Author: Bryce Ashby

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Opinion Viewpoint

Viewpoint: A Referendum on Arrogance

Bryce Ashby (Photo: courtesy Bryce Ashby)

Over the last few weeks, we’ve heard a few grumblings of support for the Memphis City Council’s referendum seeking to extend its own term limits from two to three terms. Unfortunately for the council, those grumblings appear to be coming only from its own members and their cronies. Nevertheless, they continue unabated in their effort to rally support for this mistaken attempt to supplant the will of residents.

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland has abandoned his previous promise not to seek a third term in office if term limits were extended. Now, showing a little mayoral leg to entice his voting bloc, Mayor Strickland said if the referendum passes, he will be more than happy to flip-flop his position to keep himself in office.

Meanwhile, Councilman Dr. Jeff Warren — the referendum’s most vocal supporter — seeks to garner votes in his quixotic quest to remain in power.

I’ve said this before: I like Jeff Warren. I appreciate his service. I appreciate his efforts to protect Overton Park. Although I’ve never voted for Mayor Strickland, he offered strong leadership through the pandemic and has offered a welcome, tempering voice as the city council unwisely sought to hop into bed with the Carlisle group and have the city carry far too much financial risk in the One Beale project.

I have strong disagreements with these men on a number of other issues, but even if I didn’t, their cynical efforts in backing the term limit referendum demonstrate a disappointing amount of hubris and/or frightening misunderstanding of the goals of public service.

Strickland and Warren have primarily argued in favor of the referendum because there is still work to be done. Well, of course, there is, but that’s not a good reason to extend term limits. There will always be work to do, challenges to overcome, and improvements to make. Extending term limits to three terms or eliminating them altogether will not change that fact.

Public service and governing should be about making as great a contribution as you can while you have the opportunity. Democracy is about making long-term, incremental progress, and a good public servant should work to make those contributions and that progress, but with an eye on developing young leaders to follow behind him or her and continue that work. That’s Strickland and Warren’s first mistake — contending that the work can ever be finished. Their second mistake and the much more troubling one is believing that only they are capable of doing that work.

Look around Memphis. We have so many talented, energetic, and creative people working to make the city better. Whether it is in business, nonprofits, or advocacy, Memphis’ greatest resource is our sheer abundance of smart and caring individuals working to build a more just and equitable city. Working to build a stronger education system. Fighting to ensure that as we develop, we do so in an environmentally sustainable way.

Instead of wasting their energy and spending political capital on keeping themselves in power, Mayor Strickland and Councilman Warren would be better off identifying young leaders who are already contributing to our city and encouraging them to bring their energy to public service.

Let’s bring this debate to a close on August 4th. What is on the ballot is not a referendum on term limits but one on the arrogance of a few. For the third time in 14 years, vote against this cynical referendum. Once that’s done, we can focus on what really matters, continuing the work of improving the lives of all Memphians.

Bryce W. Ashby is an attorney with Donati Law, PLLC.

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The USA: Detention Nation

Sometimes sport and politics clash in Latin America, but last month’s “Central America snub” was particularly revealing. Vice President Joe Biden flew to the region to meet with the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in the midst of a deepening Central American human rights and refugee crisis. President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras was a no-show — too busy watching his national team play soccer in Brazil.

Over the past several months, tens of thousands of women and children, most of them poor and from those three Central American nations named above, have arrived at our southwest border. From October 2013 to May 2014, the United States detained nearly 35,000 unaccompanied minors at the border. This is up from a total of 21,000 for the entire previous year. Meanwhile, the number of women seeking refuge in the U.S. has increased to a point that 240 female detainees were transferred to a prison in Mason, Tennessee, because the detention centers at the border are at capacity.

We’re not solely blaming President Hernández for a migratory crisis, but the leader’s priorities reflect an unfortunate historic reality: The struggles of women and children, particularly poor women and children — are generally secondary to other more compelling national concerns. In this case, World Cup soccer.

Central America is suffering from demoralizing poverty and widespread violence. Honduras currently has the world’s highest murder rate and ranks first in the world in murders per capita. To appreciate the extent of despair there, imagine making the decision to send your 10-year-old daughter on a solitary journey north — for hundreds of miles — in search of refugee status in the U.S. rather than letting her face the dangers at home.

