by Jorge Ramos
The other important point is that the Latino and Asian populations are both expected to grow—by 115 percent and 128 percent, respectively—during the relatively short period from 2014 to 2060.
Projections indicate that Hispanics will jump from a population of 57 million in 2015 to around 100 million by 2045 and nearly 120 million by 2060.
There is no magic or witchcraft involved in America’s demographic future. Whites are on the decline while Hispanics and Asians are on the rise. It’s as simple as that…and that’s what bothers some of Trump’s followers.
With a bit of luck, I’ll be eighty-six years old in 2044. But we won’t have to wait that long to witness the changes taking place. Even as early as 2015, a majority of babies less than a year old were members of a minority. And the change is coming from below.
We are in the midst of a real demographic revolution.
It is the revolution that Cesar Chavez, the historic leader of the Latino community, predicted. In a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in 1984, he saw the changes that were on the horizon:
“We have looked into the future and the future is ours!” he declared. “History and inevitability are on our side….These trends are part of the forces of history that cannot be stopped. No person and no organization can resist them for very long. They are inevitable. Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.”
California is living in the future. It’s not exactly how Chavez would have pictured it, but on July 1, 2014, Latinos had officially outpaced non-Hispanic whites as the largest single demographic group in California. According to Census Bureau figures, there are 15 million Latinos to 14.9 million non-Hispanic whites.
But power is not proportional to population growth. While Chavez believed that the children and grandchildren of the unionized farmworkers would come to “dominate” the labor situation in the California fields (even if they didn’t necessarily become landowners themselves), this has not yet happened.
But what has taken place are the demographic and generational changes and the new sense of awareness among younger Latinos that they have created. The future is theirs.
Not only will there be more of them, they will have more power as well.
Here’s an example I use often: When 2018 begins, Latinos will represent 18 percent of the population. But we have only four senators. Four! We should have eighteen. We need fourteen more.
I’m not talking about quotas or formulas, just the simple fact that a people should have political representation that corresponds to its population. We don’t have this yet. But that is changing, slowly but surely.
We have more congressmen than ever, more senators than ever, more governors than ever, and—for the first time in history—in 2016 we had two Latino presidential candidates in Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.
We are gaining greater political power.
We are becoming better educated.
We are earning more money.
These are all breakthroughs. But they’re not enough, nor are they happening fast enough.
And these gains are not being reflected in the media. According to the Latino Media Gap, “Stories about Latinos constitute less than 1% of news media coverage, and the majority of these stories feature Latinos as lawbreakers.” In 2013, none of the top-ten rated television shows featured a Latino star, and from 2010 to 2013, Hispanics represented only 1.1 percent of the producers of these shows, 2 percent of the writers, and 4.1 percent of the directors.
The challenge is to translate increasing numbers into increasing power. And we’re seeing that more and more. Tom Llamas was named the sole weekend anchor and chief national correspondent for the ABC News program World News Tonight, while Cecilia Vega was named senior White House correspondent for the Disney unit, and José Díaz-Balart was named the anchor of the Saturday edition of NBC Nightly News.
I am not proposing that the growing political, economic, and cultural power of Latinos be granted at the expense of any other group. It’s not about excluding anyone. Rather, it is about including Latinos in the process. They are a fundamental part of the American population and have suffered from racism and discrimination for far too long.
Hatred
Despite all the progress we have made, we still often find ourselves on the defensive. Why is that? If we are an important part of the United States, if we are growing so quickly and gaining more political, educational, and economic power, why are there times when we feel attacked?
The answer has nothing to do with low self-esteem or psychological trauma. We feel defensive because we are literally being attacked.
There is a growing resistance to the social and demographic changes that the United States is currently undergoing, and the response by many sectors of the population has been to attack those they perceive as a threat. Trump’s racist and xenophobic statements have encouraged many to overtly express their rejection of minority groups.
Sanam Malik of the Center for American Progress has expressed this idea better than anyone in her article titled “When Public Figures Normalize Hate”: “Calling it a theory of ‘activation,’ Karen Stenner, a professor of politics at Princeton University, argues in The Authoritarian Dynamic that when certain people perceive a threat to the ‘oneness and sameness’ of their group, they can adopt riskier and more violent behaviors. Public figures and the media can certainly stoke such fear when they paint certain groups as threatening outsiders.”
Hatred is contagious, and the infection is spread from top to bottom. As the scholar Francis Fukuyama wrote in a tweet, “The world is producing a bunch of mini-Trumps under the radar.”
It’s impossible to draw a direct line of causality between Trump’s words and the bullying being experienced by minorities. But neither can we say that it’s a simple coincidence.
After Trump’s attacks on and criticisms of immigrants and Muslims, the number of recognized hate groups in the country increased sharply. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, it jumped from 784 in 2014 to 917 in 2016.
