by Jorge Ramos
Still, though, the votes were there.
I work in an office building in Miami that shares space with a number of radio and television stations. Every day I walk past the Spanish-language broadcasts, and I often stop and listen for a minute to what they’re saying. Open mike and call-in programs are extremely popular, and on a number of occasions, back in 2016, I overheard listeners say—often anonymously—that they were going to vote for Trump.
I figured that those Spanish-speaking voters supporting Trump could not be statistically significant. But multimedia surveys say otherwise. And that was my mistake. I should have given more weight to those opinions.
Of course Hispanics are not a monolithic group, and of course Trump would have many Hispanic backers. For many of them, immigration reform was not their primary issue, as is the case with Cubans and Puerto Ricans. They had other concerns.
Of course there are also huge generational differences. Hispanics who have lived here for a long time, or whose families span two or three generations, can have very different viewpoints from those of newcomers. The opinions of Latinos in the Northeast and in California don’t necessarily match those of Latinos in Texas and Florida. And Trump’s offensive remarks about Mexicans clearly weren’t game changers for the 3,640,000 Hispanics who voted for him.
There are many things Latinos can learn from past presidential elections. But the most important one is that if we don’t vote, someone else will do it for us. That’s exactly what happened in 2016.
Another lesson is that Trump was able to win the White House with less than a third of the Latino vote. I thought we had more influence. Not quite yet.
I personally overestimated the importance of the Latino vote. I said on numerous occasions that nobody could win the presidency without a significant portion of the Latino vote, yet Trump did it. I got ahead of myself, and this will teach me to be more careful in the future.
Eventually, of course, there will come a time when no candidate can reach the presidency without the Latino vote. But for now, if an election can be decided in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—places that have relatively low Hispanic populations—then our influence is diluted.
In spite of all that, I still believe that Republicans made a serious mistake with Latinos in 2016, one from which they will not easily recover. It may even end up as one of those historical blunders that becomes so legendary, it will be hard to pin down exactly how and when it began.
So let’s do that here: it was when the Republican Party as a whole attached itself to Trump, a candidate with racist beliefs. What happens when you don’t distance yourself from a candidate who defines the fastest-growing group of voters in the country as criminals and racists? They will forever be reminding you of it to your face.
Historically, Democrats have controlled two-thirds of the Latino vote in presidential elections. Why? Because Democrats’ views on immigration issues, public education, and social policies that help those in need have been more attractive to most Hispanic voters than free-market principles and harsh enforcement of Republican immigration laws. The reasoning goes more or less like this: I’ll vote for the one who helps me, who protects me, who thinks of me before him- or herself.
But that is not a captive, immutable vote.
George W. Bush won more than 40 percent of the Hispanic vote during his reelection campaign. Then, many people believed that the Latino vote could be divided equally between the two major political parties. Long before that, Ronald Reagan famously quipped that “Latinos are Republican. They just don’t know it yet.” And in 2004, the Republicans thought it was finally coming true.
There are certain issues on which Hispanics tend to be very conservative. According to the Pew Research Center, just over half (51 percent) believe that abortion should be illegal in all cases, compared with 41 percent of the general population. And 69 percent of Latino immigrants say religion is very important to their lives, compared with 58 percent of Americans as a whole.
And there’s more. Many Latin Americans left their home nations because of violence, corruption, and a lack of opportunity. They are often suspicious of their governments and distrustful of politicians, which is why the Republican cornerstone of smaller government is so attractive to so many.
Meritocracy goes hand in hand with three out of four Hispanics, who believe that hard work generates social progress and personal benefits. Republicans could promote all of these ideas as a way of reaching out to Latino voters.
But they still face a serious problem: How do you ask people to vote for you after you’ve insulted them? How do you gain people’s trust if you are constantly telling them that you want to deport their parents, neighbors, and coworkers?
That was Mitt Romney’s problem during the 2012 election. He wanted the Latino vote, but at the same time he promoted the idea of “self-deportation” for the undocumented. The party did so poorly with Hispanics during that election that the Republican National Committee wrote an “autopsy report” so they wouldn’t make the same mistakes in the future.
Here are two of its recommendations:
“Among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”
“If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e., self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence.”
Exactly.
But the Republicans did not learn from their mistakes in 2012. Instead of following their own recommendations, they took an even stronger anti-immigrant stance in 2016. Their proposals? Build a wall. Massive deportations. No immigration reform. No legalization of undocumented immigrants. Ban Muslims from entering the country.
Again: If Latinos are being made to feel unwelcome by Republicans, how can they be expected to vote for Republican candidates?