This crisis did not materialize overnight, as suggested in the mainstream U.S. media, nor is it an indictment of President Obama’s immigration policy; a feckless, unfocused Congress has refused to even consider the moderate immigration reform passed by the Senate last summer and supported by Obama.

No, this crisis is decades in the making, and until the U.S. adopts mature, reasonable immigration reform and sensible partnerships within Central America, we’ll continue to cycle through these crises.   

U.S. policy in Central America has hardly helped that region’s poor. From the 1970s through the early 1990s, the U.S. pursued three wars in the region. At times, it became difficult to separate our allies from our adversaries. One thing was clear: The U.S. supported, with tens of millions of dollars in military aid and direct CIA intervention, anyone in the region who fought Marxism. We blindly backed the Contras in Nicaragua and the pre-modern militaries in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. The Guatemalan military, during the 1980s, even committed genocide. To this day, that nation’s Nobel Lauriat in Peace, Rigoberta Menchú, travels with a 12-man security detail. What kind of a nation would want to kill a Nobel Peace Prize winner? 

Our policies under President Obama have not pointed any closer to peace or security in the region. In 2009, for example, despite unanimous opposition from the Organization of American States, the U.S. — after briefly protesting — acceded to a coup in Honduras against a leftist regime. In Honduras, young, idealistic Americans (including one of the authors of this op-ed) once served in the U.S. Peace Corps, but the organization pulled out a few years ago, citing legitimate safety concerns for its volunteers.

The recent Free Trade Agreement frenzy, pushed by the U.S., the World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, has not generated prosperity in the region: Some 65 percent of Hondurans live in poverty, and Honduras and Guatemala are the most unequal nations (in terms of overall distribution of goods and income) in Latin America. Almost 20 years ago, the bipartisan “Washington consensus” assured us that free trade agreements between the U.S. and Latin America would create more wealth, income, and prosperity for all in the Americas — and would have the added benefit of reducing migration into the U.S.  

Our wars, our trade policies, and now our inability to lead on immigration reform, combined with low levels of enlightened leadership in Central America are the true causes of the current humanitarian/refugee crisis in our region. We could help by passing a clear national reform to our outdated immigration laws, but Congress won’t act.  

The president has decided to act unilaterally, where he can. On June 30th, he announced that by late summer, he’ll move on some areas of reform that do not require congressional approval. But women and children fleeing Central American poverty and governments with a genocidal history can’t wait.

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A Failure to Lead on Immigration Reform

Progressives are still celebrating the fall of Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader defeated in a June 10th primary by a sleeper candidate, an economics professor named David Brat. The national media, asleep at the switch on this one, rolled out an easy, unconvincing thesis to explain this political collapse: Cantor’s willingness to consider some sort of immigration reform.

Yet a comprehensive immigration reform bill, passed by the Democrat-controlled Senate last summer, continues to languish in the GOP-led House of Representatives. The leadership in the House, including Cantor, has refused to take up the bill, offering a myriad of stall tactics and maneuvers to slowly smother the legislation, without having to go on record as actually killing it. The bill is moderate, sensible legislation that seeks to regularize the immigration status of millions of people who live in the United States, pay taxes, and contribute to our culture and society. The majority of Americans (62 percent), and 70 percent of Republicans in Cantor’s district, support comprehensive immigration reform that includes a pathway for citizenship.

Cantor’s defeat is really related to his arrogance, his out-sized national political ambition, and his disingenuousness on the immigration issue. His refusal to actually lead on immigration, and his inability to produce any type of counter-legislation on this critically important question, exposed him to attacks as just another political opportunist. It’s no surprise, then, that Cantor’s negatives going into the primary stood at 63 percent. The surprise is the national shock over his defeat and the misappropriation of the meaning of this political collapse.

The national media, political pundits, and the Republican Party’s narrow focus on immigration as a factor in Cantor’s defeat has given the anti-immigration wing of the Republican Party an excuse to do nothing on immigration reform. Thus, a political implosion in a tiny corner of America means fear and fecklessness prevail in the nation at large: There will be no vote on a perfectly sensible Senate immigration bill this year.

