 Good afternoon. Buenas tardes. Yo me llamo Andrés Martínez. Soy vicepresidente aquí de la Fundación Nueva América. Bienvenidos. All our events here at New America are bilingual. Except I was thinking this morning, I don't know the right translation for the word delve, so delvear or something like that would be, I guess, the bocho approximation. But seriously, thank you for joining us at one of our occasional event in a series that we have pegged to the election, delven to 12, where we're looking at various issues and trying to go a little bit beyond the campaign headlines and look at, in this case, an interesting intersection between politics, demographics, and policy. So in two hours, we're going to hope to really bridge those three buckets. When it comes to immigration, it's hard to think of other issues where there is such a correlation between politics and policy. Sometimes, perhaps, in ways that are not always the most sophisticated. But there's a lot of anxiety and curiosity and excitement this election cycle about the role of the Latino voter. It feels like one of these issues that pops up every four years and there's always a bit of question about how much of it is reality, how much of it is hype, how much of it is sort of tomorrow's promise. A friend of mine likes to compare the role of Latinos in elections to the role of Brazil on the global stage and, you know, the old joke about Brazil being the country of tomorrow and always being the country of tomorrow. I think obviously when you look at the demographics and you look at the ways in which the U.S. is changing, there's a lot of substance here. And I can't think of a better group of people than the folks that have been gracious enough to join us today to look into this. So my role is mainly to just keep the program flowing and introduce people and sit back and learn from them along with the rest of you. So we're going to start off today with a conversation on Manuel Roig Francia's great biography of Marco Rubio, which is available for sale outside. And he is going to be in conversation with Alexandra Starr. I have these very extensive biographies for both of them that I'm just going to try to pick out the highlights. Alexandra Starr is an Emerson fellow here at the New America Foundation. She is an accomplished writer on the topic of immigration and other subjects and has been published widely in a number of publications, which I won't enlist. And Manuel Roig Francia, as most of you know, just published The Rise of Marco Rubio, a Simon and Schuster book. Fantastic editor on the project, by the way. A good friend of New America's. Manuel has been at the Washington Post for a long time. He has served in Mexico City. He's been the bureau chief in Miami. He's a very real stylist of a writer for somebody who's writing I've always admired, and he's done great pieces in the style section as well. The thing that jumped out at me here, Manuel, is I didn't know you were an adjunct professor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. When I first saw that, I'm like, wow, he paints, too. But apparently you teach reporting and writing there. So that's fantastic. So I'll spare you the details, because I want to get right into the conversation. As a matter of housekeeping, I also just want to remind people that this is being livecast on the web. So everything is obviously very much on the record. And when we have Q&A portions, please wait for the microphone, mindful of the fact that this is being livecast, and identify yourself as well when you do get the microphone. So I'm now going to pass this on to Alexandra. Can you guys hear me okay? Can you hear me okay? Well, thank you all for coming. And I agree with them this. This is not just informative, but very well written. Thank you. And I enjoyed reading it. I enjoyed writing it. How many people say that about their professor? Not many. So I thought I would start by pointing out Marco Rubio is 41 years old. He was elected to the U.S. Senate two years ago. And yet he's spoken about as a potential vice presidential candidate. And some people talk about him as potentially the first Cuban American U.S. president. So what is it about this guy that has so many people talking about him in those kind of laudatory terms? You know, I was very smart in that I worked on a book that required me to leave the winter of Washington and spend it in Florida. For men. And something that I noticed when I was talking with people in Florida about Marco Rubio was that they were entranced with the idea of Marco Rubio with the possibility that he represented. The fact that he could maybe be a Republican who could attract Latino votes was very seductive for a lot of people. And I think that he is arriving on the national scene at the perfect moment for that kind of a person. In 2004 you had something like 7 million Latinos voting. 9 million in 2008. And some people are projecting it will be 12 in this coming election. It's a good time to be a Hispanic politician on the rise and Marco Rubio has always had good timing. That's something you really highlighted in your book. Now part of the appeal is his family background and the fact that he's Cuban American. As you uncovered in your reporting his family's, how to put it, the way his family arrived to the United States and the way he characterized it was incomplete. There's been a lot of noise about this. This is what happened. When I started working on this book I first went and listened to a bunch of speeches that Marco Rubio gave. He talked very eloquently and very emotionally about his grandfather and about his parents. I sort of expressed this sentiment of the exile. People pushed off of the island of Cuba. And if anybody has spent time in Miami or anywhere in South Florida, you understand that that is a powerful, powerful emotion there. And it's an identity that really resonates with both voters and just people around the corner. And so I thought very innocently I'll look up some records about his family's migration thinking, oh geez, I bet they had to write an essay when they came in. I didn't know, right? Or maybe I'll learn a little something about their educational background. And I come across this document that says that they arrived in 1956. And I thought it must have been a typo. It had to be a typo. That's what I thought. And then I found another document. The first was for his father, the second for his mother. It said the same date and I was fighting myself really on that because I thought it had to have been a clerk who screwed up. They both went in the same day. But then I found another document for his brother. The exact same date. And then I realized that the story that he had been telling and the sort of narrative that he had been promoting while he was rising, it simply wasn't true. And so at that point we wrote an article for the Washington Post thinking that maybe somebody else would figure that out before the book was published. And the rest, as they say, was history. It ended up being a very controversial piece. Do you think he knew? He told Marco Rubio throughout his entire career. And he says that he was relying on family lore. It was interesting. Someone from the New York Times asked him, okay, so you were relying on family lore, who in your family told you that you came after 1959? And he said, oh, you don't understand. That's not the way that we talk about it in Cuban families. And I thought it was a very interesting response because there is this real sense in the South Florida Cuban American community that they have had an experience that is unique and that everyone might not understand. So I have to give him some leeway there. But I think that there's some evidence that would suggest that he knew. And that is because on occasion he gave other dates. Once he said 1958, once he said maybe 57 or 58, which tells me at a minimum there was a possibility, he knew there was a possibility they came before 1959. But much more often he's unequivocal. And the interesting thing about this, and I really looked and looked and looked, the one date that he never gave was 1956. The correct one. That's revealing, isn't it? You know, Rubio came on to the national scene in 2010 because of that Senate race where he defeated a very popular, at least for a while, sitting Florida governor to become US Senator at a very young age. And the narrative emerged from that that he was the Tea Party candidate. As you explain in the book, that really isn't an accurate characterization. I think that if you read articles about Marco Rubio in the 2010 campaign, you might have thought, and I describe it some in similar terms in the book, that he had emerged fully formed out of a town hall meeting. Remember all those town hall meetings, the Tea Party, a lot of anger about the healthcare bill. In reality, he is a politician who's been formed in the Establishment Republican Party Politics of Florida since a very early age. He worked in the Bob Dole campaign. He campaigned for Lincoln Diaz Ballard. He ran for the West Miami City Commission. He ran for the Florida Legislature. He ran for the House Speaker. He ran for the Senate. I really came to think of it like a staircase. The national myth that had evolved was that Marco Rubio was at the bottom of this staircase and he somehow leaped all the way up to the top floor. In reality, he took each of those steps quickly because he moves fast, but he touched each of the steps. As you described as Florida Speaker, he was in the thick of cutting deals, getting legislation through the House. As I read that, it made me think a little bit about his decision this spring to float his own version of the DREAM Act, which for those of you who didn't follow it, he proposed sort of a tweak to the more standard DREAM Act, where if you were an undocumented youth living in the United States, attended college, joined the military, you wouldn't be on a path to citizenship, but you could stay in the United States and work. And then President Obama essentially adopted that proposal wholesale via presidential fiat. So he had a huge influence on policy in that situation. There's no question he put the White House in a box, he pressured them, and ultimately only President Obama and his advisors would be able to tell you whether they came out with that plan because of Marco Rubio, which is pretty clear that that was part of the factor. But I think you can also look at it another way. Marco Rubio really loves football, he grew up, he was born just a couple of blocks from the Orange Bowl, he