Esther J. Cepeda: Why is Ron Johnson courting Latinos? Because their votes are up for grabs | Column

Someday in the not-too-distant future, the term “Latino vote” will die out quietly. No more talk of sleeping giants. No more voting “blocs” that are assumed to be easy gets for any Democrat who says nice things about Latinos whenever Republicans dehumanize immigrants.

Several prominent news stories in recent days have marveled at how the GOP is managing to attract the attention of Hispanic voters by funding community centers in Hispanic neighborhoods and financing the election campaigns of Latinos. In some cases, previously Democrat-identifying Hispanics switch their party.

This isn’t so surprising, really. I’ve been covering the demographic story of Hispanics in America since the results of the 2010 Census spurred a million headlines about the “coming demographic tsunami,” which implied Latinos were going to cause white people to go extinct.

It’s more the other way around, from what I can see.

Just ask any elementary school teacher in America, regardless of whether they teach in a rural, suburban or urban district — Latinos are mixing in with other races. Across the K-12 school system and in colleges across the country, white, Asian, Black and Indigenous Latino-identifying young people with names such as Xochitl Smith, Kristie Ochoa, Brad Chavez and Rick Sanchez hint at a double identity.

And many, many American men and women have “traditional,” “white-sounding names” who may (or may not) speak Spanish but who identify as Mexican American, Cuban American, etc. due to their immediate ancestry.

Usually a group of people who all have one thing in common — at least one ancestor from Latin America — would be considered to have an affinity.

But that only makes sense in the context of believing, as some truly do, that all Latinos are illegal immigrants, that they all speak Spanish, and that they are all poor and undereducated.

Actually, the Latino population in this country represents a community-in-name-only with a wide range of educational levels, professional experiences, household incomes and varying degrees of attachment to Christian religions.

Democratic powerbrokers often ignore Latino voters because they believe that Republican opponents could never appeal to Hispanics.

Republicans, on the other hand, take nothing for granted. They know that they stand to do well with Latinos who are older (as in Generation X age and older), more closely linked to religious traditions, and Latinos who have higher-than-average household incomes.

This is despite huge skepticism about what real commitments Republicans can make (and keep) in an effort to “swing” Latinos, who are very impressionable at this time. A December Wall Street Journal poll on congressional races found that 37% of Hispanic voters favored a Democrat candidate, 37% favored a Republican candidate, while 22% of respondents said they were still undecided.

It’s also true that lots of Latino voters cast their ballots for former President Donald Trump and other Republicans during the last election.

The progressive data analysis firm Catalist wrote in a report on “What Happened in 2020”: “Along with massive increases in turnout, Latino vote share as a whole swung towards Trump by 8 points in two-way vote share compared to 2016, though Biden-Harris still enjoyed solid majority (61%) support among this group. Some of the shift from 2016 appears to be a result of changing voting preferences among people who voted in both elections, and some may come from new voters who were more evenly split in their vote choice than previous Latino voters.”

Last month, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Oshkosh, was at a GOP-financed community center in a heavily immigrant and Latino Milwaukee neighborhood, trying to make nice by talking with actual Latinos about school vouchers, crime prevention and immigration policy.

Johnson and all other high-visibility candidates need to do the same — Latinos are now Wisconsin’s largest “minority” group. And there’s no teasing out which ones are susceptible to a Republican “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” message.

In a story about the rise of Republican Latino legislators, Texas Monthly described the appeal: “Shared immigrant stories and opposition to Democratic Party policies that are unpopular in the region, combined with Trumpian rhetoric.”

I hate to say that I kinda get it.

Democrats have paid little more than lip service to Latino-centric concerns about the economy, education and health care, much less immigration — a contentious topic that doesn’t define Latinos, but very much affects them and their families, even if they’re U.S.-born.

And Democrats are, let’s face it, a hot mess of internecine battles over high-minded liberal and progressive issues that seriously turn off working-class folks who are living through precarious times.