House members are afraid of losing their seats if they vote on a politically perilous issue that’s become perilous only because we’ve let the bullies and the irrational define the issue. 

For example, Brat claimed Cantor would support “open borders” if elected to another term in Virginia. This is pure campaign fiction and political manipulation. By hiring and equipping thousands of additional border patrol agents, President Obama has done more to close down our Southern border with Mexico in the past five years than any previous president. Obama’s administration also has deported two million people in the past five years. Cantor has hardly supported this effort, or this president, but “Open Borders Cantor” is absurdist, magical rhetoric.  

But sometimes in politics, the truth is less important than people’s feelings and people — at least those in Cantor’s district around Richmond — are feeling besieged. Their public schools are collapsing, their Congress won’t support a raise in minimum wage, their purchasing power is declining, and good factory jobs left their city decades ago.  

We suspect the professor from Randolph-Macon College will be elected to the House of Representatives in November as an insignificant, back-bencher with no real Cantor-like political power. We can live with that. But we can’t live with the deception, disingenuousness, and lies that have become the new norm in American politics.

It’s truly disheartening to watch professors, tasked with seeking and telling the truth, become politicians and begin to speak in fiction. Professor Brat’s exaggerations have real consequences when the national outcome of a Cantor defeat is the concomitant tabling of much-needed immigration reform for our nation. Evidently, Brat is unconcerned with the millions of deportations, the tens of thousands of detentions, the separation of families, and the squelching of opportunity for kids who dream of studying and living in peace in the U.S.  

Cantor’s defeat points to the urgency of passing comprehensive immigration reform now. We can’t allow politics to be hijacked by cynicism, laughable exaggerations, and bullying of the most vulnerable among us. Comprehensive immigration reform is in our best interest as a nation. And it will happen. Politicians who tell half-truths and outright lies to score political points at the expense of urgent national policy are not patriots. They’re the enemies of free societies and open democracies.

(Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and board chair at Latino Memphis, Inc.; Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.)

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Remedial Ed

Our Tennessee General Assembly scores pretty low on basic civics, if recent legislative statements are any indication. Law-making in the state legislature should be predicated upon passing a civics test; those who are elected (and pass the test) are seated in the legislature. Those who fail should not be given the daunting responsibility of writing the laws that govern the people of our great state.

Stacey Campfield

Maybe it’s elitist to assume our legislators have attended school and … learned things. Senator Stacey Campfield’s (R-Knoxville) recent statements certainly call into question his understanding of constitutional amendments, concepts covered in elementary school. The Tennessee legislature recently passed a bill that allows U.S.-born children of undocumented people to pay in-state tuition. It’s actually a nonsense bill because U.S.-born children are U.S. citizens; they’re granted the privilege of paying in-state college tuition in the state of their residency. But Campfield publicly questioned whether U.S.-born children of the undocumented are citizens. He doesn’t think so. Of course, the authors of this op-ed believe the moon is made of Swiss cheese — but we don’t discuss this in public.

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, establishes citizenship for anyone born on United States soil. It’s a simple, practical proclamation designed, at the time, to grant citizenship to African Americans and other American-born slaves who were freed in 1865 via the 13th Amendment. Some people in the 1860s did not consider former slaves full citizens: The 14th Amendment cleared that up. In 1868. End of story.

Next, we would administer our civics test to Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown). We know Kelsey graduated from a pretty good law school (Georgetown!), so we’re surprised at some of his recent political decisions and observations. For example, Kelsey’s sponsorship of SB 2566 (which would allow individuals or organizations to refuse goods and services that further same sex unions) resulted in much negative press that went viral and national. Kelsey, a smart man with outsized political ambition and panache for political pandering, pulled his sponsorship from the bill to dampen the political firestorm he ignited. Evidently, he never learned about the Equal Protection clause in the 14th Amendment while attending law school.

The Equal Protection clause guarantees the equal application of laws against all persons within a state, and certainly singling out gay people for discrimination would be contrary to this clause. We’re confident that they teach the 14th Amendment and Equal Protection at Georgetown Law School. We suspect the institution frowns upon discrimination. Of course, if we were good investigative journalists, we’d head up to Washington to study the Georgetown curriculum, but we’re busy. And we’re not journalists.

