Cowards vs. xenophobes; that's the Latino choice?

Whenever a Latino pundit wants to imply that the Republican Party is somehow the more sympathetic political party, he always goes off on a line of debate that labels the Democrats as nothing more than a batch of sniveling cowards, too afraid to come out and say much of anything in support of the growing Latino population in this country.

It’s true. While individual Democrats are often willing to toss out rhetoric about the need for cultural diversity, they have not as a group been willing to push for action along those lines. In particular, there was the debate of recent years concerning immigration reform.

WE DIDN’T SEE Democrats in Congress pushing for measures that would have imposed the serious reforms of the federal immigration laws that would make sense of the convoluted policies now in place. All too often, we get the impression that the Democrats have more important concerns on their mind and that they are more than willing to settle for the status quo.

That means Latinos living in the shadows of society, or having to deal with harassment because of nativist nitwits who can’t (or don’t want to) tell the difference between someone who was born in this country and who was not.

But what this convoluted logic overlooks is that the other side is guilty of taking constant action intended to let those people not of an Anglo background that they can somehow never be truly of this country.

If the Democrats are guilty of neglect, then the Republicans are guilty of hostility. It is why the Republican National Convention, to the degree that immigration and ethnicity come up at all, will be a forum for people who have hang-ups with “foreigners.”

THE MEDIOCRE PRESENCE of Latinos at the Democratic National Convention is matched by an almost invisible one for the Republicans in St. Paul, Minn.

Thus far, about the only reference to immigration at the Republican convention was when one-time Democrat Joe Lieberman of Connecticut used McCain’s one-time support for immigration reform as evidence of his “maverick” status within the GOP.

Of course, that stance has since been squashed, as McCain has sought to give off the impression he now considers himself to be wrong for wanting to include measures meant to help people already in this country without a visa to remain.

If McCain even touches the issue on Thursday when he accepts the GOP nomination for president, it likely will be in a way that amounts to an apology to the rank-and-file Republicans, many of whom are a part of the party because they don’t want to have to feel much compassion on the immigration question.

WHAT MAKES ME willing to make such a blanket statement like that?

I couldn’t help but notice the Republican Party platform that finally got approved. While the hardliners of the GOP failed to get language in the platform that says Republicans stand for English-only and oppose “comprehensive immigration reform,” they did manage to get one measure that has offended the Latino activists just as much.

They included changes in language saying the Republican Party now only wants to include people in the official Census Bureau count if they can verify citizenship. They want to designate the non-U.S.-born in this country (which many of them associate as primarily a Latino issue) as somehow amounting to non-persons.

Once that happens, it becomes easier intellectually to justify policies that harass them, treating them in absurd manners.

NOW I KNOW it’s, “just the platform.” It is just rhetoric that most Republican Party members don’t read (if they did, they’d be shocked at how much of it they personally disagree with).

But it’s the kind of rhetoric that has made many of us in the growing Latino voter bloc think of the Republican Party as openly hostile toward us and not a group with which we would want to be affiliated with.

It is why many of us are Democrats by Default, and why various polls show Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama taking the Latino vote by ratios of 2-1 to 3-1. We don’t trust the people whom McCain would consider to be his allies in Congress, and we wonder to what degree is he going to have to promise to look the other way when they try to impose policies of harassment.

Perhaps the real lesson of all this is that we Latinos are going to have to assert ourselves, rather than relying on Democratic officials or the occasional sympathetic Republican to do it for us.

PART OF THAT self-assertion is taking a stronger interest in electoral politics to get representation that understands our situation and is willing to act upon it. But it also includes reminding the current elected officials of both political parties of our growing numbers (the Latino vote come the Nov. 4 elections could go nearly as high as 1 of every 10 ballots cast).

What will ultimately stop the Republicans from thinking they can harass us (and the Democrats from thinking they can ignore us) is when they see our growing influence at the voting booth costing them votes. For a government official, that is the bottom line.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Democrats at their presidential nominating convention in Denver last week (http://www.postchronicle.com/commentary/article_212169370.shtml) went out of their way to say as little as they had to about Latinos and relevant issues.

John McCain is not likely to say much about Latino issues either, unless he wants to (http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/politics/national/stories/090308dnpolimmig.3f4c516d.html) persuade Republicans to adopt the presidential campaign of Libertarian Bob Barr as their favorite.