played football when he was in high school, and I talked to a bunch of his football coaches and I asked him, what kind of a ball player was he? And they said, well, he wasn't really fast, but he was quick. And that kind of threw me for a second because I was like, what's the difference between fast and quick? And they said, if you're quick, you get to the right place at the right time in a hurry. If you're fast, you can get from point A to point B fast, but there's a difference between being able to get to the right place at the right time and being able to run fast. And he's been quick throughout his political career, he was quick to recognize the Tea Party, he was quick to realize that he could become Speaker of the House. And with this alternative dream act, he floated the idea and then he sort of sat on it for a couple of months. And for once, he wasn't quick enough because Obama was able to take that by announcing a deportation policy that they were going to be changing the way that they handled deportations and he really seized that issue from Marco Rubio. The other thing that was really interesting about that for me, based on the research for the book was that we're talking about deportations here and when I was gathering all my information for this book, I was making all of these Freedom of Information Act requests and I came to learn that there was this obscure rule in the United States government that if your birthday was more than 100 years ago, all of your records were transferred over to the National Archives and they weren't kept by the Immigration Service. And the significance of that is that you can just get things from the National Archives without having to wait for months. And so his grandfather was born in 1899 in Cuba and I called up the National Archives in Kansas City and I got this researcher and she said, oh, I'm really busy. And I thought, oh my goodness, I'm going to be waiting for months and months for what I want to get here. And she said, yeah, before I could even say anything. She says, yeah, I don't think I'm going to be able to go over there to get that until at least after lunch. Yeah. Like, I guess I can wait. But what she brought from that archive in Kansas City that had never seen the light of day and ended up FedExing to me was really extraordinary. I got this sheaf of documents and there were all sorts of forms that had been filled out but there was also three sheets that had the, that were Xeroxes of a phonograph record. And I didn't think anything of it at the time but then I called her up the next day because I thought, I wonder if there is an actual phonograph record and she made the copy of it. And sure enough there was. And after a whole bunch of back and forth we were able to get that record transferred onto a disk so I could listen to it. And she sent it to me and when it arrived at my house and I popped it into the computer to listen what I heard was the voice of Marco Rubio's grandfather, Pedro Victor Garcia, who had come to the United States in 1956 and things hadn't worked out. See I mean that's the other thing about the great promise of America it doesn't work out for everyone. He couldn't find a job, he couldn't make a living and when Fidel Castro took over Cuba Pedro Victor thought Cuba might be a better place and he returned. He returned to the island of his birth and he stayed there for three years and when he figured out that Castro was going to be a Marxist Leninist which wasn't apparent to a lot of people in the beginning he tried to come back into the United States and he was detained at the Miami International Airport. And what I was listening to was a court proceeding to decide whether a grandfather who had seven daughters living in the United States his entire, all of his children and a wife living in the United States would be deported. And you know what at the end of the hearing the judge decided that he should be deported about fell off of my chair. I think that it was this voice from 50 years ago telling me and anybody else who listens to it to take another look at the way we handle people who want to come into this country. It was incredibly for me a very emotional experience to listen to it. Well I guess Rubio sort of has to walk a tightrope on this issue right because as you explain in your book the Republican base is, I mean there's a real anti, certainly undocumented immigration sentiment coursing through the party and yet if he is to appeal to Latino voters he can't just talk about programs like E-Verify he has to do something. This is my guess right. So how do you think he's going to finesse that going forward? You know I think he's going to be really interesting to watch for a lot of reasons but in particular to see how a modern Hispanic politician handles this because there clearly is a different expectation for a Hispanic politician in the United States than for a non-Hispanic politician. It's not that the public doesn't want to hear from non-Hispanic politicians about these issues but they really have an expectation, almost a Pavlovian expectation that Hispanic politicians will have a very open door policy on immigration and Rubio did not tow that line in the Florida Senate race. He said that he was going to be, he would have voted for the Arizona Papers Please law. He chose a very conservative website to make that announcement humanevents.com. He said that he was against in-state tuition. He, since he has come into the Senate, has cosponsored E-Verified. Very unpopular among Latino activists. But at the same time he's talking about changing the tone on immigration. He's making suggestions like an alternative dream act. So he's not just on a tightrope. He's on a tightrope 100 stories up. That's a good way to put it. Why don't we take some questions from the audience? If you'd like to raise your hand and we can get the mic around. Hi, my name is Sylvia Yusuf from the German Press Agency. Apart from the question on Latino vote, I mean on immigration, my feeling is because Marco Rubio, who's been talked about might be a vice president candidate. The way he has halted Obama's policy like stopping Roberta Jacobson's nomination to get certain things done in Latin America like policy regarding Cuba, Nicaragua and so on, I'm wondering if this is also, first, if he was picked up, if this would send a very specific signal to Latin America the way things might change regarding policy towards Latin America. And also if that could affect this panic vote because Latin America might get angry, upset, and send signals like warning against this candidacy. I don't think it would send much of a signal about change on Cuba policy in fact I think that it would send a signal that the party is interested in maintaining the policy of an embargo and restrictions on commerce between the two countries in a very sort of rigid way. At a time when different cities in Florida for instance want to get flights from their city to Havana because you can fly from Miami to Havana but it's not as easy to fly from Tampa to Havana and Rubio has been opposed to those flights from Tampa so I think it would actually send a signal of much more of a maintenance of a status quo. My name is Martin Klinkst of the National German Weekly Newspaper, alongside I have a short question. How do you see his chances of becoming a VP and does his Cuba story is a major obstacle maybe to his aspirations? I think anybody who tries to predict who's going to be the vice president is on a fool's errand because my sense is that the Romney campaign may not have even decided but he clearly has some major assets not just his story of his family coming to the United States which essentially despite the fact that we've shown that his family didn't come after Castro he's done a pretty good job of rehabilitating himself on that particular question by saying that he can still represent himself as an exile. I mean that has taken hold with a lot of people this notion that his family was prevented from returning so they are legitimately exiles but I think there are other assets that he brings everybody talks about him as a Latino candidate but he's very popular with evangelicals and religion is a big part of his public profile he's a Catholic but he also attends a Protestant evangelical church so his appeal extends beyond that and then the third thing that really jumps out is that he's got energy and dynamism and X factor and mojo and all of those things can be nice he also has liabilities though we haven't even talked about a few of the things like he had a credit card that was issued to him by the Republican Party of Florida that he used for thousands and thousands of dollars of personal expenses I mean everything from buying wine at a wine shop to buy his house to movie tickets, salon things you know paid all of that stuff back but it undercut this notion that he wanted to promote that he was very much a small government responsible spending kind of guy finish swallowing my sandwich here Charlie Erickson with Hispanic link good to see you we've spoken to you over the phone I'd like to first of all what has your access been to Rubio over the time that you started your biography and did it change over time when you started to uncover some of his background that would actually run in conflict with what the message he was sending out and a little bit about your own background and when you joined the post because I remember when you were just sort of stringing for him way back when you guys took him way back well I spoke with Senator Rubio when we did the piece in the post about his family background in his office prior to that he had told me that he was interested in selling his own autobiography and that he wasn't going to cooperate with me and so that was probably one of the reasons why I was dove so deeply into the documents but fortunately I was able to talk with dozens and dozens and dozens of people who know him well and I think really was able to in some respects by having one step back get an even better sense of him and then as for my own background I've been at the post for almost 12 years now I was Mexico City Bureau Chief I was Bureau Chief in Miami and now I write for the style section but I primarily write about politics, foreign affairs, profiles of all sorts of different people and before that I worked for the Times Piquin in New Orleans which was a place that I had tears in my eyes tears in my eyes when I left tears in my eyes about now as they're going through their troubles I was never a stringer for the