Finally, just last week, state Senator Mae Beavers (R-Mount Juliet) sought an expansion of the 2009 Tennessee Firearms Act to include a provision protecting Tennessee-manufactured guns from the reach of federal firearms laws. The bill never made it out of the legislature because the “Supremacy Clause” of the U.S. Constitution means that federal statutes trump state law. Why would an elected Senator from our state challenge Article VI of the United States Constitution? Maybe she never read the Constitution. Senator Beavers also advocates for the direct election of our Appellate Court judges because the influence of money in politics has worked out so well for our democrac process. Why not extend this practice to the judiciary?

Ultimately, it’s important that those who make laws in Nashville understand the fundamental core of our Constitution — lessons taught in elementary school, middle school, high school, college, and in law school.

Just because these lessons are taught doesn’t mean they’re grasped. We think state legislators should have a firm and realistic understanding of constitutional procedures, rather than one based in politics and, apparently, magical thinking. Our civics test, we hope, will force law makers to study some of the basics of law and legislation. In the end, a civics test might not stop all of the nonsense, but we’d like to see some state legislators — as the grades roll in — roll on out of Nashville.

(Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and board chair at Latino Memphis, Inc.; Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.)

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A House Divided

The recent shutdown of the federal government is now behind us, and unsurprisingly it was America’s poor and those who depend on government services who suffered the most during the Republican temper tantrum.

But for the 11 million undocumented persons who call the U.S. home, the shutdown was nothing more than business as usual from a federal government that refuses to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

This Republican-led House of Representatives likely will be remembered for inaction and obstruction, because its most radical members do not believe in federal government as a promoter of social peace. As such, the current House has refused to act on immigration reform, which passed the Senate in July with broad bipartisan support.

Shutdown or no shutdown, the U.S. government continues to prioritize deportation: About 1,100 people are deported daily, a number that did not change during the recent shutdown. These mass deportations separate families, create enmity, and deprive a struggling economy of workers, purchasers, and taxpayers.

President Obama would like to sign comprehensive immigration reform, because nonpartisan economists, law enforcement officials, and human rights activists agree that providing a legal framework for undocumented workers benefits the country. Our best opportunity for comprehensive immigration reform in a generation, since the 1986 reform, is now in the hands of a House of Representatives that does not believe in its own mission statement: to govern.

The extremists who shut down the government are also responsible for failing to act on immigration reform. The Republican-controlled House does not support immigration reform that offers a pathway to citizenship for undocumented persons in the U.S. Calling such people “criminals” and referring to any pathway as “amnesty for lawbreakers,” this House of Representatives has demonstrated a single-minded tenacity that is neither principled nor courageous. It’s narrow-minded and mean, and it will have clear consequences in upcoming national elections.

Nearly 50 years ago, President Lyndon Johnson — a hard-boiled Texas Democrat — predicted that by signing the enlightened civil rights legislation of 1964, his party would “lose the South” for a generation. He was proven right, and his commentary and actions in spite of the consequences show a principled politician placing important national aspirations over petty regional politics. Now, the Republicans, through irresponsible legislative inaction, are laying the groundwork to lose the national Hispanic vote for a generation and perhaps longer.   

The vast majority of voting Hispanics and others who understand that immigrants enhance our economy, culture, and society with energy and dynamism are bound to think twice before voting for the party that squelched comprehensive immigration reform at the final hour. 

Young people and others who believe that the so-called Dream Act youth should be given the opportunity to live in peace and achieve their potential in the only country they’ve ever known are turning away from this Republican Party, the party that offers neither creative solutions nor sympathy to youngsters who hope to contribute to our collective culture and economy.

So we’re stuck with Republican recklessness: They forced a shutdown of the government and threatened to push the country into default while rejecting any attempt to legislate on much-needed, extraordinarily moderate immigration reform. This sorry state of affairs can only be corrected through the democratic process.

The American electorate is certainly better, smarter, and more moderate than its congressional leadership, and the electorate will hopefully act to build a more harmonious Congress in the near future. Future historians will look to this period as a very strange (and, we hope, temporary) season of intolerance and intransigence, terms that never translate to good governance, social peace, or democratic expansion.

