Wolf, David and Martha — Pull Us Out of the Rabbit Hole

*This was intended for a pre-GOP presidential debate timeframe. But I think the ideas stated by Trujillo and Cisneros have value the day after. They take the debate moderators to task for the way they frame Latino concerns and the immigration issue. There will be more debates, Republican and Democratic, that’s why this essay is valid. Also, it serves to help us frame our conversations and ask questions from a Latino point of view. VL

By Henry Cisneros and Sol Trujillo, Huffington Post Latino Voices

Tuesday night’s Republican Presidential Debate in Las Vegas will unfold in a swing state that has given its Electoral Votes to every winning President except Jimmy Carter since 1908. Comprising nearly 20 percent of Nevada’s electorate and more than 27 percent of its population, Latinos are a crucial part of the fabric of this critical swing state. George W. Bush won Nevada in 2004 with a historic 40 percent of Latino voters, while Barack Obama won Nevada in 2008 with 75 percent of Latinos. Nevada voters count, and Latino voters in Nevada especially count.

Yet the presidential debates have had an Alice in Wonderland quality to them when talking about Latinos. Inside the debate halls, candidates voice strong and angry opposition to Mexican immigration when, for the first time since the 1940s, more Mexicans are leaving the United States than arriving. Outside of the debate halls, Donald Trump famously called Mexican immigrants “rapists” who are “bringing crime,” despite the fact that immigrants are far less prone to crime than native-born Americans. Other candidates have followed in his wake by endorsing mass deportations; breaking up families; and changing our long-held Constitutional principles of citizenship, specifically the Fourteenth Amendment’s inclusion of all persons born in the United States as U.S. citizens.

Our purpose is not to point fingers at the candidates. Our purpose is to address the most important unreality of all – debate moderators who accept and validate the candidates’ mischaracterizations of Latinos. Moderators who steer debate only to illegal immigration and crime validate some candidates’ view that Latinos are a problem to be managed. In doing so, they ignore and obscure Latinos’ contributions to the social fabric and economic vitality of this country.

It is time for presidential debate moderators to get real about Latinos.

In the real world, Latinos are not the other. Sixty-five percent of us were born in the United States. We are your friends and neighbors. We worship at the same churches, we teach and study in the same classrooms and we fight and die for this country in the U.S. armed forces. Like everyone else, we are striving to get ahead in a challenging and uncertain economy.

In the world we really live in, Latinos are job creators. According to a Stanford University study, the number of Latino-owned business grew 47 percent from 2007 to 2012, while the number of non-Latino businesses actually shrank.

READ MORE HERE

This article was originally published in Huffington Post Latino Voices.

Henry Cisneros, former Mayor of San Antonio, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and Founder and Chairman of CityView, and Sol Trujillo, former Chairman and CEO of USWEST, CEO of Orange and CEO of Telstra, are the Democratic and Republican Chairmen and Co-Founders of the Latino Donor Collaborative, a non-partisan, non-profit focused on strengthening the Latino brand and raising awareness of Latinos’ contributions to the current and future success of the nation’s economy and social sphere.