post but I may have behaved like one and involvement in the early stages and how that evolved it's still not an official biography am I correct on that? yeah it's an unauthorized biography done as a work of journalism built on deep research of the public record things that hadn't been in the public record and interviews with a whole bunch of people no I can say it's a very even handed account I wanted it to be that way you accomplished you're Cuban American right? no I was born in Spain and grew up in California so thank you I think we're going to have to move on to the next part of the program but thank you for your terrific comments thank you thank you Alexandra thank you Manuel the book is for sale and I'm sure Manuel will be more than happy to sign a copy I think that was a really good way to start the proceedings today to take a look at this very interesting modern Hispanic politician as Manuel put it a lot of people have drawn comparisons between Senator Rubio and Barack Obama and I think I would encourage you to read the book and the only difference I guess is if you are David Moranis to Manuel Rubio, to Marco Rubio a couple of differences, the two books came out on the same day as opposed to David Moranis writing his biography of Barack Obama many years after the autobiography and I think Moranis was a slower writer than you were yes yes so from that opening we're now going to step back and take a broader look at the subject and for that we're going to have Roberto Surro come up and talk to us about the broader subject of the Latino vote and why it matters I think a lot of us in the room have learned I was going to say most of what we know but that might be an overstatement but in my case it might be true most of what we know on this subject thanks to Roberto's work throughout the years he was one of the founders and then the first director of the Pew Hispanic Center earlier in the last decade and he currently is a professor in the Annenberg School at USC and at the School of Policy Planning and Development out there he's the director of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute Roberto prior to his work in the world of Wonkery was also a journalist and a very accomplished one at the New York Times and the Washington Post among other places I was sort of chuckling to myself when I read that he wrote a book in 1996 called Watching America's Door The Immigration Backlash and the New Policy Debate and I thought jeez this backlash is very long running if we were writing about it in 96 and more recently he also wrote Watching Us Latino Lives in a Changing America so Roberto the podium is yours, thank you thank you and that's for inviting me here and all of you for joining us that was the 1996 backlash was another there have been at least two maybe three since then it's the subject that keeps on going so my assignment here was to give start out with kind of a primer of the Latino vote a primer plus I think is the way to Marjorie Covey put it so we're switching from the anecdotal and the personal of the story of one politician to a few numbers here and bear with me to try and give a sense of what we know about the Latino vote and why it matters and where so the reason why we care about it is growth in numbers the startling very fast very rapid growth of the Latino population starting with as the current wave of migration got going in the 1970s and the way it's projected to grow out through the rest of the century that translates into a growing share of the population somewhere over 15 percent now based depending on whose projections you believe towards a quarter of the population at mid-century somewhere in that regard this is the basic gut reason why people care about the Latino vote just simple growth in numbers growth at a time that the rest of the population isn't growing very quickly at a time when the non-white population in particular is basically stagnant in terms of its size as is the African-American population beyond the numbers these this change in population has brought about a change in the character of the country in terms of its racial makeup this graph shows you simply the percent of the population that is classified as non-Hispanic white in different age cohorts and if you look at the older population people 65 and above that was a country that was 80 percent white you go down in age to the population that's now less than five years old and you're talking about a country that's about half white this is a fundamental dramatic extraordinary change in the nature of our society and to my mind is as important as those numbers in explaining why the Latino vote matters to a certain extent the Latino population is viewed as the vehicle for this change a great deal of agency is ascribed to the Hispanic population in terms of bringing about this change there's a much longer conversation about why this happened what the factors involved were in terms of attracting immigrant workers, changes in fertility all kinds of different factors but there's an enormous protagonist that's ascribed to Hispanics as being the population that brought about this fundamental change in the country there is however a very profound disjuncture between this reality and what happens at the voting booth because you can see the very the very deep change happens among young people if you look at a school yard it's a very different America than if you look at a workplace or a retirement home but school children don't vote they only depend on voters so you have to ask how that population growth happened what were the engines of it and there are basically two ways populations grow in my birth if you have a lot of babies you have more babies than other segments of the population that segment of the population grows faster that's what happened among Hispanics particularly mothers who were born outside the United States immigrant mothers have had fertility rates significantly higher than that of native born whether they be Latino or white and even native born Latino women have had fertility rates than white women but a child takes 18 years to become a voter there's no way around that it's simply it's a simple chronological process that 50% America of under 5 years old will become the electorate sometime 15, 20, 25 years from now the America that votes is quite different additionally the other mechanism for growth one that was very important to the Hispanic population at the early stages of its growth is immigration and as we all know a large share of Hispanic immigrants have come here without authorization and as a result aren't eligible for citizenship and so they're not voters now they won't be voters unless there's some substantial change in the law so this produces a very peculiar kind of math in terms of the how you get from population to electorate the fact of the matter is that almost 60% of all Latinos 58% in 2010 aren't eligible to vote because they're too young that's about something more than a third of the total population or they're not citizens which is about another quarter of the population they're simply on election day they have no role to play they have no voice in our civic affairs you compare that to other racial segments of the population just to get a sense of it 42, 43% of the Hispanic population is eligible to vote compared to 77, 78% of the white population 67% of the African American population that has a larger share of young people and there is a proportion of immigrants and even quite smaller than the Asian population in part because the growth has been driven so much by births so we'll do the math you start out with 50 million people you subtract the under 18's you get to 33 million adults subtract the non-citizens you get to 21 million voters you've taken out a whole lot of people from that initial impression the impression of size and growth and change in the country to actual political muscle and then look at registration these are 2010 numbers you get substantial under activity and in voting as well so you go from 50 million people to 7 million voters in the 2010 election even if you figure in a presidential election you'll get substantially more you're still going to go from 1 million to maybe 12 million voters 11 million voters it's a very wicked bit of math in terms of going from population to voting power beyond that there's geography where do these voters sit they're highly concentrated in a few places as you can see about 54% of all Latino voters are in three states none of which matters in a presidential election they're all already decided if you throw in Illinois Massachusetts the other states with substantial Hispanic populations that are already basically decided you get up to about 60-65% depending on how you count it of a Hispanic electorate this is of those 21 million who can vote who are sitting somewhere that doesn't really matter if you look at look at battleground states so this is share of total turnout in 2008 calculations by Nate Silver at 535 538 dot com Florida obviously matters a lot 15% of the total vote in 2008 was Latino Florida is also totally so generous why we should have a discussion about you can't talk about a Hispanic vote the first piece of evidence in that is Florida which is a complete outlier in every way in terms of its politics but especially in terms of its Hispanic politics and not just because of the old Cuban Republican vote but because of new Puerto Rican voters new naturalized Latin South American voters a whole hodgepodge of voters in central Florida a population that doesn't look like a Latino population anywhere else in the country a mix of Puerto Ricans off the island Puerto Ricans who've come from New York and people who've come from Latin America beyond that you get into some of the states where you've got substantial representation that might whether that are currently on the map in this case really Colorado and Nevada are the only two states with more than 10% Hispanic voters that are currently considered battleground states the other element of the Hispanic vote that you've got to consider particularly when you're looking at the Mexican American vote in the inner mountain west is that it operates in a very narrow partisan band George Bush did very well in 2004 getting 40% maybe 42% of the Hispanic vote nationally Bob Dole did very poorly getting 35% maybe 33% a Democrat that gets 60% is considered to be just basically hanging on 65% is considered doing well you're talking about a very narrow margin of difference they're very consistent in terms of the