marco rubio

It must be noted that the overall percentage of Latinos who voted for Trump is about 26-29 percent, compared to the Cuban-American vote. This wide gap in the Latino demographic is one that has plagued both major parties as they strive to grab this much desired bloc. If Republicans can claim over half of the Cuban-American vote in a key state like Florida, is there hope yet for a stronger Latino base to lean towards the GOP? After all, as Ronald Reagan infamously quipped, “Hispanics are conservatives; they just don’t know it yet.” 

Trump has now emerged as the likely Republican nominee come this fall’s election. The Republican establishment — through Super PAC's supporting Jeb Bush — burned through more than $130 million in an effort to stop Trump, yet he continues to surge in the polls. Donald Trump’s appeal, however, should not come as a surprise if it is seen in sociological terms.

Put simply, Donald Trump, once the Clown Prince of American politics has become the Most Important Person of American politics today. Outrageous as he might be, he is not just setting the cat among the pigeons. He is the cat among the pigeons. He is setting the agenda and everyone else gets to react to it. As testimony to that, the Republican Party’s leaders, while trying to distance the party from Trump’s outrageousness, are nervous about going the full distance. 

There are  upwards of 11 million people living and working in the United States, in every state and city, who face the perpetual threat of physical exile from their lives and their homes, to be banished to a country they barely know or in which they can barely survive. The only crime most have committed was to cross an arbitrary confine seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Although their plight appears disconnected from ours, this threat involves every American who cares about their country and values their ancestral history. 

About 60 percent of the 17 million Asian-Americans in the United States are foreign-born. Ninety percent of Asian immigrants come to the United States through family-based immigration visas, so backlogs in the system affect their everyday lives. In fact, nearly half of the 4.3 million people in the family backlog worldwide are in Asia. “What people often…frame as a Latino issue, it’s just not true,” Moua said. One in 11 undocumented immigrants in the United States is Asian-American; and one in 10 Dreamers is Asian-American.

The GOP’s response to President Obama's first post re-election State of the Union Address in some ways will be markedly different than in its response to his prior addresses. But in one way it will be the same. Its blatant frontal assault on him didn’t work for four years. So this time the GOP’s rebuttal will be softer and gentler in tone and theme. But underneath the flowery rhetoric, the GOP’s relentless attack on his policies is still very much in place.

It’s good news that Cuban-American Rubio is accepting his party’s leadership role on immigration. Or is it? The idea that we need increased border security and enforcement ignores reality. His timetable for citizenship for the undocumented is problematic. And there are legitimate reasons to be skeptical of his conversion from immigration hardliner to immigration reformer. Now his Tea Party base and Hispanics are supposed to welcome his new position on immigration? Not too likely. Instead, people may realize that Marco Rubio’s only core conviction is Marco Rubio. 

They may well be the future of their parties — Rubio, the Cuban-American Republican, is 41; Castro, the Mexican-American Democrat, 37. In their speeches — hyped relentlessly before and after the fact — they drew on stories of their immigrant families. This is the reality of the magic act we saw: Both parties are trying to claim the hearts of Latino voters. This is the deception behind the magic: Both parties are breaking Latino hearts when it comes to immigration.