Bryce W. Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney. Michael J. LaRosa teaches history at Rhodes College.

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Fencing Justice Out

Laws written out of fear and anger are never good laws. Very few Americans are proud of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1789, the Prohibition amendment of 1919, and the Patriot Act of 2001. All were designed to curb the rights of American citizens but especially those of immigrants.

The pending new legislation on immigration, which passed the Senate this past week, focuses on border security and control and may, or may not, become the law of the land. Just as in 2007, when the hard right blocked President Bush’s genuine attempt at immigration reform, Republican fear, anger, and intransigence in the House now threaten to undermine reform by insisting on prohibitive, unrealistic “security” measures at the border.

To placate the hard right, Congress is considering spending up to $40 billion over the next 10 years to double the current force of 20,000 border patrol agents and complete a 700-mile fence project that was begun in 2006, never fully funded by Congress, and technologically flawed. Given that most undocumented persons in the U.S. overstay some type of visa, appropriating billions of dollars for a fence is wasteful.

Additionally, over the past couple of years, the U.S. has recorded a net loss of immigrants. This is because an anemic economy and a robust deportation effort under the Obama administration, combined with the foul mood of state legislators in Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, et al., have created an inhospitable environment for immigrants.

Nevertheless, billions of dollars in unnecessary fencing seems to be the fulcrum upon which any potential reform of our outdated immigration system rests and may be directly related to U.S. military drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan, driving defense contractors to the border with Mexico.

Even with this giant “security surge,” many Republican legislators oppose the pathway to citizenship for undocumented persons who have been living in the United States. The vast majority of the undocumented workers have contributed to our communities and economy; many have been here since infancy and form part of the complex fabric of society. Rather than thinking of the undocumented via a one-dimensional narrative, why not look at the undocumented as human beings, workers, students, friends, neighbors? Let’s recognize their presence and value by focusing on the many contributions they make to society.

Republicans are putting up myriad barriers to prevent the undocumented from moving along a path toward citizenship. Insisting that the border be completely locked down and “secured” before anyone can move toward citizenship is a tactic designed to please the nation’s most conservative element — people who have historically opposed all programs and legislation designed to help immigrants, minorities, and the poor.

The fearful right refers to a pathway to citizenship as “amnesty for lawbreakers,” yet our immigration laws are so outdated, baroque, and unfair that we’ve pushed into the category of “lawbreaker” most people who come here without documentation or overstay a visa and who want to work in the U.S., save money, and support loved ones.

The hard right’s irrational focus on “security” and punitive policies reflects the demographic triple-bind in which they find themselves. Republicans know they’ll never win another national election without strong support from Hispanics. Republicans know that “Hispanic” is the fastest growing demographic category in the nation. They know the sun has set on the days of national political domination by white males, and so they’re in an existential fight for political survival.

The solution for Republicans is simple: Treat immigrants, legal and otherwise, like human beings, and support policies that are important to immigrants. A hike in the minimum wage, more money for public schools, better and strongly funded community health centers, money for English language classes, and public funds for day care would make for a good start.

Republicans have shown, though, that they would rather spend money on technologically dubious and expensive fence projects and 40,000 border agents.

No matter what happens — and we hope meaningful legislation emerges that can be signed by President Obama — Hispanics will remember the great Republican intransigence, the menacing, expensive fence, the fear and anger of the 2013 U.S. Congress.

Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and board member at Latino Memphis, Inc. Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.

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Living Wages

In light of recent Republican electoral failures to communicate with Hispanics, immigrants, African-Americans, and hourly wage earners, pushing anti-living-wage legislation would seem politically counterintuitive. But here in Tennessee, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a bill on March 28th that’s injurious to workers and now awaits action by Governor Bill Haslam.

Living-wage ordinances were enacted in 2006 and 2007 by the city of Memphis and Shelby County Commission respectively. The ordinances require that all employees of the city and county, as well as employees of companies contracting with those entities, receive at least $10 per hour with health insurance or $12 per hour without. At the $10 level, assuming a 40-hour work week and 52 weeks of solid work, workers take in approximately $19,200 before taxes, per year. This is hardly a fast-track path to prosperity, but the ordinance offers a modicum of dignity for working people. Who, then, could be against a reasonable policy that guarantees workers a decent wage and path to self-sufficiency?

