Criticized by supporters for passing a weak civil rights bill in 1957, even though it was the first civil rights legislation in almost a century, the powerful Democratic Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson responded by saying that it was but a first step to larger gains ahead. Eight years later, a far more comprehensive civil rights package indeed became law. The story of those years — retold in part in Robert Caro’s new book on Johnson, The Passage of Power – holds implications for those contemplating a watered-down version of the Dream Act. The courageous leaders of the Dream Act movement, perhaps unknowingly, hold in their hands much of how HispanicLatinos are redefining themselves. The other part of that redefinition is being accomplished through the courtesy of states like Arizona, Alabama and Georgia and, soon enough, most likely, the Supreme Court.
Reformers in any arena always have to confront the concept of incremental change as a tactical possibility. Supporters of the Dream Act are no different, yet their movement is more than a way to extend citizenship to college-age students whose parents brought them into the country as non-citizens and who have spent most of their lives here. The fight over proposed law represents part of how the HispanicLatino population is evolving. It has as its broader topic the existence of 11-12 million HispanicLatinos who are in the country without proper authorization, and it speaks to the greater need of how all HispanicLatinos, legal or otherwise, advance economically, politically and socially.
The problem is that the politics of today are not the politics of 1957, when the legendary Johnson and his fellow Texan, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, were able to use their enormous political skill and power to achieve what despite the criticism was a historic accomplishment made better in the future. Today, there is no such leadership on Capitol Hill or in the White House to push the Dream Act forward – or much of any legislation of importance to the rest of the HispanicLatino population and, indeed, the whole country, for that matter.
Even more problematic is the difference in substance of the two pieces of legislation. The 1957 law sought to strengthen the dignity of every American by protecting the right to vote. The reduced version of the Dream Act being batted around does not advance the dignity of HispanicLatinos. Indeed, Marco Rubio’s proposal, what we know of it, would convert HispanicLatinos into second-class inhabitants of the country – not even citizens – in an attempt to create political chattel for himself.
That it took eight years – eight years! – to achieve meaningful civil rights legislation is a historical fact that Dream Act supporters and HispanicLatinos in general cannot dismiss. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 came to be only after Johnson as President seized the emotional momentum generated by President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in late 1963 to fashion a great Democratic landslide in the presidential election of 1964 that increased his political power exponentially. Today hardly resembles that period in American history.
The Dreamers will have to gauge whether any compromise now matters more than standing firm for the whole package or a larger package of immigration reform. Demanding a larger package implies figuring out how to increase the power of the HispanicLatino vote immediately, the only dynamic factor that can change the current environment as the HispanicLatinos continue to redefine and find themselves.
The HispanicLatino vote could be the new Lyndon Johnson – except that no one has converted it into the kind of political power that he embodied and brandished. But that is what real leaders do: Grow their power to affect more change.
Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.