Rubio Declares, but Won’t Win Latino Vote
by Ryan Campbell | April 13, 2015
Marco Rubio, downplaying a previous gaff made during State of the Union rebuttal
Marco Rubio declares himself at 6pm EST today.
Looking to the Latino vote, however, Marco may have a Latino name, but that’s his strongest connection to most of the Latino voting community: I don’t expect it to help him much outside of Miami.
Looking to Marco’s Latino heritage, he is Cuban. Nothing wrong with that, but Cubans have a dramatically different immigration experience than other Latino groups, that is, a type of Cold War refugee status that his own family was able to take advantage of.
Because having a beloved member of the community deported is not a part of life for the Cuban population, not even when deportations were skyrocketing under the “Deporter in Chief,” it never became a major a part of their politics. Since immigration wasn’t much of a concern, the Cuban community was still able to support GOP candidates calling for more deportations so long as they sync’d up on their other issues like relations with the Cuban government.
Although this may be changing with normalization of relations with Cuba, back in the 2012 cycle, the epitome of my immigration organization’s interaction with the Cuban community was a young Cuban Romney volunteer trying to explain to my undocumented friends how “self-deportation” wasn’t really that bad. Currently, the Texas immigration lawsuit against DAPA is making immigration a hot button topic, and doesn’t seem to be leaving the news cycle soon.
While the younger Cuban demographic is more liberal and on board for immigration reform, we can expect the divide between the older Cuban political establishment and the rest of the Latino community to grow more intense over deportation relief. It’s not that the older Cubans are against immigration, they just don’t place a high enough priority on something that is central as both part of the life and identity of the vast majority of the Latino community, and typically ties that diverse community together both politically and ideologically.
Additionally, Rubio hasn’t governed to the benefit of the Latinos in general or the immigrant community in particular. For instance, he put forward legislation to strip the child tax credit from undocumented parents. The biggest problem with that is that the credit is to benefit the children, not the parents, and many of those children of undocumented parents are US Citizens.
Perhaps the worst thing I have seen out of Rubio (or any politician in a long time) was his filibuster of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). VAWA is typically the least controversial legislation imaginable and passes without much notice. Unfortunately, Rubio’s base didn’t like the fact that women who were reporting their sexual assaults or domestic violence to the police were being offered visas.
This is important because, without those visas, they could be brought to ICE for deportation by the very police they were reporting their victimization to. As a result, often even young US citizens with undocumented parents are often afraid to have any contact with the police, no matter what the nature of their victimization.
This has huge consequences: if a community is afraid to go to the police, everyone suffers as criminals are all but told that they are allowed to prey on undocumented women, and often wind up going after members of other communities as well. It allows criminals to repeat offend in certain communities, and makes adjacent communities far less safe as well.
Let’s be blunt: there was a choice to make between protecting the rights of raped and abused women to go to the police and pandering to the sentiments of ignorant, anti-immigrant Teabaggers: Rubio went the Teabagger route. It reminds me of a crowd, waving signs and chanting in protest of Muslim women with their children who were being escorted to a women’s shelter: in American politics, there is no such thing as common decency, and Rubio caved in a cringe-inducing way to a bunch of bigoted xenophobes.
Looking to immigration in the legislative process, the only real effort that looked like it could succeed, one which many immigration advocates disowned for being too harsh in it’s militaristic Corker-Hoeven “Border Surge” Amendment, was the Gang of 8 bill. The bill was going to add billions in military equipment like Predator Drones and Black Hawk helicopters, along with large numbers of additional Border Patrol officers.
Although Marco Rubio first pushed hard for the Gang of 8 bill on the Sunday talk shows, the Tea Party forms a large part of his base, and they quickly voiced their discontent. Soon, his support morphed into a stance summarized by this quote: “At this point, bringing the Senate bill back to the floor would be a show vote,” said Rubio. “It would set us back even further – taking an issue that’s already divided people and actually going to stir the pot and poison the well even further. Why would I support and effort to do that?”
After the Corker-Hoeven Amendment took border security away as an excuse, he really did not have any reason other than his base and their support in a 2016 primary to be concerned about, but that was enough. When there were calls from the GOP for piecemeal legislation, citing the length of the bill as the problem, Democrats agreed to pass immigration reform in several smaller bills. Rubio still wouldn’t publicly support the idea.
In the end, Marco Rubio doesn’t have the credit with the Latino community that being an immigration advocate would have brought, rather, after filibustering VAWA, he may have more liabilities with Latinos, especially women, than any other politician who is a serious candidate for 2016. While the mostly-white base may love his immigration stances after forcing him away from the Gang of 8 bill, it is difficult to see how he can get beyond this to win the support from the Latino community he would need to win a general.