Category Archives: Immigration

Slow Down the Slowing Down

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Decision-makers, especially those in business, should take a considered view of recent reporting on the slowdown of the growth of the HispanicLatino population.  Changes in population by their very nature alter the composition of the marketplace, but the formation of new markets and a work force that is more HispanicLatino remains fairly on course.

Much is being made of the slowdown in the HispanicLatino birthrate since 2007.  As the Great Recession took hold, it dampened the disposition of HispanicLatinos to add to their families.  Coupled with the dramatic increases in deportation of individuals in the country illegally and increased border security to prevent their return, the lower birth rate is causing some observers to move quickly to ratchet down estimates of the size of the HispanicLatino population going forward.

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Gingrich: The Newt Slaveholder

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Newt Gingrich is at it again.  He sat down for an interview yesterday with CNN and repeated the idea that most of the world ridiculed when he offered it at the most recent Republican presidential debate.  The notion that local panels or juries would decide the fate of immigrants who are in the country illegally boggles the mind.  But he is serious.  He apparently believes that citizens other than hate-filled, blood-thirsty bigots would serve on the local boards.

Gingrich would have us believe, too, that such a system could be built.  The mountains of files, the numbers of lawyers, the need to hire experts to verify piles of paper – the whole thing is an unworkable mess.  Come to think of it already exists.  It used to be called the INS.

However unseemly and unmanageable his idea, Gingrich presses on.  His new system would never, ever grant citizenship or voting rights to the immigrant community – even after 25 years of lawful and productive existence.

You would think that someone from Georgia – especially someone who seeks to convince the public that he was paid $100 million to provide “historical perspective” to corporate interests after he left the Speakership – would know the definition of slavery.

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What Luck!

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Newt Gingrich’s proposal for local citizen juries to decide which of the individuals illegally in the country gets to stay is of course nuts.  Why even discuss it?  The arguments against it are monumental.  The idea is being laughed at across the board and it shows one of the reasons Gingrich would be an excellent choice for Republicans to nominate as their candidate for president – if they want to lose in a landslide.

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Turning Back History

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The long arc of the immigration story has gotten us here, literally.  Yet on one hand, the demographic and economic forces which are structural in nature and in place have led to the assertion of immigration as a population change agent.  Immigration, as it has always, is adding to the population of the country and changing it in the process.

On the other hand, the countervailing sentiment is also asserting itself, so that states like Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana and Texas are leading the equally natural anti-immigrant reaction.

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Not Armageddon Yet

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The Wall Street Journal hid the woman’s face.  Not the usual journalistic fare you see on a Greyhound bus between Austin and Dallas.  The WSJ is more likely found zipping above us on American Airlines on a 35-minute flight.  She sat to my left, within the peripheral range of my one good eye.

Every other week or so when I board the bus to go 220 miles in four and a half hours instead of three by road I resolve to fly the next time or to break down and get a car.  If I get the smallest car on the market, I can minimize my carbon footprint.  But I then think, regardless of the size of the car, about the number of people who would be at risk.  Oh, I can drive.  Recently in a rented car with a package of insurance that could have bailed out the Greek economy, I managed to navigate more than 300 miles safely.  But I still shudder when I think about the old lady I almost ran over with my truck on my way to Christmas Eve Mass at Saint Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington years ago.  The police rightfully would have concluded it was her fault but had I better vision I would have been able to react more quickly.

Behind the WSJ woman, a young man sat fidgeting, his face turned brackish, or perhaps crackish, and dark by either a hard life or drugs or both.  A diamond ring in the ear of an NFL linebacker strutting his masculinity on television on Sundays no longer comes off as improbable.  On a somewhat youngish man who should weigh another 10 or 15 pounds, his stoned ear suggests the rest of him might be too.

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After Herman Cain are Willie Horton and Pete Wilson Next?

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Hmmm, so this is what the election year is going to look like.  It begins with the sensational accusations of sexual assault against Herman Cain and an equally astounding press conference by the candidate himself that pushes the limits of what is now fair game.  Should we dare visualize how it might end?  It almost should not matter, now that we get a glimpse of what could be a spectacularly sorry election year – except that it might get worse for HispanicLatinos, especially those unprepared or who live in a state of denial.

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Seriously?

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An Associated Press story last week quoted Alabama’s Gov. Republican Robert Bentley, who signed legislation that targets any HispanicLatino who might appear to be in the state illegally.  The law would have kicked every brown kid out of school had a federal court not intervened.  Bentley, not intending to draw guffaws, wondered why his state is being laughed at across the nation.