partisan split so you're talking in these states in Colorado and Nevada very narrow potential differences that could if you in a election decided by a whisker you're talking about whether a 4%, 5% shift in the Latino vote in Colorado will produce a 0.2%, 0.3% difference in the total vote well that might actually make a difference and the way the maps are playing out it could make a difference meanwhile the big battlegrounds the places where the elections are really going to be decided Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin there's not a Latino vote to speak of so you end up in this election in my mind very nearly arguing this out whether the Latino vote could shift the presidential election in relatively few places I mean you could be overly small about it and talk about certain areas of Las Vegas and the Denver metropolitan areas where a couple of 100,000 Latino voters going one way or another a split of 70, 30 instead of 60, 40 ends up making a difference that becomes a very difficult way to run a large scale political mobilization I'm going to leave I mean I've been told my time is up so I'm just going to point very quickly to the other reason we care which is looking to the future there's population as we saw that at the beginning and that 50% America is very heavily Latino you've got and they're all citizens under 18 years old you don't get a lot of immigrants about 92% of them are eligible voters of the 17 million Latinos under 18 years old and they end up being a very significant share of that electorate if you so look at 15 to 19 year olds the oncoming voters in the next two cycles you've got about 6.7 million Latinos out of 22 million total that means about 30% almost 1 out of every 3 voters who's aging into the electorate in the future will be a Latino and that's in a very large sense what I conclude with is the discussion of Latino voters is a discussion about the future of politics not about this cycle and where this cycle could have a big difference is it how it casts trajectories looking to the future and what it does to these people to the young people who are watching this election and we're going to be coming on stream in very large numbers in the next couple of presidential cycles and could have a huge impact going forward thank you and we'll talk about this more thanks this was actually even more fascinating than I thought it was going to be and I had very high expectations and rest assured that we'll be able to flesh some of that out in the conversation that's going to happen in a few minutes so apologies that we didn't have Q&A but we'll get to that I now want to turn the podium over to another recovering journalist there are many of us in the room today Tamar Jacoby one of the great privileges of working here at New America and coordinating our fellows program is that I get to collaborate with people like Tamar and learn from people like Tamar as Tamar is one of our short fellows here at New America in addition to being the president and CEO of Immigration Works USA which is a national federation of small business owners working to advance immigration reform Tamar as I said is also a recovering journalist she was the working with Bob Semple back in the day and has also been a senior writer and justice editor for Newsweek she's the author of the very highly regarded book Someone Else's House America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration which was a book in the 90s about race relations Tamar the podium is yours thank you Andres and thank you all for being here this event is sort of typical of why it's so much fun to be here at New America it's sort of New America at its best let me find space for this pulling together this focused in depth book on this one interesting Latino then this big picture wide lens 30,000 feet look at Latino voters and now what I'm going to do is try to look ahead at the potential impact of the Latino vote if we think the Latino vote is going to be significant Roberto raised a lot of questions about that but if we think the Latino is going to be significant vote if that whisker can really make a difference and wag the dog if Latinos decide you know one state Florida if Latinos potentially decide the election how's that going to play out in terms of policy what effect will it will that be the straw basically that breaks the log jam excuse me for the mix metaphor but the straw that breaks the log jam on immigration reform will that be the key that unlocks the lock and allows Congress to finally get to this issue that it's been trying failing putting off trying failing you know for a dozen years now and obviously there's some people that hope so right I mean there's a whole school of thought out there well I mean I hope so who anticipate a big Latino vote that will lead to a big Obama victory I won't join that but and that in a second term Obama will finally come through and deliver on his promises and basically presto change Joe in early 2013 will have comprehensive immigration reform so what I want to do in my sort of few minutes is look a little more closely at those hopes are Latinos the keys to immigration reform if Obama wins are we going to see a big movement in early 2013 and my short answer just to kind of sum up is that yes I think Latino vote will be important maybe even a game changer but it's not going to be that simple or automatic right because immigration reform still has to go through congress and no matter what happens in November probably Republicans are going to control one house of congress and here's where I'm going to be controversial making immigration an election issue could potentially backfire right because making it a political wedge issue could potentially make it harder to get to a solution next year so why do I say that well let me back up and unpack some of those assumptions so you know the first thing some of this is kind of obvious can't do immigration reform without Republicans right both parties are split Democrats have labor Democrats and pro immigration Democrats even when the dream act comes up last time five Democratic senators don't vote for it can't do immigration with Democrats alone even if they control both houses of congress Republicans are also split right we have sort of pro business kind of a better word so the trick of immigration reform is putting together a package that appeals to enough people from both parties to get across the finish line and that's why it's been so hard to do even at times when Democrats controlled the presidency in both houses obvious but still really important even when the Republican president was strongly for immigration reform and made it safe for a lot of Republicans to do it we couldn't get there right and in the five years since then let's be honest you know I'm a Republican right so let's be honest in the five years since then it's gotten a lot harder for Republicans to be with us on immigration reform in 06 22 Republicans voted for reform in the Senate just a year later only 12 Republicans voted for immigration reform in the Senate when the dream act last came up in the Senate in 2010 only three Republicans voted for it so 22-12-3 and you know I think we all know what's going on there right both parties have gotten more polarized and the wings have gotten had more control there isn't a Republican president to make it safe the Tea Party obviously has been a huge factor you know the ousting of Republicans of incumbents scared a lot of members on both parties oh wow I'm already in five minutes wow wow wow well much harder for ours to do it we know that it's gotten harder for ours to do it the point is you know Alexander talked about anti-immigrant sentiment coursing through the Republican base that's not exactly true it's 20% of the general public but that is a big part of the general proportion of the Republican base it's not all Republicans but there's this faction that makes it hard for Republicans so that's the test for Latino voters that's the challenge can they overcome that difficulty for Republicans and that's a big challenge because politicians don't like to lose elections Lindsey Graham explained what immigration meant for Republicans he said it's a jobs issue jobs for politicians so the other thing that's kind of gotten the other thing that's changed in the last five years and here I kind of fault both parties is it's not just that the base has come up and gotten into Republicans' face and made it harder for them to do it but I would argue that the issue has become polarized and partisan driven by partisanship in a way that makes it harder for Republicans to do it and talking about LBJ he used to ask his fellow lawmakers do you want a bill or an issue and a bill meant something that they were working together to solve where both parties could give and take where you could get some compromise where both parties were willing to go back to their base and say I didn't get everything an issue was a wedge issue where you go back to your base and you say I'm an ID log and I stood strong and I tried everything I could try and I didn't get it now vote for me because it was an issue they were working on it Ted Kennedy and President Bush were working on it now it's a wedge issue and that makes it harder and harder for Republicans to go there even Democrats own the issue now so even Republicans like Lindsay Graham who want to vote with us can't go there because you're helping the other team it also doesn't help that when Republicans like Marco Rubio come up with a compromise and they say well I can't do your whole dream act but I'll meet you in the middle on a modified dream act and it's basically written off and ridiculed and driven out of town and people even misrepresent the proposal Democrats not only did Obama not call him but people misrepresented the proposal and you know Cornyn sort of summed this up last month when Obama issued his order on the dream kids he said when you go around us and you blame us for not participating instead of coming to us and making a deal you poison the well and you make it harder to get to a deal when we have a chance to get to a deal on the websites here yes it's gotten much harder for ours and I wish ours had more backbone and more courage and we're willing to do it but I also think there's a politicizing of the issue that's making it very hard for everybody to get to and you know wedge issues do sometimes get converted back into real issues it didn't happen on abortion it didn't happen on gun control but it has kind of happened on gay