Peter Applebome of the New York Times reports on the experience of a Latino immigrant on Long Island:

Like a stranger in a strange land, Carlos Morales, a 26-year-old day laborer who came to Long Island six years ago from Mexico, is a perceptive observer of the suburban terrain where he works, goes to school and dreams of a better life.

So as he rides the bus or walks to Suffolk County Community College, past the mysterious signs reading “Rose Riot” (that’s a $7.99-a-dozen sale) or recruiting youths for lacrosse, as he observes the women in their big S.U.V.s and the hostile glares when he enters non-Latino businesses, he takes note of many things.

There are the kids tossing bottles or tomatoes at immigrant workers from passing cars. There are the men who, he insists, protest illegal immigration at night and then turn around and hire the same laborers by day. There’s the policeman who stopped him on the street and demanded to know what was in his backpack (schoolbooks) and who photographs immigrant workers for a running dossier.

There’s the 12-year-old boy he can’t get out of his head, who, when asked by a television interviewer what he thought of immigrant workers, answered, “I hate them.”

Carlos Morales is not a citizen. But his experiences - his feelings - aren’t exclusive to undocumenteds. You could be a fifth-generation American with dark skin and a Hispanic surname and there’s a good chance you may have faced discrimination in one way or another, even if it’s something as seemingly benign as a department store salesperson addressing you in Spanish or a co-worker asking about your immigration status.

Latino voters do not respond to this discrimination by advocating a permissive immigration policy. Latino voters can be as tough on border security as anyone. Consequently, being tough on border security is not tantamount to being discriminatory. Instead, Latino voters respond to the discrimation by assessing whether a politician is being discriminatory in their immigration-related pronouncements. To the extent that the immigration debate caused Latinos to turn on Republican candidates in 2006, it’s more a result of the Republicans’ racist rhetoric rather than any specific policy.

I’ve attended focus groups where Latino voters have been speaking Spanish while referring to undocumenteds as “them” and complaining about the effect “they” are having on wages and working conditions. Just because Latino voters think that immigration has been good for the country in the past doesn’t mean they think the borders should be thrown wide open. Poll after poll shows that immigration is not atop the list of issues Latino voters care about. Which makes perfect sense, since Latino voters are here already. They’re residents. They’re citizens. They are voters. No immigration policy is going to have any effect on any Latino voter in terms of his or her standing in the eyes of the law.

Instead, the effect of the immigration debate on many Latino voters has been to make them feel like their Americanness is being questioned, even if they have been here for many generations. Being proud of one’s family’s country of origin is a classic part of the American experience. Yet owing to their surname or their skin color or their accent, Latinos’ status is brought up by non-Latino peers and politicians alike, like Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger insisting despite evidence to the contrary that Latinos don’t assimilate very quickly. It is this sense of discrimination that needs to be the starting point for Democrats as the party thinks about how to use the immigration debate to bring more Latinos into the Democratic fold.

The significance of comprehensive immigration reform to most Latino voters is simply the hope that the debate will go away - that their status as Americans will no longer be questioned. (It wasn’t questioned nearly as much as in 2004, for example.) The specific policies are totally secondary. In fact, the specific policies are less important than issues like Iraq and education.

You cannot tell who is an American citizen just by looking. Latino voters are tired of getting treated as something less than real Americans. And those voters are much more interested in making discrimination against Latino citizens disappear than they are in opening the border to more Latino immigrants.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Blog, Immigration Issue, Latino Vote. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.