Commentary:
By Angelo Falcón
As a result of the Republican capture of both houses of Congress last year, there is a serious need for some creative strategizing by Latino political progressives. While for many the focus will be supporting a Hillary Clinton presidency and making her campaign responsive to the Latino community (including pushing for a Latino Vice President), the Latino political agenda for the next couple of years needs to be much more than this. With the Presidential campaign season comes a new political dynamic that the Latino community needs to exploit. It is very much a political chess game with Obama, the Democrats and the Republicans all using Latinos as pawns in their struggle for power.
While in the last couple of years, Latinos have grown increasingly critical of President Obama, especially about his continual broken promises on immigration reform, pressure to get him to adopt executive actions to limit deportations was successful. NCLR’s Janet Murguia’s calling the President out as “deporter-in-chief” last year crystallized the pressure on Obama that moved the needle on this issue. The current legal challenge to the Presidents executive action on immigration, while raising concerns among immigration advocates, represents a major political victory for the President and the Democrats in fully polarizing the immigration issue in a way that guarantees Latino support of the Democrats in ways that could promote greater Latino voter participation in 2016. This Republican legal challenge is a move in a complicated political chess game that Obama has adroitly forced to his political advantage, literally using Latinos as political pawns.
However, it would be unfortunate if Latino advocates settle on a strategy that merely defends the President’s immigration executive action. Once the legal challenge to it fails (which by every indication it will), Latinos should be ready to continue to pressure the President and Democrats to add to the categories of Latino and other undocumented immigrants that would be eligible to be authorized by the President.
This should go hand in hand with a strategy to attack the Senate’s comprehensive immigration proposal, known as the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act,” or S. 744, as too punitive toward immigrants. Rather than accepting this awful legislation as some sort of model to be supported after 2016, Latino leaders need to reject it and begin immediately to develop a more humane and comprehensive approach to immigration reform to promote during the Presidential election and after. The notion that the Republicans or the Democrats have to come up with a plan should now turn into Latinos pointing out that the have both lost their credibility to do so and it is now our turn. The possibility of being able to make Republicans more defensive on the immigration issue during the Presidential general election and pressure the Clinton and the Democratic Party to be even more supportive of a more progressive approach to immigration reform need to be an operating assumptions of Latino political strategizing.
The 2016 Presidential campaign is also an opportunity for Latino political leaders to look to identify political priorities beyond immigration reform. If Republicans can be made more defensive on the immigration issue, they may be more open to being supportive of other matters of particular interest to the Latino community. This includes a revision of the Voting Rights Act that is reflective of the growth and new settlement patterns of Latinos, issues of economic equality, fair representation in the federal bureaucracy, greater affordable housing, extending federal benefits to immigrants and the territories, expanded workers’ rights, more federal attention to urban policy, limit the role of money in politics and so on. However, these must to be framed in ways that go beyond the Democratic Party’s “trickle-down progressivism” that it has practiced for far too long that keeps Latinos as political outsiders. It should be developed in ways that actually fully reach and engage our community. The Latino political leadership needs to create a community-based national policy agenda that includes but goes beyond immigration reform, and unifies the vast majority of Latinos and our advocates, forming coalitions with others to make them political viable. This Latino leadership needs to be more visible and accountable to their community, as opposed to operating as a shadow leadership that advises Democratic leaders and operatives in back rooms.
In the process of doing so, Latino leaders need to expose the Right’s agenda fully and aggressively for our community for its lack of substance and harmful effects. At the same time, the Latino leadership needs to take more seriously take on the Democratic Party and its Presidential candidate’s campaign for continually taking the Latino community for granted. They should demand the party make a greater investment in promoting Latino candidates and party leaders, and by putting more resources into the field in Latino neighborhoods and progressive political organizations during the Presidential election and beyond.
2016 is almost here and so time is short for Latino leaders to begin strategizing for change. Not doing so will condemn Latinos to continue being second-class citizens, even for the majority who are US citizens. Latinos may be pawns in this 2016 Presidential chess game, but we need to be smart enough to not continue to be en prise.
Angelo Falcón is President of the National Institute for Latino Policy (NiLP). For information on NiLP, visit our website at latinopolicy.org. Reach Falcón at afalcon@latinopolicy.org.