marriage so you know there is some hope that the toothpaste of wedge issues is a problem and even a strong Latino vote you know it's still hard so I guess we're sort of coming to the end so maybe I'll kind of skip I have two minutes left so what is the likelihood that you know they're gonna get to this in early 2013 well you know there's some things going strongly for us right if Latinos do come out strong if they really do decide one state or decide the election that's a big powerful constituency for reform and you know even if we're put we haven't had that really up to now we haven't had a powerful constituency for reform we've had a powerful constituency against where we haven't had a powerful constituency for so that's a very good thing we're also seeing a very good sign I believe there's been kind of a breakthrough in the last year or so from in the old days we used to say comprehensive immigration reform or nothing and the idea was you kind of had to pass the whole big package with all its elements and all its Christmas tree ornaments and the whole big thing or you couldn't do anything for 60 reasons and it's sort of right you do need all those pieces it was also partly for political reasons right how do we get to 60 votes we don't have kind of everybody who has a stake in this behind it people who want enforcement the people who want high skilled workers the people who want legalization the problem is betting on that whole enchilada didn't work like we never got to 60 we never got over the finish line so there's kind of a new thinking afoot maybe we go incrementally maybe we do some small pieces of this first the table and you know I think the president going around on dream maybe is a sign of that we've seen a lot of Rs Rubio coming out with the dream proposals kind of a sign of that that could be a good sign for early 2013 we don't have to get everything maybe we could go by little step by little step the other good thing we're seeing and I'll just say it really quickly is the Obama dream order was very interesting how little pushback there was on the Obama dream order like no big republicans came out and denounced it no mainstream really republicans nobody denounced the way he did it nobody denounced the substance polls showed public four two to one even some republicans came out and said it was a good idea some reporters even went to obama rallies and people at the rallies said well I don't like the way he did it but of course we're not going to deport all these people this only makes sense so you know in a way what could have been really controversial kind of brought out yawns and even more interesting galloped at some polling recently immigration is a major issue that's compared to 19% in 2006 so it's a much less intense smoke coming out of your ear issue for voters so those three things to me are encouraging the big question mark for me is how is it going to play out in the campaign and you know obviously we're going to see a lot of fighting over it in the campaign the Obama order makes it an issue and gives a club to republicans to hit republicans with which is where it matters but if you go too far with that you have the chance that you make the compromise that you need to do in 2013 impossible right so you know unless latinos can overwhelm us with the power of their vote and just make it impossible for ours to say no you know which could happen but I'm sort of dubious about that I hope we can see them kind of controlling the jockeying you know resisting the pressure to get the guy in the box to be too aggressive and make it too much of an issue because I really do think that could make it harder to get to a compromise in 2013 so now we're going to thank you tamora you actually promised you weren't going to be controversial what happened I'm just kidding I love that expression the toothpaste of wedge issues I think there's a talk show in your future with that name on it we're now going to segue into a general conversation with the folks with Roberto Manuel Tamar and I also want to introduce Michelle Salcedo who is going to do us the favor of moderating this discussion Michelle is the president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists a group that as many of you probably know has done a fantastic job at nurturing a couple of generations of very talented latino journalists and being a great organization on that behalf she is unlike those of us who are recovering journalists, still a practicing journalist, she is she's an editor at the Washington Bureau here of the Associated Press where she edits on the national general news desk and does politics as well she also has a great deal of experience covering Latin America I just learned today she's the author of a book on planning the quinceañera, the essential guide to playing the perfect sweet 15 celebration so she is a person who covers a lot of ground and thank you Michelle for moderating today can everyone hear me thank you Manuel for inviting me here today and I want to thank the panelists for giving us such terrific media meaty information to move forward I want to start with Tamar and I want to ask you why you think the Latino vote in impelling immigration reform is more important than the business community why do you think that that has more traction well that's a really good question since what I do for a living is try to organize the business community to be at the out front the business community operates in a slightly different way there's one thing then voters voters go in the street and held rallies voters vote at the voting booth business works behind the scenes so it plays a kind of a different role in politics for that reason it's also true that immigration while an important reason to business is only number the number one issue for a very small number of businesses so you know you're going to see dairy farmers and and nursery owners and agricultural employers who grow like vegetables and tomatoes vegetables and fruits and perishable crops they're very concerned about immigration restaurant owners and hotel owners to a degree but you're not going and then you're going to see the high tech companies like Intel and Microsoft they care about immigration they really really really care about immigration but most of the businesses in the middle don't care like your bank doesn't care you know big manufacturers don't care so you have only a certain kind of businesses some of them and and they're not always united on the same page and it's just it doesn't you know they're important important part of the puzzle but I think the Latino vote will have a kind of a well I think you need both let's maybe just put it that way I was going to say isn't this really an isn't this really a leadership issue for especially some of the high tech the skilled visas which are extremely limited and we've we've actually heard people come out more and more and say that we really need this is why we need comprehensive reform that we tend to focus on illegal immigration but in fact it we really need to take a much larger but see this is one of the interesting things like Romney gave his big speech recently two weeks ago at Nileo right the Latino National Association Latino elected officials and he actually had a great program for all the parts of immigration reform except the legalization piece like he had visas for the high skilled he had visas for the ag workers he had family reunification he had all the elements in only only one out of ten stories even mentioned that stuff most of the stories where he's not coming through on the legalization and I mean this is kind of what I mean about to get there we're going to have to be able to compromise do some of those pieces that we need as a country in addition to the legalization maybe first people are going to have to give ours some credit when they come out in that direction so so the Latino vote is really let's accept the premise that the Latino vote is really going to be the immigration to ultimately get immigration reform but what we are seeing is a drop in the number of of people who are registered even from 2010 to what's projected for 2012 in the Latino community we've got voter ID laws that are becoming more popular especially in some of the states that have seen the greatest growth of the Latino population so my question for you Roberto is how does that play out how does that balance counterbalance of an extraordinarily charged Republican white base versus a shrinking Latino electorate play out I mean I'm not sure I accept all the promises there it may whether it shrinks or doesn't grow as much as you would expect it to have as is still to be seen it's not going to be huge and it's not I think as I try to show the numbers aren't in places that will be decisive the other element of this I think in terms of the way I think about the Latino vote Latino voters and the immigration issue is that what we've seen in the past is Mexican-American voters to be specific have mobilized negatively on this issue what I mean by that is when there have been situations in which either the rhetoric or the reality of politics has been perceived as either a threat or a denigration of that community as a whole we've seen mobilizations against the source of that denigration so for example in the earlier backlash that I wrote a book about that started in California in the mid-1990s with Prop 187 Governor Pete Wilson very harsh campaign demonizing undocumented immigrants demonizing people from Mexico democratic representations of Mexico as a threat the border as a threat in California produced a mobilization of Latino voters which turned California democratic for a generation and it is still the memory of that has shifted the partisan attitudes in California still we saw a very powerful negative mobilization at the grassroots level in Latino communities in 2006 against a bill enacted in the House of Representatives actually the next backlash the backlash of the mid-2000s with the so-called Sensenbrenner bill named after the then chairman of the Judiciary Committee a Republican House passed an extraordinarily punitive bill on illegal immigration and that produced a negative mobilization produced the largest single public series of public demonstrations in American history in the spring of 2006 more people on the street on one issue than has ever happened before since there was no affirmative agenda there there was no leadership there was no structure and so you had this extraordinary mobilization over the course of about eight weeks