The most dramatic increase was seen in anti-Muslim groups. These tripled from 34 in 2014 to 101 in 2016. During that stretch of time, there were dozens of attacks on mosques all across the country.
Additionally, groups linked to the Ku Klux Klan rose from 72 to 130 over that same period.
No one told me about this hatred.
I saw it with my own eyes.
One night, behind a house in small-town Ohio, my team of documentarians and I watched as around twenty white supremacists nailed together a wooden swastika and set it on fire. They formed a circle around it and then, raising their right hands in a Nazi salute, began to chant, “White power! White power!”
I don’t often keep my mouth shut. But there, for almost three hours—during the burning of the swastika and the racist speeches that followed—I didn’t say a single word. I have a distinct accent when I speak in English, and it didn’t seem safe to me (or to the other journalists and technicians who were there with me filming the documentary) to express my views in favor of diversity and tolerance at a white supremacist rally. Even less so considering that some of them were armed. The police were nowhere to be seen during the entire ceremony.
That experience reminded me of two books.
The first was James Baldwin’s revealing work titled The Fire Next Time. First published in 1963, it describes in brutal clarity what happens when one race feels superior to another: “The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another—or others—always has been and always will be a recipe for murder.”
The other is A Nation of Immigrants by former president John F. Kennedy. In his foreword, Abraham H. Foxman writes, “While racial superiority is no longer the parlance of our time, today hate groups rail against non-white immigration and urge Americans to ‘fight back’ against the percei
ved ‘invasion’ of the ‘white’ United States by Hispanics from Mexico.”
When one considers Trump and many of his followers, this observation has a deeply concerning effect.
Words matter.
Trump and his followers have been looking to portray Hispanic immigrants as a danger to the United States. When Trump launched his candidacy, he said that the immigrants arriving from Mexico and the rest of Latin America were drug traffickers, criminals, and rapists. But once again, he was wrong.
I’ll prove it to you. With facts and figures.
What I won’t do is defend the undocumented immigrants who are real criminals. Absolutely not. It is true that a very small number of undocumented people have committed murders, rapes, armed robberies, and other violent crimes. We know this because every time a serious incident involving an undocumented immigrant occurs, the more conservative wing of the nation’s media takes it upon themselves to not only cover but highlight it. The problem is that they often take the case out of context and criminalize the entire undocumented population.
This is an issue that must be treated with great care and respect. I’ve spoken with two parents who lost their children through incidents involving undocumented immigrants. Their pain is boundless. I listened to their stories, which were weighted with beautiful memories of their children and the terrible feeling of knowing they will never see them again. As a parent myself, I could never begin to comprehend what they must be feeling or the emptiness that now inhabits their homes.
Stepping back from the political debate, they argued that if those undocumented immigrants had never set foot in this country, their children would still be alive. And I have no defense against that argument. What I did tell them is that it does not seem right to me to persecute and vilify an entire community of millions of undocumented immigrants based on the actions of two people. Yes, there are those who have committed serious crimes, but the vast majority have not.
Still, the loss these families feel is as incalculable as it is irreparable. I’ll repeat here what I said to them in person: I am sorry for their loss. Truly sorry.
So then, what are the real numbers regarding undocumented criminals? In an interview with the news program 60 Minutes, Trump stated that “what we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records—gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million.”
Where did he get these figures? Nobody knows. It appears he may have made them up, because they are ten times higher than the concrete data that exist. His tendency, after all, is to exaggerate. According to the Migration Policy Institute, only three hundred thousand undocumented immigrants have a felony conviction on their records.
That number was estimated based on data released to Congress by the Department of Homeland Security in 2012, at which time there were 11.2 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. That means less than 2.7 percent were responsible for having committed a serious crime. And this number would be even lower if using a false Social Security number were a less serious offense. The fact of the matter is that thousands of undocumented people use them to work for U.S. companies, and their employers are fully aware of what’s going on.
This may come as a surprise, but if we follow the statistics, in general undocumented immigrants conduct themselves better than many Americans. Let’s do the math. According to a study conducted by Princeton University, in 2010, 8.6 percent of adult U.S. citizens had a felony conviction on their record. That’s over three times the rate for undocumented immigrants.
Conclusion: over 97 percent of undocumented immigrants are good people, not the “bad hombres” described by Trump.
And there’s even more data to support that.
It’s no secret that the undocumented population increased dramatically from 3.5 million in 1990 to 11.2 million in 2013. But according to the FBI, during that same time frame, violent crimes fell 48 percent. This might seem incredible to many—especially if they follow the more conservative social media sites—but the reality is that there are more undocumented people here now, and crime rates have decreased.
