperatives that should be driving discussions about immigration in Washington.  At the moment, though, there does not seem to be a draft plan being discussed uniformly by all interested parties.  If a breakthrough is not soon achieved, it will be a long time before today’s propitious, post-election opportunity comes again.  And, if the latest jobs report from the Department of Labor released last week indicates an economy turning around, then it will become again the magnet dulled by the Bush recession and by the slow recovery afterward.  Would now not be the right time to put a system in place so that future immigrant waves are not chaotic repeats of the acrimony and suffering of the past three decades? 

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The Enemy Within

It is hard to see how and why the leadership of the Republican party does not see the danger at hand for its future.  Its leaders are not aware that their party could be only a few years from extinction.  Things do die.  Larger entities than the Republican party – whole empires and powerful corporations, in fact – have disappeared through history.  A political party disappearing is nothing.  On this business of the fiscal cliff, the country already is suspicious of Republicans by a 2-1 margin.  So within a few weeks, the country could blame Republicans for throwing the economy back into recession.  And let us say that another storm like Sandy brews up in the Atlantic next summer, pushes past Florida and instead of wrecking New York and New Jersey parks itself over Atlanta this time.  Already caught in a demographic squeeze as the nation’s population changes, embroiled in an extended Bush recession and then pasted by another blow from the change in climate that Republicans deny – the GOP could be at the precipice leading into the 2014 midterm elections.  They just lost an election that if President Obama had had a better night in Denver one evening might have turned into a landslide.  And now, another storm named Hillary already is beginning to vent its first soft but undeniable breezes for 2016.

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Building New Rhetoric Not New Walls

Two standard phrases crop up the instant that lawmakers, bureaucrats and the media begin to talk about immigration:  Resolve the problem and comprehensive immigration reform.  Talk in Washington about resolving any large-scale challenge is rather ambitious given the city’s ever-steepening warps in its already pockmarked ideological-rhetorical terrain.  Immigration is not an easy subject to talk about dispassionately, and so how Washington gains traction on immigration no doubt will be affected greatly by how lawmakers and the President manage the fast-approaching fiscal cliff.

The 2012 election, it is said, opened Republicans to accept the possibility that they might have to compromise on immigration, something that most of those commonly referred to as the Tea party adamantly oppose.  The corporate side of the Republican equation, however, is in favor of something being done, and corporate America has more of the power now.  It is not surprising that it also is driving a good part of the discussion of how to avert the cliff.

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First heal then rebuild

Ceaselessly, the babble goes on about the crossroads the Republican party faces after its rejection by almost 64 million voters.  And, of course, the discussion misses the point. The usual post-election hand-wringing in the wake of a political defeat has gone beyond usual recrimination.  Desperation has turned bitter.  Ill-informed and/or cynical political strategists and pollsters had hoodwinked the party’s faithful into thinking they were going to win an election with a nominee who truly considers half of the nation way, way beneath him.  Despondency has conflated into screeching on the radio about the old America dying.  The resentments that right-wing gasbags with microphones spew into the air unfortunately cloud the opportunity that America has before it.

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Far, Far From a Status Quo Election

Years ago as a young boy in the small town of West Texas where I grew up, I would daydream along the railroad tracks in the shallow valley below our home.  I would wait for the high, mighty trains that I imagined came roaring from Los Angeles from the west or Atlanta from the east.  The trains would slow down as they sped by an old salt lake but even so would displace enough air to create a powerful force that on occasion sent my thin, reedy body reeling and crashing into the brown dirt.  While other boys were sniffing glue, I was getting off on sudden blasts of air from caravans of steel that the day before might have sat idling near the Pacific or come from the other side of the country where Sherman ran roughshod over the Confederacy.

One day, one of the trains slowed to a pace slower than usual.  A clump of rail yard workers not far from me waited.  One of the crew stood by a thick iron stick that he pushed away from his body.  As he did, the tracks moved and separated in part.  I watched with fascination.  A new set of tracks appeared suddenly and diverted the massive train to another set of tracks.  That decades-old image came to mind as I sat with my old college roommate watching the returns of the election of 2012 that some observers have characterized as a status-quo election.  It was anything but.  In fact, it was a shattering election – far more important than the pedantic conclusion that Democrats retained control of the White House and the Senate and that Republicans maintained their majority in the House.

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A New Ambassador for a New Time

The topic of immediate concern in Washington is the nation’s fiscal crisis.  Nothing is more important.  But not long thereafter, the time for immigration reform will arrive.  What does immigration reform mean?  When will the Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress draft and propose legislation?  Is the intention to build on the last proposal that went nowhere?  Is there a legalization component?  President Obama should be involved directly, but will he engage?  Who in Congress and within public interest organizations will be central to this drama?  Is there a cost to the Treasury?  What terms are acceptable to discuss in public?  Will the fight be as bitter as over healthcare?  What steps are being taken to assure that the public accepts proposed legislation?  Will all come to naught in the face of Republican opposition and predictable Democratic angst?  Will hard political capital on both sides of the aisle be used to get this done?  Or will one party use it to set up the other in time for November, 2014?

Listed in this fashion, the questions frame the sheer difficulty of what is demonstrably easier said than done.  No one has answers for most of them, except that the Administration will need every tool to achieve success – and develop new ones.

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The Debate’s Effect on Arizona: California Here We Come, Right Back Where We Started From

 

Against a backdrop of ever-changing polls, the debate last night highlighted the essential political question for Americans – certainly for Mitt Romney’s disdained 47-percent and most assuredly for HispanicLatinos:  Whether they believe the tiger trying mightily to shear his stripes.  All Americans have heard – and seen on videotape – Romney denigrate HispanicLatinos and dismiss at least 47 percent of the American people at a time when national unity is elementally important.  We do not know what he might think of undecided voters after last night.  The polls will soon enough begin to tell the latest version of the tale but no one knows what other images of the candidates – stripes or no stripes – the optical nerves of 70 million Americans sent to their brains.

Did they see a President in Barack Obama or did they see through the superficial arguments that Romney floats into the air hoping that the weight of truth does not crash them back to earth?  The debate and its results are important but there seems to be more going on with the innumerable polls that change storylines from day to day.  Polls of states are more reliable than national polls, and so what is happening in Arizona might be instructive.  Indeed, Arizona might be the most important state in the 2012 election.  And the polls after the debate in Arizona will probably conclude that the public has seen enough of the campaign.

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Demographic Implosion

Years ago, supporters of George W. Bush’s push for immigration reform correctly predicted in public that falling birth rates in Mexico and a growing Mexican economy would reduce and stabilize historic immigration to the United States from its southern neighbor.  Bush wanted to disarm critics skeptical of anything that smelled of an amnesty that would add fuel to the demographic change that so many in his party fear.  The ploy did not work.  Immigration reform went down in flames.

Now comes evidence that the life span of the lower-income non-HispanicLatino white population without high school diplomas is falling precipitously – a development that will amplify and accelerate the growth of the HispanicLatino population and its importance to the economy.  Most of this blog draws heavily and directly from a story in The New York Times by Sabrina Tavernise two weeks ago that details in part how the demographic transformation that alarms so many in the country will continue.

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