This wasn’t just Trump’s attitude. Other Republican presidential candidates also launched harsh attacks against immigrants and minorities. The great irony is that many of them were the children of immigrants themselves.
I personally believe that the children of immigrants have two sets of responsibilities: first to care for their parents; and second to protect other immigrants as if they were their own children. This has been a noble American tradition for more than two centuries. There is nothing quite so sad and treacherous as wanting to slam the door in the face of the immigrants who come after us. But that’s exactly what some presidential candidates did in 2016.
First, the good news: Never before have we seen so many children of immigrants seeking the White House. That speaks very well of our nation. In a single generation, you can go from being the son of an immigrant to president of the United States.
Here they are: Donald Trump, whose mother was born in Scotland; Marco Rubio, whose father and mother were born in Cuba; Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada to a Cuban father; Bobby Jindal, whose parents were born in India; and the independent/Democrat Bernie Sanders, whose father was from Poland.
All of them had firsthand experience of what it is like to grow up in a home marked by different accents and where at least one parent was learning the laws and customs of their adoptive country. But what struck me the most was that despite having so many children of immigrants among the presidential candidates, the overall campaign was marked by harsh attacks on immigrants themselves.
Suffice it to say that almost every one of these candidates had called undocumented immigrants “illegals” at one point. But incomprehensible to many Hispanics were the anti-immigrant positions taken by the two Latino candidates: Cuban American senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.
They broke a decades-old trend in which Hispanic politicians at the national level and regardless of origin always defended the rights of the most vulnerable immigrants. Why not give this new generation of immigrants the same opportunities t
heir parents had enjoyed?
Look, for example, at the undocumented Puerto Rican Democrats Luis Gutiérrez and Nydia Velázquez and the Cuban American Republicans Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln and Mario Díaz-Balart.
Immigrants never forget those who help us. Ever.
The United States has been extraordinarily generous to me, and for that very reason, I argue and fight on behalf of the immigrants who came after me, so that they might have the same opportunities I did and so that they are treated with the same respect I received. That’s why I don’t understand why immigrants or their children would attack someone who got here just a little bit later than they did.
There is no greater show of disloyalty than when the children of immigrants are so ungrateful as to forget where they came from. It’s almost a betrayal.
Trump is the son of a Scottish mother. He had a German grandfather, and he is married to a woman from Slovenia. Four of his five children have an immigrant mother. And I cannot think of a candidate who is more anti-immigrant than he is.
The Republicans are running the risk of driving away Hispanic voters for generations to come. The results of recent elections may lead them to believe that attacking immigrants will generate more and more votes going forward. But that’s not how I see it. The Trump phenomenon is unrepeatable, and tying yourself to that brand is going to cost you many future elections.
The future of the United States holds more Latinos than ever before. And there is no way to earn their support if you make them feel like strangers.
Fear and Dreamers
So here we are: with Trump, with no immigration reform, and with a lot of fear.
Politicians who reject a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants are not representing the wishes of a majority of Americans.
As early as 2015, the Pew Research Center concluded that 72 percent of respondents believed there should be a way to allow undocumented immigrants to remain in the country if they meet certain requirements. That’s 80 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans, when split by party. Other more recent polls back up these findings.
But what the polls show is one thing. What’s actually happening is something very different. Instances of a growing anti-immigrant climate—and the fear that this creates—are palpable, and they precede Trump’s arrival on the political scene.
The year 2015 was particularly violent for at least three Latino immigrants, and the violence came from the police.
Here’s what happened:
On February 10, police in Pasco, Washington, killed a Mexican man by the name of Antonio Zambrano-Montes after the homeless man threw rocks at them, a video shows.
On February 20, police in Grapevine, Texas, killed a Mexican man by the name of Rubén García Villalpando after a chase. According to his brother-in-law’s version of events, García had his hands raised and asked one of the officers, “Are you going to kill me?” Shortly thereafter, he was shot twice in the chest.
On February 27, police in Santa Ana, California, killed a Mexican man by the name of Ernesto Canepa, who was suspected of robbery and found with a BB gun in his car. The Canepa family says he worked two jobs to support his four children.
The Mexican government sent a letter of protest to Washington officials stating concerns that these were not isolated incidents. But it did not want these three deaths to become a central issue that would strain bilateral relations.
Mexicans living in the United States are alone. They know that they are not a priority for the government in Mexico City. And when they are the target of police in the United States, they have practically no way to defend themselves.
Mexicans are killed and nothing happens.