It’s difficult to estimate what percentage of Wisconsin’s approximately 190,000 registered Latino voters (they represent only 4% of all eligible voters) will turn out during the next midterm elections.

What’s easy is noting, for the umpteenth time, that Latino votes are up for grabs. Every political party should be doing whatever it takes to welcome, court and win over this growing, eager and non-homogenous electorate.

1,000 families are still apart

I know a global pandemic is still going on, in addition to war in Ukraine and all sorts of other suffering. But we cannot forget that we still have an immigration crisis in the United States in which people, especially children, are still suffering.

Democratic-leaning organizations seem to have some unspoken agreement to steer clear of openly criticizing Team Biden on immigration, but children are still lost, families are separated and cruel treatment remains at our border.

Those of us who were waiting for leadership on the immigration front were disappointed during President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. He hit the usual beats: Provide a “pathway to citizenship” for “Dreamers,” temporary status recipients, farmworkers and essential workers to help with the national labor shortages.

“Revise our laws so businesses have the workers they need and families don’t wait decades to reunite,” Biden said. “It’s not only the right thing to do — it’s the economically smart thing to do.”

Ugh. Immigration advocacy groups began framing humanitarian issues as economic puzzles with built-in solutions because — the thinking went, over a decade ago — that using cold hard business facts about immigrants’ worth as human capital would get certain conservatives to re-imagine how immigration reform could pay off.

It’s a strategy that will never pay off big because so many legislators, in Washington and beyond, don’t care about facts. They care only about promoting a boogeyman wedge issue that relies on demonizing immigrants.

“Pathway to citizenship” and “reform” are the most vague and simplistic platitudes you can make on immigration. This is what the Biden administration calls leadership?

It’s true the Biden administration has already done much for immigrants and refugees. According to the National Immigration Forum’s Score Card:

“In its first year in office, the Biden administration has made hundreds of reforms to the immigration system. These changes have come in the form of executive orders, memoranda, updated guidelines, DOJ decisions, and signing legislation into law. In many cases, they have resulted in real, substantial progress toward a more just, humane immigration system that works for all Americans.”

There’s just so much left to be done. People who were brought to this country as children and got temporary legal status, as well as refugees with temporary protected status, are being herded into the shadows as program time limits run out. The immigration courts continue to be clogged due to case overload — backlogs are staggering, and the immigration courts have been hobbled by COVID.

These situations are bad enough. But according to the Immigration Forum, 1 million migrants were turned away last year at the border without any access to the very asylum our nation’s law guarantees to those who qualify. They say that refugee resettlement “sits at record lows just as immigrant detention is increasing back to pre-pandemic highs.”

The forum also estimates that 1,000 families separated by the Trump administration have not yet been reunited.

On that front, the nonprofit advocacy organization Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) is calling on the White House to set explicit policy that parents and children not be separated unless it’s an exceptional case, such as human trafficking (which KIND and other experts call rare).

Other organizations have views into our current immigration crisis:

“One year into the Biden administration, some of the most severe Trump-era policies that have decimated access to asylum — commonly known as ‘Title 42’ and ‘Remain in Mexico’ — remain in force,” said The International Rescue Committee, a nongovernmental organization, in a recent report. “These measures effectively ‘externalize’ asylum beyond U.S. borders, making U.S. territory unreachable to foreign nationals — even if they are exercising their human right to seek asylum — and require Mexico and other countries to carry increasingly challenging burdens to meet humanitarian needs. Rather than welcoming with dignity, asylum seekers’ rights continue to be violated by the U.S.”

Lastly, the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project estimates that over 650 migrants died at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021 — a 24% jump from the previous high of 524 posted in 2019, prior to the pandemic, under then-President Donald Trump (And higher than during the Obama administration when, in 2016, a high of 412 was reported, representing a 58% change.)

Children are still in detention without their parents. Many families are still separated. We must not forget them.