“Why are we getting all the publicity? I think it has to do with Alabama’s past and the perception that people have of Alabama over the years…and really don’t recognize the amount of progress we’ve made in Alabama over the last 50 to 60 years,” Bentley said.

If you did not know he was serious, it would indeed be a laughing matter. Continue reading →

Crockett Keller, Meet Joshua

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Years ago as a teenager in the mid-1960s at the height of the civil rights movement, I would take the bus down from the dusty and dry plains of West Texas in August to go to high school in San Antonio in South Texas, returning home for Christmas and then for the summer.

I loved the trips.  The trip south was the more exciting.  Back then buses were clean and safe, and the bus driver through his mirror looked at me to make sure I was secure and he and his bus would carry me to a completely different world.  Listening to my little transistor radio – that age’s version of the iPod – I would stare out the window and watch the land begin to fall and the flat and empty terrain change.  The further south the bus sank the greater the number of trees and the greener the grass got – and some of the rivers actually had water in them.

The Hill Country was always beautiful.  It is like no other part of Texas, especially in December.  The bus would roll by ranch homes, with singular rows of red and green lights outlining their roofs, snuggled in between the hills.  Thin trails of blue smoke would drift from their chimneys.  I was a blessed soul seeing Christmas cards come to life.  I especially liked arriving at little Mason, Texas, whose courthouse seemed enchanted.  It appeared to me like a little Hapsburgian castle.  Ringed by a small stone fence, it seemed to have dropped from an Austrian sky.  I half-expected the Archduke Ferdinand to step out of it and get gunned down by Serbian nationalists.

The reason my thoughts would turn from idyllic and romantic meanderings so abruptly to thoughts of violence was only moments away.  Just as U.S. Highway 87 bends away from the courthouse a huge billboard in black letters on a white backdrop proclaimed “Martin Luther King is a Communist” with the word communist underscored.

Memories of those times came back to me this week when a news story popped out about a man named Crockett Keller, who owns a gun shop in Mason.  Keller refuses to make his services available to Muslims and to people who voted for President Obama.  Well, that would include Catholic me and most HispanicLatinos. How sad.  It was a far different experience for me when the bus stopped for a few moments in Mason by the side of a store.  I would run in to buy a candy bar and Coke.  The German lady recognized me after my first trip and would always smile.  In between the haters and the angered, other people make the world better.

I wish I could remember when the sign changed.  King was assassinated in 1968 precisely so that no one in the country would be discriminated against as Mr. Keller seems to think he has the right to do.

After the jarring sign, the bus would continue to flow south, and I would get excited.  Within yards of the road just north of San Antonio, a spring would gurgle from the ground.  A real spring.  For someone from the driest part of Texas, water springing from the ground is a near miracle.  Memory unreliably brings back the name of the spring as Joshua, the prophet who led the Hebrews to the new land of Canaan.  In one of the battles the Hebrews had to fight, God is said to have hurled hailstones from the heavens to help them.

My first thought for Mr. Keller was a ton of hailstones, except that after all these years, I remember Dr. King, and I realize there always will be people like the gun shop owner.  He was preceded by the people who put up the long-gone billboard.  They were there in 1965, they exist in 2011 in the likes of Govs. Jan Brewer in Arizona and Robert Bentley in Alabama and the Loudon County Republicans in Virginia who circulated a picture of President Obama shot through the head – and they will persist even until 2065.

But there always will be people like the bus driver and the German lady at the little store.  And there are other many good people in Mason and even in Alabama and Arizona and Loudon County.

And there will be always springs of hope.

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This Time is not an Act

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So I was sitting with a HispanicLatino executive in the movie business in Los Angeles recently.  The views expressed on the Obama Administration’s handling of immigration did not surprise me.  The ferocity of the comments did.  They were not part of the usual script.  The conversation in Hollywood confirmed what I have been thinking for many months:  That unlike other national elections in which immigration is important then tends to fall by the wayside, this one is shaping up differently.

From a number of perspectives, the power of the issue is real – real enough to tip what looks like a close election in the making.  It is certainly real for a significant number of HispanicLatinos.  How many?  In a close election, 500 votes can be significant.  Had only 1,000 more HispanicLatinos voted in Florida in 2000.