To these three cases, we must add a dozen others involving Mexicans who clashed with U.S. Border Patrol officers since 2010, according to figures from the Southern Border Communities Coalition. The sad reality is that most of these deaths go unreported, and we almost never find out what actually happened. Law enforcement officials have virtually total impunity. There are almost never any charges brought, nor is there any real expectation of justice.
This sense of injustice for immigrants in the United States is reinforced by the language used by many politicians, both in Washington and around the country, who call them “criminals.” Some are even guilty of perpetuating this false stereotype of the “criminal alien.” But simply being in this country illegally is entirely different from committing a crime here.
Despite what the Declaration of Independence says, not all people here in the United States are treated as equals. Some—those who were born abroad, who speak with an accent, or who have a darker skin color than others—can lose their lives at the hands of those who are sworn to protect them: the police.
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The fear is growing. Fear of being killed. Fear of being abused. Fear of being deported.
But is there a way to measure it?
Many undocumented people who, following the example set by the Dreamers, came out of the closet during Barack Obama’s presidency have gone back into the shadows since Trump took office. They don’t trust the police. They don’t want to drive anywhere. They’re afraid to go to work. They have become, once again, invisible.
How does one go from invisible to visible?
It’s not easy.
The Dreamers—the brave young people who were brought to the United States as undocumented children and have since become the new political leaders of the Latino community—taught us that the first thing you have to lose is your fear.
They showed us this in 2010 when four of them marched from Miami to Washington to draw attention to their struggle. Many of us feared that they would be arrested along the way and deported to countries they did not know. But that’s not what happened.
Those same Dreamers who in 2012 were not allowed to set foot in the White House because of their undocumented status were the ones who finally convinced President Obama that he indeed had the legal authority to approve an executive action and make Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals a reality.
Their strategy worked.
In June 2016, I was invited to Houston to a conference of United We Dream, the primary organization of Dreamers in the United States. The place was filled with rebellious passion. It was clear to me that the new leadership of the Latino community was there and not in Washington.
I took the opportunity to talk about the difference between their parents and them. I said that I was very afraid that their parents would become the “sacrificial generation.” What did I mean by that? That they were part of a group that, despite decades of effort, was never able to legalize their migratory status. But still they stayed in the United States so that their children could legally live here and prosper. They made this sacrifice for their children.
And we’re already witnessing the results. The Dreamers are as American as any of us. They just don’t have the paperwork to prove it. That’s how they feel, and they let everyone know it.
Many Dreamers are the first in their families to attend college. I’m always excited to meet Dreamers at the nation’s top universities. They study in places that their parents never could have imagined.
But the contrast between the tactics wielded by the Dreamers and those employed by their parents could not be more stark. The older generation believed that the most important thing was not to make any waves. Keep quiet and don’t draw any attention to yourself, period. That was the way to get ahead in life. And they were right.
Their tactics of silence produced results. Many of their children were born here in the United States—and were therefore U.S. citizens with all requisite rights—and thousands of those born outside the country have been protected under DACA.
After many conversations with the Dreamers and their parents, I began to notice a certain sense of impatience among the Dreamers. Why had their parents remained silent for so long? Why did they not speak up and protest? Why didn’t they go ou
t and fight for their rights?
There are no easy answers to these questions. Suffice it to say that those were different times. The parents of today’s Dreamers learned to survive by staying silent, invisible, virtually immobile. And there, while nobody was watching, was where they worked and raised their families.
It served them. But not their children, who decided to change the rules of the game.
Their parents were invisible, so the Dreamers want to be as visible as possible.
Their parents learned to use silence to their advantage. Dreamers want to be heard.
Their parents waited patiently for politicians to acknowledge them. Dreamers forced candidates to address them and their agenda.
Their parents never would have dared to confront members of Congress or occupy their offices. Dreamers aren’t afraid of doing exactly this.
Their parents waited patiently and prayed for the best. Dreamers demanded immigration reform for themselves and for their parents.
Two different eras with two very different sets of tactics.
I have learned a lot from the Dreamers, which is why I dedicated this book to them. While I was in Houston, I told them that when I faced off with Donald Trump at the press conference in Iowa, the first thing I asked myself was, What would the Dreamers do?
They remind me so much of Rosa Parks.
On December 1, 1955, when she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, she knew that the law was against her. But she did it anyway. There are times when civil disobedience is necessary. And her simple gesture of defiant freedom kicked off the civil rights movement here in the United States.
I believe that Dreamers are doing the same thing: rebelling against unjust laws. They stand at the forefront of a new civil rights movement in the United States, one in which nobody is illegal, regardless of the papers you may or may not carry in your wallet.