Changing Times

50-million Hispanics in the USA! Faster than a speeding bullet, that’s us…
   American Hispanics, like famous come–from-behind race horse Silky Sullivan of yesteryear, have sped past the American Black population in numbers, in economics and is rapidly catching up in educational level. By 2050, four decades from now, one in four Americans will have Hispanic backgrounds if nothing less than Hispanic grandparents.
   The growth, according to the U.S. Census, is not coming from immigration; it is coming from domestic births. One in four American children is Hispanic today. To be more specific, almost 70 percent of the Hispanic population is of Mexican origin.
   One political strategist once said that there were more Mexican origin people within sight of Los Angeles City Hall than all the Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in the entire country.
   This is the time for Republicans to cast aside its 5th columnists bound and determined to destroy the Party with backward looking, Ku Klux Klan attitudes it lived and breathed in the 1920s when Kluckers ran immigration and minority affairs policy. Their base numbers of non-Hispanic whites are shrinking all over the country while Hispanics are growing in numbers and voters everywhere.
   Chris Cillizza of the recently pointed out that if Hispanics had not voted in North Carolina in 2010, Republicans would have carried the state. Hispanics have exploded their numbers in North Carolina and the rest of the South for the simple reason that they went where the jobs were in the past decade.
   North Carolina Republicans made no effort to locate, groom and push any Hispanics for statewide office; in contrast Republicans Susanna Martinez was elected New Mexico Governor, Brian Sandoval elected Nevada Governor, Raul Labrador was elected an Idaho Congressman by beating a Democrat incumbent, Republican Mexican Americans won congressional seats in Texas from Democrat incumbents (for the first time ever) and Florida elected Cuban American Marco Rubio United States Senator.
   So what are Republicans doing in California where Hispanics – with almost 90 percent being Mexican American — now almost match the non-Hispanic white population?
   Outgoing State Republican Chairman, the vicious Mexican hater Ron Nehring enabled Mexican haters to take over the Party; how, by encouraging Mexican haters of every sort to participate in the Party. They were his base. He has been replaced but is attempting to further his hate of Hispanics by controlling the Party from political retirement.
   San Diego County, with 32 percent of its 3-million people Mexican American, is Ron Nehring’s home Party. The San Diego County Central Committee with 48 elected members has only four possibly five Mexican Americans – ten percent. That is Ron Nehring’s legacy – driving Mexican Americans out of the Party.
   Perhaps, Nehring, his followers and fellow travelers should look to Mississippi.
   There, Gov. Haley Barbour publically acknowledges the vital role Hispanic immigrants played in rebuilding Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina, commenting that he didn’t know “where we would have been in Mississippi after Katrina if it hadn’t been for the Spanish speakers that came in to help rebuild, and there’s no doubt in my mind that some of them weren’t here legally.”
   Those mostly Mexican workers flooded Louisiana and Mississippi after Katrina to rescue it from the horrors left behind by Katrina’s water and wind. As Barbour says, not many protested those that were in the country illegally because they were necessary after home-grown, native-born-Americans fled New Orleans and its surrounding areas for Texas and federal cash handouts. The Mexicans came to work. They almost always do.
   A year after Katrina, I met a New Orleans Federal Bureau of Investigation Special-Agent at a law enforcement conference reception in San Diego. His house was inundated by Katrina water after the levees collapsed.
   He told me he hired a crew of Mexicans to clean up and rebuild his devastated residence and moved back in less than 100 days. I jokingly asked him if he checked the workers for papers to make sure they were legally entitled to work in the United States.
   “Hell no,” he exclaimed. “I needed them and they were the only ones willing to work. I paid top dollar and got top effort.”
   Both these men are Republicans. If all Republicans felt like these two, Republicans would never lose the Presidency again. Barbour is running for President. If the election were today, I’d vote for him.
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