Angered by the Obama Administration’s failure to achieve immigration reform (read that some sort of legalization program) and by the number of deportations that by November of next year will number by far more than a million, many HispanicLatinos are ready to hold back on President Obama’s re-election.  How many?  As I said…

The predicament the Administration finds itself in is delicate, and any attempt to triangulate the issue Clinton-style is nearly impossible.  No amount of pitting sides against each other while appearing to be the good guy is going to reduce the intensity of a substantial number of HispanicLatinos on the issue.  How many?  As I said…

A growing number of HispanicLatinos dogging Obama on immigration know that attacks on immigrants – whether legal or not – are attacks on them.  As silent as the HispanicLatino population often appears, most are quite aware of the intimidation and harassment – and intentions – of racist bullies in Alabama and Arizona and elsewhere.  Many HispanicLatinos would think that perhaps a black President and African Americans on his staff would understand.

Usually immigration has lost its currency as an issue by the time of the national election.  But this time, a credible part of the HispanicLatino community is intent on keeping it alive in the closing stages of the general election that could force it to gain traction among non-HispanicLatinos.  This is a worst-case scenario for Obama.  Thus another attempt is being made – at least for show – by congressional Democrats to achieve “immigration reform” whose failure they hope to pin, deservedly, on Republican members.  But all is not as it appears.

GOP strategists know full well that the demise of any reform legislation will only fuel the issue among HispanicLatinos.  Losing on immigration for them might well mean winning in November – not in the classic sense of HispanicLatinos not voting for them but through enough HispanicLatinos not voting at all, while keeping the issue alive among anti-immigrant voters.

It seems the die is cast on immigration:  Any semblance of “immigration reform” in Congress would enflame the issue from the start.  On the other hand, the ongoing deportation of individuals and rising anti-HispanicLatino rhetoric have created a sensation within parts of the HispanicLatino community that portend more conflict with the administration than it realizes going into November.

Immigration and the election appear headed to the final act as thriller and nightmare – for a million and more reasons.

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The Education of Marco Rubio

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A friend of mine called to yell at me about Wednesday’s blog on Marco Rubio, whom, my friend supposed, I was defending.  Well I was, in part.

We cannot live in a nation in which people bend to the fringe, in this case the same whacko-birthers who would disagree with Christ Himself if he appeared and told them President Obama is a citizen and is legally entitled to hold his office, having won the votes of more than 69 million of his fellow Americans in a fair election.

When does this nuttiness end?  Now, because a senator’s parents were born outside the United States he cannot be Vice President or President?  Nonsense.  The other side of me, however, disdains the politician who wants to have it both ways – and Rubio clearly does.  But there is much more to the story.

Note: the author served in the Clinton and Obama administrations.

In conveying the idea that he is part of the Cuban exile community that fled Castro when in fact his parents departed Cuba for purely economic reasons, Rubio spun the kind of narrative that candidates for high office require.  But his pushing back is against The Washington Post, whose editors published the story that now threatens to ensnare Rubio in his own deception – and not the birthers.

In so doing, Rubio might not be worthy for higher office because he does not appreciate the larger truth:  That the birther movement is the angry expression of the part of the nation’s population that is reacting to its new demography.

Rubio evidently does not realize that throughout the country too many of his fellow party members, like the birthers, are reacting to the nation’s changing demographics in the kind of negative, predictable ways that good leaders would decry – except that Rubio does not.  Yet large segments of his party seek to diminish HispanicLatinos and their standing.  For that same reason, any of the Republican presidential candidates who have not denounced the birthers are giving aid and comfort to anti-HispanicLatino sentiment. The promise of young and talented men and women like Rubio is that they might be able to help the nation transition into a new chapter in its life, not enable the crazies.

However the Post might confront one important HispanicLatino with lofty aspirations, it is not as damaging as the actions of Republican-controlled legislatures passing real laws that push minorities back into the 1950’s with regressive new laws on voter registration and identification that will restrict the very freedoms at the ballot box that Rubio’s parents did not enjoy in the days of the military dictatorship that preceded the Castro regime.  Republicans in states they control are slashing education budgets and in the process myopically crippling America’s future.

When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie spoke at the Reagan Library last month in California, I thought I saw its former governor, Pete Wilson, sitting on the front row.  Wilson was the man who in his re-election bid in 1994 ushered in the modern-day reaction against HispanicLatinos that has now swept the nation.  I wonder if Wilson was in the room at the same library in August when Marco Rubio gave his own coming-out address that, no, by no means, was meant to signal that, yes, yes, he is very interested in being on the national ticket.

Rubio is very much eligible to be Vice President of the United States.  But he might not be qualified for the demands of our times.  Nevertheless, his rights should be defended.  Too bad he cannot bring himself to do the same for others.

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