State senator Brian Kelsey (R-Memphis) and Representative Glen Casada (R-Franklin) sponsored SB/0035 – HB/0511, which eliminates the right of cities and municipalities to prescribe wage standards above the federally mandated minimum wage. This legislation, under the guidance of Kelsey, even goes a step further and prevents any city or county from passing future “wage-theft” legislation.

Wage theft, defined as any instance whereby a worker is denied the pay that he or she has earned under state or federal law, occurs with alarming frequency. Two out of three low-wage workers claim to have suffered some form of wage theft at the hands of their employers. Wage theft targets the poor, the undereducated, and immigrants, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck. Their lives can be completely upended by unscrupulous, dishonest employers. Proposed wage-theft ordinances would provide simplified, low-cost measures to quickly remedy such abuses.

Evidently, Kelsey, Casada, and supporters of this egregiously bad, anti-worker legislation hope to move the county back to the mid-19th century, when workers had no rights and lived at the margins of society, where they could be battered about by the capricious whims of their employers — their overseers. In this difficult economy, workers need support from legislators. But in Tennessee, the state legislature seems responsive only to managers, owners, and financiers. This legislation is one more example of a creeping, dangerous disconnect between the Republican Party and working people.

As the gap here in the U.S. between management and workers grows — 1 percent of the population now takes home 21 percent of all wages in America — it’s difficult to understand how legislation such as SB/0035 – HB/0511 advances through and passes a state legislature in a state that is generally considered reasonable, with a diverse, mixed economy. Healthy economies and societies never grow from the top down — they grow from the bottom up, by supporting wage earners while offering them reasons to lay down roots and build neighborhoods and communities. Condemning workers to poverty and powerlessness is hardly an admirable or healthy model for social development.

The alternative to the Kelsey/Casada legislation is simple and clear: Pass a state minimum-wage requirement that guarantees workers a living wage and adjusts for inflation. This would provide individuals with an incentive to work, stimulate the economy by putting more money into the pockets of workers who tend to spend more of their earned income, and put workers more clearly in command of their own destinies.

Let’s support people who work for a living. Legislators who would deny fair wages to workers here in Tennessee undermine the dignity of all working people. As a political agenda, the assault on workers, the working poor, and those who struggle to make ends meet is not in the best interests of Tennessee. It is merely another step in the “race to the bottom” with states like Mississippi and Alabama, which deny worker rights in a cloying attempt to build a “pro-business” environment on the backs of workers.

Workers in Tennessee, and in the nation, need friends and support. In the short term, let’s hope Governor Haslam is one of those friends and vetoes this anti-labor bill. In the long run, we can only hope that hourly workers consider this legislative assault and support candidates who truly represent their best interests.

Bryce Ashby is a Memphis attorney. Michael LaRosa is a professor at Rhodes College.

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Embracing Immigration Reform

Republicans’ fast, furious, and sudden embrace of immigration reform may have unintended consequences. And if winning national elections by mobilizing Hispanics is their goal, it might be too late.

For several years, we have advocated for changes to our existing immigration laws. In this column, we have called for comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform that reflects the realities of our market-based economy. Such reform should reinforce our neighborly relationship with Mexico, a nation that precariously straddles the wall between the Third World and the First.

This past November, Barack Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote, even though his relentless deportation program (a record 1.4 million people forced out of the United States in four years) continues unabated. Despite this, the president spoke the language of tolerance, inclusion, and reform while on the campaign trail, and Hispanic immigrants, documented and undocumented, were listening.

So now, barely a month into the president’s second term, some Republicans are speaking this (foreign) language of inclusion through a sudden conversion to the cause of immigration reform — something they characterized until a few weeks ago as merely amnesty for lawbreakers.

The idea of somnolent Spanish-speakers suddenly waking up and voting Republican after some sort of comprehensive reform is passed is completely out of step with recent Republican-imposed reality. Hispanics will vote for Republicans if Republican policies and positions favor issues important to them. Many Hispanics, we should remember, are raising children, earning very low wages, and living in substandard housing. Hispanics will vote for candidates who have specific plans to improve education for their kids.