after the Sensenbrenner bill mobilized the Democrats particularly in the Senate to stop it followed afterwards but it wasn't an affirmative mobilization behind a set of positions so the idea that you can nobody yet no political leader no set of organizations has yet found a way to mobilize voters on behalf of an immigration agenda what has happened successfully is the opposite that demonization of immigrants particularly immigrants from Mexico in the largest segment of Latino electorate that segment of Mexican origins has mobilized negatively against the people seen demonizing it happened in Nevada in 2010 in the Senate race it happened in California in the Governor's race in 2010 I mean you see it over and over again Republicans seem a little bit as they would say in Spanish Puerto Rico about this because it's like this is the one thing you know for sure about the Latino electorate that you get to a tipping point and it's hard to tell when you have pushed hard enough on this issue and when you have pushed hard enough people go basta and you end up with a disproportionate negative reaction that doesn't get you an immigration bill I mean that does not get you anything other than the defeat sometimes of of politicians who take highly rhetorical stands on this issue what you're saying is it's made to be a wedge issue it's like it's it isn't just the polls have exploited it it's almost the other part of it's important nobody has actually tried prominently to mobilize some large segment of the Latino population on behalf of an immigration agenda an evision did it some you know the game with Latinos to move a couple of percentage points it's not about capturing all the Latinos it's about close races there are two percentage points and that being the tipping isn't it? it's the range the national numbers which give you a proxy of a way of thinking about this as I said for a Republican to hit 40% was originally you know the Carl Rowe vision laid out in great detail and really quite brilliantly a permanent Republican majority his design laid out in the late 1990's and then perfected between the 2000 and 2004 elections was based on the idea that Republican nationally had hit 40% consistently don't fall below 40% in terms of the total Latino vote and start edging towards 45% whenever you can if a Republican could hit 45% in the middle of this decade the argument was you would hold Texas forever and by the end of this decade start turning California purple and you would change the map fundamentally if a Republican knew it up never in that scenario was Rowe projecting an actual full win of getting over 50% the idea was you reduce the Democratic advantage closer and closer to par but that was also with a candidate specifically George W. Bush who embraced comprehensive immigration reform which included paths to citizenship he didn't in the 2004 election but you know he backed his temporary workers program going into the 2004 election the only thing I would say is I get your negative it's been easier to mobilize against a negative characterization it doesn't show in the way many of them are campaigning but Republicans are paying attention to this Latino vote I mean I don't think it's going to push them to comprehensive immigration reform anytime soon I think they're caught between a rock and a hard place of that element of the base that's really against and wanting to appeal to Latino votes but even without somebody going out and campaigning on exactly here's how I'm going to fix the problem Republicans are worried about this they've seen those graphs and they don't know what to do about it they're kind of like deers in the headlights how do I deal with this complexity I'm facing I'd be the first to say Romney's not doing very well but it's real I mean it is again I don't think it's going to be the only factor I don't necessarily think it's going to get us there in 2013 but I think it is going to have an effect even though the mobilization has been mostly negative but at the same time you've had during the primary you had some really strident rhetoric during the debates on immigration and specifically on Latino immigration is there, do we have a hangover from that? how is that going to play out? I think we do well that's the Republican you know that's where they're caught between the two one car is pulling the body in one direction and the other car is pulling the body in the opposite direction and down Bella the rhetoric remains quite harsh right particularly in the year Mountain West we're really where maybe the only place any of this matters there's been some speculation too that Mitt Romney has basically decided he's not going after the Latino vote at all but he's going to focus on energizing the base making sure that they're fired up making sure that the anti-Obama vote is out there in a major way and ride that into the White House is that viable? it's not a mystery how you boost your share of the Latino vote I mean there's a very good playbook that was really originated by Roeve and then executed even better and perfected by the Clinton primary campaign in 2008 and it's not about issues particularly it's not about high-gloss politics it's about surrogates it's about working connections it's about a ground game all of this has been laid out working pastors and religious leaders it's all style politics and Obama is doing it better spending a lot more money on it what he did on deportation took a lot of the initiative away too what did he do on deportation? what Obama did on should we turn to that? yes let's do you seem eager to I seem eager to it's bizarre to me that Obama gets credit for that move from immigration advocates it is bizarre given what he where the dreamers fit in the larger strategy of immigration and what he did so let's go back just a second remember the idea of the dreamers ten years or more in terms of large immigration strategy was you take the most worthy segment of the unauthorized population these little saints who are brought here against their will that are guiltless, that are pure that they're going to college they're fighting in the military, they're killing bad guys they're perfect, they're lovable they've never done anything bad to anybody and you get them a privilege and you break the impasse by taking the most worthy segment of this population and you start with them and that was the logic they were the opening wedge they were going to break the log jam this has been the logic going back since 2001 the other piece of it was agricultural workers you take the most needed people, the one that have a very clear business lobby behind them and the original idea was to pair these two you take the innocence and the needed and you get them benefits and then it's easier to get everybody else benefits so the logic politically was you start with the most worthy and you negotiate down they've got to get the best benefit you get them citizenship, you say these are innocents, they're never going home they don't speak Spanish, they've lived here their entire life they're productive citizens make them citizens and then you negotiate down to their parents, to the other workers to people whatever what happened just now was they got nothing they got a two year work permit and a deferral of deportation if you negotiate down from that what is there? if that's what you give dreamers what do you give ordinary people who are unauthorized a one year work permit politically you can't negotiate up from that you're looking at it from a policy perspective I'm talking about it from a political perspective and political perspective is the optics of it and the optics are that Obama's helping Latinos and helping Dream and I guess the other question is also this president has deported more people than the entire Bush administration so how does that all fit in together with this my favorite factoid about Obama and immigration and one that is very vivid in immigrant communities is since his inauguration one of every 10 Mexicans in the United States has been deported one of every 10 since he took the oath but to the problem is already in that is a very do you watch do you watch Jorge Ramos you know what you did he give to the Dream Act over three years every night relentless stories about families broken up about children coming home to an empty house about families down in Mexico trying to figure out what they're going to do with their lives I mean the Dream Act did not begin to challenge the optics that facts have created in that population now that population doesn't include all that many voters but they influence Latino voters really I think the number of the question because you're getting to the for one of the better word the African American syndrome where one party takes you for granted and the other party ignores you and so Obama deports however many millions of people, a million people there's no one to call him on it I just can't call him on it Obama does a small thing that doesn't really solve the problem there's nobody to call him on it and the problem is that it's become a wedge issue it's become about partisanship and not about solving the problem and if Latino voters and Latino pundits and Latino voices could really stand in the middle and say we're not going to be taken for granted you know we really want some real fixes out of you and we're not giving with one hand but departing one and ten with the other is not good enough and meanwhile to the other guys you know you've got to cough up we're not going to wait forever because it's not rational he gets called on it if he loses Nevada and Colorado by a combined total of 150,000 votes that will be the price he pays for this policy but does it drive us forward? I think the White House and the Obama campaign are already aware of this possibility because there are already whispers going around that the Latinos are going to stay home worse and already drive down a relatively low they need a big turnout in order for Obama to win if they stay home as a result of the deportations it's a losing proposition which is why I think that the executive order was signed I want to but this is also a good segue to Manuel and Rubio's immigrant the story of Rubio's family and the way they immigrated I think touches on two issues that we don't hear really hear much about one is that the United States ties with Cuba, with Mexico especially are very close and have been over centuries we don't really recognize that and we don't really recognize what that relationship has done in the United States for one thing