It might seem like a joke, but what do you do if you want less crime in your cities? Bring in more immigrants.
I don’t want to overwhelm you with facts, but it’s important to use data to discredit the lies that Trump is perpetuating about the undocumented. Some, very few, in fact, are gang members; we’re not talking about a population whose members often end up behind bars. According to a study undertaken by the Immigration Policy Center (the research and policy arm of the American Immigration Council), only 1.6 percent of immigrant men between the ages of 18 and 39 end up in prison, compared with 3.3 percent of those who were born in the United States.
So which one of us is telling the truth?
The contrast couldn’t be sharper. Trump, the conservative media, and the anti-immigrant groups present us as rapists, murderers, gang members, abusers, beaters, cheaters, counterfeiters, and criminals. But the reality is that immigrants—undocumented and otherwise—commit fewer crimes than natural-born Americans. We are supportive and generous, we help those who need it the most, and we contribute greatly to the country that accepted us.
There is, however, one other accusation: that we are thieves. People who don’t pay taxes. Who are exploiting the U.S. economy, looking for free benefits without working to earn them.
Well, you may already know what I’m about to tell you, but this also is false. Don’t take my word for it; look at the numbers.
There is no doubt that immigrants, both with and without papers, can be expensive. There are huge costs in the fields of education and health and social services. But what immigrants contribute far exceeds these expenses.
Undocumented workers pay taxes, create jobs, and do the work that nobody else wants to do. The question is whether they are a burden on or a benefit to the United States. To know this, we have to add up all their economic contributions and deduct from that figure their cost to society.
The National Academy of Sciences, which comprises leading scientists and researchers from across the country, ran those calculations in 2016 and published its findings in a telling report, titled The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration. Their conclusion: immigrants added $54.2 billion to the U.S. economy from 1994 to 2013. That’s what’s known as an “immigration surplus.”
Immigrants contribute an average of $2 billion a year to the U.S. economy. It’s a huge surplus.
And that’s not all: immigrants don’t steal jobs from American workers. “There is little evidence that immigration significantly affects the overall employment levels of native-born workers,” the report concluded.
While the numbers aren’t always a perfect match, other studies also find that immigrants add to, rather than subtract from, the economy. They pay taxes, a lot of taxes. A report by the American Immigration Council estimates that immigrants earn approximately $240 billion a year and pay $90 billion in taxes, while using only $5 billion in public benefits.
In today’s age of so-called fake news, it’s easy to bombard the social networks with false information about immigrants. And if someone as powerful as the president himself is the one distorting reality, promoting stereotypes, and inventing lies, it can be difficult to generate a counternarrative that contradicts the head of state. But the fact that Trump is the president doesn’t mean he’s right.
I know I’ve spent the last couple of pages hammering away at the facts and figures in the studies, but it’s the only way to demonstrate that Trump’s statements about immigrants are slanderous. We are not criminals, we are not rapists, and we are not a drain on the U.S. economy. We contribute more than we take, the vast majority of us are not “bad hombres” or gang members, and we are extremely grateful for all the opportunities this nation has given us.
Why does Trump attack us as much as he does? Does he truly hate immigrants, or is it just part of a pol
itical strategy, first to win the White House and later to maintain the support of his base? I don’t know the answer to this.
I don’t know if he’s a racist at heart, but I do know that he has made racist and derogatory comments.
I’m not interested in what’s going on inside Trump’s head. But I do know what comes out of his mouth.
There Is No Invasion
After listening to a few minutes of a Trump speech, one might assume that the United States is about to be invaded or that it is facing a serious threat from the south.
But this isn’t true.
Immigrants are not invading the country. Nevertheless, Trump wants to build “a big, beautiful wall” to hold back a threat that exists only in his head.
The number of undocumented immigrants in the United States has remained stable for nearly a decade. According to several studies conducted by the Pew Research Center, there were 11.3 million undocumented immigrants in 2016: exactly the same figure as in 2009. Nor is there a conspiracy among Mexicans to invade the United States and retake the territory they lost in the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848. In fact, more and more Mexicans are saying adios.
It’s true: more Mexicans are leaving the United States than entering. The Pew Research Center indicates that the number of Mexicans living in the United States fell by 140,000 between 2009 and 2016. Why? Because they want to be with their families, they’re uncomfortable living in the shadows and fearing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), they’re no longer seeing the economic benefits of working in the United States, and the opportunities in Mexico have been improving.
That’s why they’re heading home. They never felt comfortable enough in the United States to make it their permanent home.
They were always strangers.
Instead of a Mexican invasion of the United States, what we’re currently witnessing is the end of four decades of intense and feverish migration from south to north. Between 1965 and 2015, sixteen million Mexicans migrated to the United States. It was one of the largest migrations in the history not only of this country, but of this world.