(Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed
are his own)
By Bernd Debusmann and Dado Ruvic
NEW YORK, April 6 (Reuters) – WASHINGTON, April 5 (Reuters)
– Every day, around 1,600 U.S. citizens of Latin American
extraction are reaching 18 years of age – voting age – and
adding to the fastest-growing segment of the American
electorate.
Almost 22 million Latinos will be eligible to vote in
November’s elections and how many of them turn out may well
decide who will be the next U.S. president.
A series of recent polls show that Latinos favor President
Obama over any of the Republican presidential hopefuls, with a
comfortable 70 percent to 14 percent over Mitt Romney, the man
most likely to win the Republican nomination at the end of a
primary campaign marked by often shrill anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Obama is so confident that the primary debates have driven
Latinos away from the Republican party that he told the
Spanish-language television network Univision last November
there was no need for his campaign to run negative ads on the
Republican presidential hopefuls. Instead, “we may just run
clips of the Republican debates verbatim. We won’t even comment
on them and people can make up their own minds.”
Among debate highlights that stick in the collective memory
was the electrified Mexican-U.S. border fence suggested by
Herman Cain, who soon after dropped out of the race, and Mitt
Romney’s idea that illegal immigrants would chose
“self-deportation because they can’t find work here, because
they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here.”
Newt Gingrich, who is still in the primary contest but whose
star is fading, described self-deportation as a fantasy.
The president’s confidence of winning Latino support again –
he took 67 percent of their vote in 2008 — is partly based on
history: Republicans have lost the Latino vote in every
presidential election since 1972.
But it would be a mistake for Obama to take that support for
granted, not least because he broke an election campaign promise
to produce a bill on immigration reform in his first year in
office.
This prompted Jorge Ramos, the influential Univision anchor
to whom he made the promise in 2008, to write in an essay in
Time magazine last month saying that Latinos faced the difficult
choice on November 6 “of voting for either a president who broke
a major promise or a Republican candidate who doesn’t respect
us.”
If enough Latinos find that choice so difficult that they
will sit out the vote, Obama’s confidence may prove mistaken. To
hear electoral number crunchers tell it, an Obama victory could
hinge on Latin turnout and support in swing states where no
candidate can be certain of getting the most votes. These states
include Florida, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.
POPULAR VOTE DOESN’T EQUAL VICTORY
Ruy Texeira, an election expert and demographer at the
liberal Center For American Progress Action Fund, points out
that while the Latino support tracked by opinion polls points to
Obama winning the popular vote, that doesn’t always translate
into electoral victory. The presidential elections of 2000,
decided after a bitter controversy over Florida’s 25 Electoral
College votes, are a case in point.
While immigration, for decades a hot-button issue in the
United States, has dominated the debate, it does not top the
list of Latino concerns. Surveys show that like other Americans,
Latinos care most about jobs, the economy, education and health
care. Immigration ranks fifth.
Latino voters don’t have direct immigration problems – they
are citizens. But, as Jorge Ramos says in his essay, “the issues
concerning undocumented immigrants are very, very personal. If
you attack them, you attack all of us. They are our neighbors
and co-workers; their kids go to school with our kids; they
serve in battle next to our sons; they take the jobs no one else
wants; they pay taxes and overwhelmingly make America a better
country.”
Those who attack illegal immigrants are not restricted to
Republican presidential hopefuls. Since Obama took office, his
administration has deported more undocumented immigrants than
any other president in history – an average of around 400,000 a
year. The deportations have resulted in the separation of
thousands of parents from children who were born in the U.S. and
thus are citizens.
In a campaign twist that carries a whiff of desperation,
Romney has begun to try and turn Obama’s record on immigration
against him. “He campaigned saying he was going to reform
immigration laws and simplify and protect the border,” the
Republican front-runner said early in April, “and then he had
two years with a Democrat House and a Democrat Senate and a
super majority in each house, and he did nothing.”
“So let the immigrant community not forget that while he
uses this as a political weapon, he does not take responsibility
for fixing the problems we have.”
This comes from a candidate whose party stalled attempts at
immigration reform both under George W. Bush and Obama. Whether
his argument sways enough Latinos to make a difference in
November remains to be seen.
(You can contact the author at
)
(Editing by Clive McKeef)
