We held a forum today on immigration and the Hispanic community here in DC. We will be releasing video and a transcript of it all soon, but I wanted to make available these wonderful set of opening remarks from Senator Bob Menendez:
I don’t want to go on for too long today, because I know the real experts are going to speak in just a minute.
I won’t mention too many statistics either, because I know if a number is relevant, it’s going to be in Simon’s presentation.
If there’s one thought I want to put out to you about the Hispanic vote today, it’s this: Republican’s harsh rhetoric about immigration didn’t just change the political landscape, it changed how we as Hispanic voters see ourselves.
Two words I heard used on the floor of the Senate during the recent debate really shocked me. The words were, “those people.” Everyone sitting here today knows what that’s about. When they said, “those people,” they were talking about more than just undocumented workers. They were talking about the entire Latino community.
For those of us who work hard every day, for those of us who have served our country in countless ways, who have managed to succeed despite the odds, this was an attack on all of us—and in doing so, Republicans showed their true colors.
Last year, when we heard former Senator Conrad Burns joke about the, quote, “nice little Guatemalan man” working on his house; or last week when we heard Mitt Romney talk about people with a, quote, “funny accent,” the message was the same: Republicans were willing to use Hispanics as political scapegoats in order to avoid taking on the real issues of the day. So when the Republicans started talking about “those people,” it speeded our march toward the Democratic camp. We saw this in 2006, we saw it to a certain extent in the local and state elections in 2007 and I know we’re going to see it again in 2008.
But immigration isn’t the only thing that has led Hispanics to the Democratic Party. It’s a general lack of understanding on the part of Republicans as to how the agenda of the Hispanic community fits very much within the American agenda.
We’re all concerned about health care. 47 million Americans have no health insurance. But Republicans don’t seem to understand that Hispanics are the least insured of any group—and Republicans have no solution. Our educational systems are in crisis, but Republicans don’t seem to understand that barely more than half of Hispanics graduate from high school—and they have no solution.
Our nation is facing the prospect of an endless war in Iraq, and Republicans don’t seem to understand that Hispanic men and women in uniform make up a significant percentage of those putting their lives on the line every day. They certainly wouldn’t be saying what they do about Hispanics in general if they did.
The success of Democratic candidates next year is going to be tied to how much they decide to stand up for the agenda to tackle those problems head on, and how well they exhibit their understanding of what Republicans do not.
So here’s the political bottom line: if we as Democrats communicate where we stand on health care, education, economic empowerment, immigration and Iraq, there will be a record Latino vote and a Democratic president.
That’s the political bottom line. There’s a moral bottom line, too. When Mother Theresa was asked what others could do to advance peace in this world, she answered simply, “Go home and love your family.” In the immigration debate, that kind of thinking has been in far too short supply. Human compassion has been in far too short a supply.
And the sooner it becomes plentiful, the sooner a candidate can start reaping a plentiful harvest of votes—no matter what the ethnicity of the voter.