but the other thing is the way his grandparents immigrated and their ultimate detention going back and forth isn't that really kind of the story of millions of families here regardless of ethnicity so why isn't he coming forward more and saying you know what I understand what the Republican base is saying but the fact of the matter is this is my history and it's the history of millions of people here not just Latinos wouldn't that make him a better leader well that was always one of the mysteries to me when I was untangling about the dates in reality his family's story has a much broader appeal but as a young politician coming up in South Florida having a broad appeal isn't what you are looking to do what you're looking to do is have a narrow appeal can you change that narrative does he have the opportunity to do that now that you've brought it to light well I think it becomes harder for him because of this complicating factor in telling and the reality and there's another problem for him too in that you know there's some tape out there of him saying that well I don't have anything against immigrants but my parents are exiles and when you when you start to categorize people that you're trying to appeal to and you place yourself in a category that is higher or more distinctive than the rest it really puts you in a corner makes it hard but for a variety of reasons that is a winning strategy in South Florida because for many many years if you weren't an exile you might draw some other kind of attention from the larger community I think we have to give Rubio Ho's do on what he did on immigration like you know for five or six years he was a Republican in Washington who would talk about authorizing any unauthorized immigrants I mean it was completely taboo and you know he basically came out and he was incredibly eloquent I mean I think the line there's not a Latino in America who doesn't love someone who's caught up in the broken immigration system I mean that's like really using that's what the bully pulpit is made for lines like that but then you know the courage for legalization was a young Republican rising star hitching his wagon to the issue of legalization I mean that was a big gutsy step and I think he was in a perfect world and we all live in a non-political world but in a perfect world the Democrats would have reached out to him and say let's make a deal and instead they ignored him and people misrepresented what his deal was and then Obama stole it and did it unilaterally so let's give Rubio a little credit you know that's that's how we're going to get to yes but the other thing that happened there was actually more generous because you know it was I mean it really did yeah it didn't have citizenship but it had the promise of permanence and the possibility of citizenship you know the eventual but I mean he intellectually took this really important step of saying we can think about legalization without citizenship let's at least talk about it about how you can construct legalization programs don't necessarily lead to citizenship and you know that's this has been this stopping point since 2006 and it's it's something that's it'll never we know that there's almost no plausible scenario in which a legalization program that carries a very large scale path to citizenship is going to pass for I mean starting with the reason that you know you've got 10 or 11 million people of whom you could predict if they become citizens somewhere between you know somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of them are going to vote Democratic I mean you know who in their right mind would vote for that I mean it's political suicide for the Republicans to start out with I mean leaving aside everything else but Rubio took that step and nobody what was remarkable was that nobody gave him credit for at least opening the discussion and saying let's consider a whole other range of alternatives and not only that the Speaker of the House John Boehner said that it was a no starter that he was never going to bring whatever this year whenever Rubio wrote it and introduced it even if it passed the Senate it was not going to make the full house and I completely agree that as far as matters of tone his impact has been huge there's no question about that but I was curious about what your reaction was to his announcement after Obama's deportation decision that when Rubio said well now I'm not going to introduce mine look they're not going to vote on it before I mean the more play it gets between now and November the less likely they're going to get to a deal I think Rubio is serious about getting to a deal on this and the answer is let's keep it out of the political football realm and let's talk about it in January so let me channel Marco a little bit more for us why did you I mean he may have been quick to the wrong may have been quick to the wrong place all together on this this spring what were the calculations involved in saying I'm going to stick my neck out I mean if you're campaigning for the VP slot I mean it's not the most common thing to do is attract attention to yourself on a controversial issue well I mean it was drawing attention to his possibly biggest asset which is that he could potentially bring in some Latinos into that tent so I didn't see that there was this huge risk involved there because he was already a hero with the Republicans so this was a way of sort of bringing up his potential gigantic plus which is that some people who may not have been with the Republicans might have come over and you saw in the front page of the Washington Post you had people who were Latino activists saying well you know they won't even meet with us at the White House because we're not legal I mean that was on the front page of the post yet that same day we were able to meet with Marco Rubio that was important I think you know all the other voters are looking at Washington saying they can't tie their shoes they can't come together to do anything and here was a guy saying I can crack the latest issues there is that has a lot of appeal but at the same time we kept hearing about it you know Marco Rubio is going to do this and he's going to introduce his own version of the Dream Act and it's coming and he hasn't written it yet but it's coming and it's coming and it's coming and the next thing you know I mean we heard that for months so what happened there I think it was hard to pull together the support he needed I think it was hard to pull together the support he needed it didn't work to come out and have it be shot down by both sides for it to work and that took time but isn't that something you do behind the scenes instead of just kind of saying I'm going to do this and then you try to gather support here I think the idea is you build some momentum and then you get some support and then you build some momentum and then you get some support and you just didn't quite pull it off it was a rookie move as it turned out it would have been brilliant if it were he talked before he went public before he was the right time he blew up and it was really somebody not schooled in Washington fairly or unfairly it has allowed people who are critics of his to say he never intended to do it in the first place this was just about playing election year politics I think it was very serious about doing it and it was hard to line up the support that you needed to come at in a way that meant something and what was real intentions are of course some more bourbon before you talk but what his real intentions were and what the perception of his intentions were are two different things I still give him credit he introduced a really important policy idea he had the guts to do it he talks eloquently about it it was good enough idea that the president stole it and used it for himself I think gets points walk points let's talk a little bit about the impact of the voter ID laws some of the civic engagement groups even the Hispanic chamber has been registering people to vote some of the stories that I've seen the numbers are not nearly and especially Nevada are nearly not what they were to the point where the Hispanic institute which was registering people two years ago is sitting the selection out completely how does that portend and what does that mean and who needs to pick up that slack I mean it's I think it's it's fairly straightforward as you described you end up with a significant amount of disenfranchisement and it'll matter where in places like Nevada and there's and it's a state where there's a really significant backlash developing a very at a time when the Hispanic community there is extremely vulnerable we have very large influx of non-voters of immigrants whether they be documented or not in lots of children the Clark County schools have depending on how you measure either the highest or the second highest density of ELLs in the country because one of the things that happened there was the economy the construction economy died but a lot of people stayed a lot of people who had come for that economy stayed and this has produced a very substantial counterreaction among voters we saw in the Sharon Engle race in 2010 and seeing a repeat of it now in a state where there's not a lot of civic infrastructure that's going to be less so even than there was in Arizona for example in terms of seeing kind of mobilization of public events lawsuits other kinds of matters to try and counter what is a very difficult political situation for very vulnerable people in one where the classic dilemma of trying to convince an electorate to act on behalf of a disenfranchised group to begin with and it's actually going the opposite direction in Nevada so yes there's entirely the very likely possibility that certainly you'll end up with voter suppression lawsuits there as we've already seen in other places and they'll play out probably after the election but if this is if where we are now in terms of Latino voters is a snapshot into the future or we project into the future for all of those young Latinos who are coming up 20, 25 years from now and they see their parents not voting and they see the vote repressed and that they feel powerless why does it count how are they going to get engaged well that is the big question the power of Latino electorate lies in this movement of people into voting age but the effective age of enfranchisement for Latinos like very young people they've really not behaved that differently than other young people is in 18 it's more like 30 and we saw in the last two