Like all human beings, Hispanics want to live in safe neighborhoods, with a responsive, professional police force. They want decent housing and access to basic health care. They want public transportation that’s safe and functional. They don’t want to send their kids to Afghanistan or Iran.

What did the Republican platform offer this past November? Their program, in essence: lower taxes for the wealthiest of Americans and large corporations, massive cuts to social programs, and a possible invasion of Iran. The fact that 27 percent of Hispanics voted for that agenda is nothing short of miraculous.

Republicans might benefit from comprehensive immigration reform in that a new, national policy will probably shut down the dizzying array of primal “laws” coming out of state legislatures in Alabama, Georgia, Arizona, and South Carolina. Passing and enforcing immigration laws is a federally prescribed prerogative (and obligation), and new immigration reform laws, passed in a bipartisan manner, should dampen down the rhetoric from the individual states. Those state laws, which are designed to impose maximum suffering on the undocumented, have been written, passed, and praised by Republican state legislators. Ruling through cruelty is never a politically sustainable plan of governance.

Here we are, once again, and we hope that a national, bipartisan plan to reform our outdated immigration laws is passed by the end of this year. It is unlikely that such reform will result in an immediate Hispanic pivot to the Republican Party, even if the plan passes with strong Republican support. We look forward to studying the details of the legislation that emerges in the months ahead, and we hope the cruel, racist, xenophobic rhetoric of the recent past recedes and dissipates, replaced by a much more enlightened discussion on immigration and the immigrants among us.

Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney. Michael J. LaRosa teaches history at Rhodes College.

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A Dishonored Anniversary

On November 6, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). No president since then has been able to develop, shepherd through Congress, and sign a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform package.

The Great Communicator from California knew something that Republicans — who continually channel his ethos and champion his legacy — are learning right now: Immigrants matter, Hispanics count, and mean-spirited, petty policies aimed at hurting Hispanics are paid back in kind at the polls.

Six years after Reagan left the White House, the Republican governor of his state, the hapless and forgettable Pete Wilson, pushed through Proposition 187, the so-called Save Our State Initiative. The law was designed to make life so miserable for the undocumented that they would (wait for it) … deport themselves.

Proposition 187 required school teachers to remove undocumented children from their classrooms (they refused) and mandated that treatment of the undocumented in the state’s emergency rooms should be denied by physicians, who also ignored this draconian law. By 1999, Prop. 187 was declared unconstitutional by the California Supreme Court; yet that ballot initiative forever changed politics in California, turning a once reliably red mega-state bright blue.

Over the past few years, with no understanding of Reagan’s message or his prudent, hate-free approach to immigration questions (IRCA provided permanent legal residence status to 2.7 million undocumented agricultural workers and targeted the corporations that knowingly hired the undocumented, abused their labor, and made excessive profits via a broken immigration system), state legislators in Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina have completely ignored the lessons from the 1994 California morass.

They have pushed through angry legislation (much of it unconstitutional) that questions children’s residency for purposes of school registration, targets those who, willfully or not, help the undocumented in any way, and makes an undocumented person’s mere “presence” in certain states an actual crime scene.

People in 2012 no longer communicate by rotary telephones. News of these abusive laws spread quickly via cell phones and Twitter; translated onto Spanish language television and radio, they became election issues in Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia.

No surprise that the presidential candidate forced to defend the rash of recent and really stupid legislation out of Arizona and other places, the man who jumped on the bandwagon by actually coining the term “self-deport,” lost the presidential race on November 6th.

That anyone should be surprised that Romney lost, or received a mere 25 percent of the national Hispanic vote, is the real surprise. Those of us tuned into demographic trends or who fought through California’s brutal 1994 crash course on how not to treat human beings — immigrants, non-immigrants, documented, or undocumented — predicted the outcome of this election long ago.

Now, it’s time for President Obama, with the support of the U.S. Congress in a bipartisan, rational fashion, to craft and pass comprehensive immigration reform. It’s time for all of us to tune out the xenophobic obstructionists — the people who have had the upper hand in this debate for too long and who essentially see the undocumented as a lesser form of humanity — and enact pragmatic legislation that can be signed by thinking problem-solvers on both sides of the aisle.

