Miami Herald (Opinion)
By Andrew Oppenheimer
August 8, 2015
What’s
most worrying about Thursday’s first Republican presidential debate
wasn’t Donald Trump’s outrageous remarks about Mexico and Mexicans, but
the fact that none of
the other nine contenders had the courage to confront him with a
vigorous statement setting the record straight on immigration and
criticizing racism.
Even
former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — who took
some distance from Trump’s remarks on immigration — seemed to go out of
their way not to forcefully
challenge Trump’s populist demagoguery, which blames illegal
immigration from Mexico for much of what’s wrong in this country.
In
case you missed it, Trump repeated his previous claims that the United
States is being flooded with undocumented immigrants (in fact, their
numbers have plummeted in
recent years, according to U.S. Census figures) and that Mexico is
sending to the United States drug dealers, criminals and rapists.
When
Fox News debate moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump for specific
evidence that Mexico is “sending” these criminals across the border,
Trump couldn’t respond.
When
Wallace pressed him again, Trump said “The border patrol... people that
I deal with, that I talk to, they say this is what’s happening.” Trump
did not provide one
single name, nor study, nor document to support his allegation.
But
none of the Republican hopefuls raised their hands to call Trump’s
bluff on immigration. None of them cited recent figures from the Census
Bureau’s American Community
Survey showing that the flow of Mexican immigrants to the United States
has fallen from about 400,000 per year a decade ago to 125,000
nowadays.
None
of them confronted Trump with Census figures showing that there are
already more undocumented immigrants coming from China than from Mexico.
None
of them, with the possible exception of Bush, made a thorough argument
that the majority of the 34 million people of Mexican origin in the
United States are good,
hard-working people. Bush said most undocumented immigrants “want to
provide for their family,” and immediately added, “but we need to
control our border.”
Granted,
Bush said that he supports a conditional path to legal status for
undocumented immigrants, but he simultaneously courted anti-immigration
zealots by declaring
himself against an “amnesty.” Rubio, in turn, told Trump that most
undocumented immigrants are not coming from Mexico, but from Central
America, and added that “I also believe we need a fence.”
The
whole cast of Republican hopefuls tacitly accepted Trump’s false
premise that the United States is suffering from an avalanche of
criminal illegal immigrants, and
that its first priority should be to “secure the border.”
The
reason none of Trump’s contenders dared to rip apart his narrative on
immigration is, of course, that they don’t want to antagonize
conservative Republicans who vote
in the primaries who basically agree with Trump’s anti-Mexican
rhetoric.
Nationally,
only 39 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Mexico, down from
47 percent before 2008, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Trump,
like most nationalist-populists,
is tapping into the resentment of many Americans who are looking for a
scapegoat for their economic problems after the 2008 U.S. economic
crisis.
“The
good thing about what Trump did is that [his comments] shined a light
to the level of the problem of racism,” actress Selma Hayek said only
half-jokingly in an interview
with Fusion’s Jorge Ramos. “The minute he attacked the Mexicans, his
numbers went up.”
My
opinion: Trump’s Republican contenders may think that they did the
right thing by avoiding an all-out confrontation with Trump on
immigration, but they shot themselves
in the foot.
They
came across — some more than others — as a group of spineless
politicians who don’t have the guts to speak out when a demagogue
insults 34 million people of Mexican
origin, many of whom will vote in the 2016 elections. Their response
was pitiful and self-destructive.
In
the unlikely — but possible — event that Trump wins the Republican
nomination, the Republican Party is almost guaranteed to lose the
election, because there is no way
that Trump could win the 42 percent to 47 percent of the Hispanic vote
that pollsters say the party will need to win.
And
if Trump doesn’t win the Republican nomination and decides to run as an
independent, as he admits to be considering, he will siphon off
millions of Republican votes
that will help Hillary Clinton, or whoever the Democratic candidate
will be, become the next president. Either way, Trump’s Republican
contenders lost by not standing up for decency and against bigotry.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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