presidential elections some change in that very clearly in 2008 it seemed the direction turned on that towards more engagement there are all kinds of this is where the game is in terms of states you start in really important states Texas soon but really even then places like Virginia New Jersey certainly the inner mountain west what happens to these very big cohorts you're talking about hundreds of thousands a year Latinos coming into the franchise immigration is not always going to be the top issue it's not the top issue even now the economy, education immigration is a litmus test kind of issue immigration is a threshold issue what I say about Romney it's like he's coming to the door to sell you encyclopedias and the first thing he says is I don't like people like you it's sort of hard to get to the encyclopedias Latinos hear the way you talk about immigration as do you like us or not and that's what I think ours are getting wrong right now immigration is going to continue to be some kind of a threshold issue but the other issues are going to get to be more and more important and god I hope Republicans can figure out ways to talk to Latinos about some of these other issues these people are going to care about other things not only for the sake of Republicans but because it's so dangerous for Latinos to be in that position where one party is taking you for granted and the other is ignoring you and you're disenfranchised where your voice isn't heard on significant policy issues the dreamers I just want to quick note there's a time when I thought the issue of the dream act had the potential of being a mobilizing issue for young Latinos I think it was well in 2009-2010 you really saw something developing and I live on a college campus there's been a lot of time on it among young Latinos it really had the potential to become a civil rights issue and still might have and one of the interesting questions about the way this has all gotten so perverted now is whether Obama actually disinflated what might have been a really important wedge issue that Democrats could have used that's just the worst strategy you don't have a politics I'm just saying well gosh I'm shocked I can't believe it I'm sure you folks out in the audience have many questions and we'd love to hear what they are so hello my name is Alberto Pimientz I'm with the Voice of America VOA today we have talked about how immigration is less of an issue now the impact of in the future and then people like Senator Marco Rubio is in news and we talked about Latino boat but it seems like it's not decisive right now but then we also see we also watch in the news that Senator Rubio could help narrow that Latino gap but what's really at stake here because immigration is not an issue now Latino boat is for the future but then we also talked about Marco Rubio so what's really at stake right now I think Latinos could play a really important role in one or two of the swing states I mean if they play an important role in Florida that could decide who's the president so yes Roberto's right that we're only talking about a few voters switching over a few voters out of a small percentage in a few states but sometimes you're right you're the little needle that makes the whole machine go or not go and that's potentially true this year Florida, there are a lot of other factors in Florida but Latino boats and Latinos are different in Florida they play a huge role Colorado to some degree it could make a difference, Nevada and Florida is so interesting too because everyone associates Florida with Cuban American Republicans and in reality there are more Latinos who are registered as Democrats in Florida than Republicans I mean that's a number that would take a poll that 99 out of 100 people wouldn't know unless they were reading some of Roberto's reports I mean what Roberto pointed out was it's a whisker but if it's the whisker that is right there in the place that it matters could be the whisker that wags the dog and Florida is more than a whisker I mean Florida is important Florida is in its own it's its own universe but you work the map I mean if you flip one way or the other and then look at the rest of the map it's decisive I mean it makes Ohio and Pennsylvania critical I mean you can't lose all three of those states and become president, period there's almost no way to run the rest of the map so if you win if you lose Florida then you've got to take both Ohio and Pennsylvania or you've got to take one of them plus some combination of a whole bunch of other states it's really critical in the Latino vote I mean Florida is a really it's one of the most complicated political states in a schizophrenic political I mean probably two people who've spent a lot of time there and they should talk about it I mean it's like a delicatessen politically I mean there's just all kinds of you know there's all these different things you know regardless of whether you have to hang chads on the side or not I'll never forget the night of the 2008 election I took a group of visiting journalists because at that time I was down in Florida down to Coyote and to Versailles the restaurant the famous Cuban American restaurant there and you know Kerry had put his Florida Miami office across the street from Versailles and Versailles is sort of like the really you know right Cuban American anti-Fidel crowd and so you go on this one we walked through the Versailles side and talked to people why are you voting for Bush? oh he is going to get Fidel you know he's going to what else are you interested in? oh well he's also going to get Raul right? and then we walked over to the other side of the Americans where it's skewed younger what do you care about in this election? oh I'm interested in health care I'm interested in education I'm interested in all of these other things it was just I mean it was a very small sample size but it has really stuck with me about how things are evolving it was a snapshot of the Cuban American community Charlie once again Charlie Erickson Hispanic link news service who has made the statement that Mexican Americans conducted a very negative campaign during the Sensenbrenner era and beyond that and that the Mexican American leaders conducted or supported and conducted a very negative campaign I saw I was at that parade and I saw hundreds of US flags I saw leaders saying don't even show your cultural allegiance let alone your political allegiance and you're telling this audience that the Mexican Americans and their leaders conducted only a negative campaign and I don't buy that and I'm amazed that you you're trying to tell these people this yeah no but I mean you've misunderstood me and I hope other people didn't what I met about the 2006 mobilization was that its purpose was to block the Sensenbrenner bill it was well Charlie let me listen to what I'm saying it wasn't in favor of something if the Sensenbrenner bill hadn't been enacted those marches would not have happened it was a mobilization you had action counter reaction politically that is different than taking the initiative in favor of something so the 2006 marches did not have the agenda there was no the Sensenbrenner I wrote a long piece about it called the triumph of no and it was it was a very effective blocking action but it was not and it was one of the most effective blocking actions that has happened but it did not succeed in pushing, creating enough momentum to carry an affirmative agenda through and that's what played out the following year but in any case I'm not saying it was negative in the sense that it was they mean things about people it's negative in the sense that it was a counter reaction rather than an affirmative agenda is that clear to everybody? thank you well I think we've got well I know but Charlie I think we got most of the crowd here on board on that point yes hi I'm Christina Lamb from the Sunday Times of London I was really interested Roberto and what you said about the percentage how the Latino vote was not really very influential in battleground states because I've spent time at both campaign headquarters recently and both of them seem to be focusing very strongly on trying to get Hispanic votes in not just in Florida but particularly looking at places like Virginia saying that could actually be key in those places and the other thing was I think you could explain why a higher percentage of Latino voters who are eligible to vote don't register I mean well Virginia is a very interesting emerging battleground I mean it has been since the 2000 middle part of the last decade and where it's going to go it's a toss up now it's one of these places where if you get a very very close election then everything's going to count and there's in a very close election a Democrat can't afford not to carry the Latino vote in Virginia overwhelmingly given that there's so many I mean a Democrat can't afford not to carry Northern Virginia with enough weight to counteract the rest of the state and there are Latino in very specific places you know in Alexandria in Prince in Manassas in a few other places they could make a difference in a very close election and as you look at the rest of the map for Obama Virginia could end up being one of the and it's most of the conventional wisdom puts it among the top four or five states aside from the big industrial battlegrounds in Pennsylvania you're going to have always there especially Ohio but Virginia could be and it's somewhere when you look to the future when you play things out the next cycle and the cycle beyond that it's one of those places where if Latino young voters participate at any kind of significant rate they become a factor in Virginia politics they can become a factor in a couple of congressional districts here in a significant way and as they do in places all kinds of odd places parts of North Carolina parts of Georgia when you're looking 10 years out I'm afraid that's all but we're out of time so thank you very much I want to thank our distinguished panel Tamar Jacoby Roberto Sudo and Manuel Roig-Francia I want to thank the new America foundation for inviting us here for leading the charge thank you very much for coming thank you Michelle thanks to all of you we promised at the outset that we were going to try to bridge the rise of Marco Rubio the broader demographic story the political season and where we go forward on policy and immigration reform and I think we accomplished that and I certainly learned a lot and I thank you for sharing this lunch hour with us thanks for coming