Through a series of fines, penalties, and other means to demonstrate culpability within a revamped immigration system, folks who are here and integrated into our communities, who are working, going to school, and supporting families can be offered a pathway to citizenship — which is what millions of the undocumented want and what polls show a majority of Americans support.

Republicans went over the immigration cliff on Election Day, at a time when they could have been celebrating a presidential victory. Romney failed to connect with wide segments of the electorate and missed an opportunity to draw on the example of Ronald Reagan and to follow the historical direction he set — at a time, moreover, when he desperately needed both, on the 26th anniversary of the Great Communicator’s signature, bipartisan immigration reform act.

Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and board member at Latino Memphis, Inc. Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Rubio Republicans, Castro Democrats

The Latino community and the Latino vote are often thought of by politicians and described by pundits as a uniform, single-issue constituency. Senator Marco Rubio of Miami and the Castro brothers of San Antonio (state representative Joaquín and Mayor Julian) illustrate the Hispanic vote’s complexity and offer a clear narrative for Hispanic political mobilization in the country over the next few years.

Rubio, who spoke at the Republican convention in Tampa and was evidently on the short list for vice-presidential nominees with Mitt Romney, was born in Miami to Cuban parents. His parents arrived in the United States in 1956 at a time of social and political turbulence when many Cubans moved from the island to South Florida, New Jersey, and other places in the U.S. Migration accelerated dramatically with Castro’s — Fidel Castro’s — revolution of 1959. Most who left during this exodus were direct victims of Fidel Castro’s furious redistribution plan for the island: They were the landed elite, well-connected business owners and professionals, many of whom had money and contacts in the U.S.

Cubans who came to the United States — at least during the first 20 years of the ongoing revolution — received the full support and embrace of the U.S. government. Those who arrived, about 800,000 during this period, were allowed to enter the U.S. with temporary-exile status, and, after 1966, with the passage of the Cuban Refugee Adjustment Act, they could become eligible for permanent residency after a year. Thus, Cubans are unique among immigrants as their status in the United States is assured merely by reaching our shores.

Many Cuban Americans are still grateful to President Eisenhower, the Republican who closed the U.S. embassy in Havana in January 1961, and disdainful of President Kennedy, a Democrat who ordered a failed invasion of Cuba in April of the same year but refused to follow through with a bombing of Havana. To this day, hard-line Cubans living in the U.S. believe that bombing Havana would have dislodged Castro. Political alliances sometimes endure for generations, and this is one such case: Cuban Americans in South Florida have been loyal supporters of the Republican Party.

Mexican Americans, such as the Castro brothers of San Antonio, do not share the same affinity for the Republican Party due to a variety of economic and political factors. First, Mexican Americans have a much more complicated history with America’s immigration system. For decades, millions of Mexicans worked as migrant workers and crisscrossed the border in concert with the demand for low-wage work in agriculture or construction.

Their numbers in the U.S. increased during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), when more than a million Mexicans moved north. Some stayed permanently in San Antonio, Tucson, San Diego, and Los Angeles. Tens of thousands of Mexican Americans fought in the U.S. military during the Second World War; they returned to work in cities throughout the Southwest and, like the occupants of most urban centers, aligned themselves with Democratic Party politics and policies.

During the 1960s, many working-class Mexican Americans in the Southwest were animated by César Chávez, who organized workers in the Southwest and insisted on the humanity and dignity of poor agricultural workers. Chávez’s followers gravitated toward the Democratic Party in America, which has been a more proactive, pro-labor, and pro-immigration party over the decades.

Marco Rubio and Julian Castro represent the next generation of Hispanics in U.S. society and politics. Nevertheless, they reflect stable political alliances that developed over generations. Rubio carries forth the Cuban-American experience, deeply rooted in Republican politics. Julian Castro, mayor of San Antonio, personifies a very different narrative, grounded in the Mexican-American story.

Both parties are fighting for the votes of “Hispanics” but the Hispanic vote should not be taken for granted or understood in monolithic, simplistic terms. The largest minority group in the nation is exerting political power in America, and both parties would benefit by taking the time to learn about the history and diversity of the Hispanic communities among us.

Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and board member at Latino Memphis, Inc. Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.