Republicans Dismiss the Hispanic Vote

Like many Latin Americans living in the U.S., after watching the Sept. 7 debate between the candidates for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, I came to a clear conclusion: These people do not care about us at all.

With the possible exception of former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, who at one point was forced to remind his rivals that immigrants are “human beings,” the remaining seven men and one woman who participated in the televised debate on MSNBC/Politico seemed to be competing to see who was the most “tough” on illegal immigrants. None of them mentioned even in passing the fact that illegal immigration has declined dramatically since the 2008 economic crisis.

Even before the debate began, a notice to California Republicans stunned me. It showed a blond young man saying that the U.S. problem is not just illegal immigration but also legal immigration. The ad, signed by a group called “Californians for Population Stabilization” — which sounds very similar to “Californians for Population Sterilization” — said that “we need to reduce legal immigration” to reduce unemployment, not to mention the fact that most immigrants do jobs that few Americans are willing to do.

From Bad to Worse

From that moment on, things went from bad to worse. Texas Governor Rick Perry, the favorite in the polls, called for “more troops on the border” between Mexico and the United States without mentioning that the number of illegal border crossings is at its lowest since 1973, or that the number of Border Patrol agents has more than doubled in the last six years.

More importantly, Perry did not mention that nearly half of all undocumented immigrants enter the country across the Mexican desert, but do so with tourist visas through U.S. airports, and then they stay longer than their visas permit. The former Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney, the second in Republican polls, said his top priority to solve the immigration problem would be to build a wall along the entire border. But conveniently, Romney did not add that besides being economically impossible, this measure does not prevent immigrants from continuing to cross the border with ladders or through tunnels, while the per capita income of the U.S. remains several times higher than Mexico, as U.S. employers continue to offer jobs that U.S. citizens refuse to occupy.

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann spoke about the risk of terrorists crossing the border without mentioning that not even one of the 9/11 terrorists entered the United States from Mexico.

The only voice of reason was Huntsman, who reminded his rivals that many illegal immigrants enter the country illegally because of bureaucratic obstacles that make it almost impossible for them to do so legally. The United States should streamline its legal immigration system in order to attract bright minds, skilled workers and investors, he said. What will the Republican Party do to win 40 percent of the Hispanic vote that most pollsters say they need to win the 2012 election, with these anti-immigrant views and these proposed cuts to social programs that benefit millions of Hispanics?

Republican pollster Nicole McCleskey told me that the Republicans are betting on the vote of the white population. “Because [Obama] is doing poorly among white voters, it decreases the necessity of the Republican candidate getting to that 40 percent figure,” she said. My opinion: In his search for support from the extreme right of the Republican Party to win the primaries, the Republican frontrunners are throwing away the Hispanic vote. That could cost them the 2012 elections.

There is no doubt the United States, like any other country, must protect its borders. But to do that you need to (a) reduce bureaucratic obstacles to legal immigration for foreigners who deserve to enter with visas, rather than entering with human traffickers; (b) focus the activities of immigration officers to prevent the entry of criminals, instead of engaging in indiscriminate persecution; and (c) achieve greater economic integration with Latin America, so that the neighbors of the U.S. are doing better, and people do not feel the need to migrate. What is needed is not cheap demagogy, as we saw in the debate.