By Allan Wall
08/19/2012
In a twist bizarre even for GOP Hispandering, the news broke recently that a group of “Hispanic Republicans” is attacking Obama for…deporting too many illegal aliens. [Conservative Ads in Spanish Tell a Different Story to Hispanics, by Stephen Dinan, Washington Times, August 9, 2012]
This is what happens when politicians run ads in a foreign language. The English-speaking a.k.a. American majority doesn’t get to hear what’s being promised to the linguistic minority. (I exposed a previous example ten years ago: “Nuestra Gente” and the National Question in Texas.)
This ad was run by a group called “Nevada Hispanics”, in affiliation with the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, executive director Alfonso Aguilar. “Our goal was to come up with an ad that would really engage Latino voters and make them think” Aguilar was quoted as saying.
You can watch the ad here (English version here).
Here’s the text:
Don’t be fooled by President Obama’s words, he’s not committed to immigrants, he only wants your vote. With his election on the line he promises our youth a temporary solution that still cheats them of legal status. Why didn’t he keep his promise to push immigration reform? Instead, Obama has deported more people than any other president in the country’s history. With friends like these, who needs enemies? In November, make your voice count.
I checked both the Spanish ad and the English video. They both say the same thing — with one curious exception: whereas the Spanish ad says “he only wants your [singular] vote”, the English version says “he only wants our votes”.
What is this ad saying and what does it tell us about the “Hispanic Republicans” who produced it?
The ad asserts that Obama has deported “more people than any other president in our country’s history”. While it says this, words appear on the screen, attributing 1.2 million deportations to Obama–still a fraction of the illegals in the country, even going by the low official estimate of 11 million.
But what about President Eisenhower? In 1954, Ike ordered Operation Wetback which deported (or caused to self-deport) 1.3 million illegal aliens.
Moreover, the record increase claimed by President Obama has been refuted by our own Edwin Rubenstein: See Obama’s Big Lie — Illegal Alien Deportations Have NOT "Shattered Records".
Still, let’s suppose for sake of argument that Obama really did deport 1.2 million illegal aliens. There is still an even more basic problem: the ad presents the deportation of illegal aliens as a bad thing.
And that, my friends, is all we need to know about the ad and the motives of its producers.
Note, too, the appeal to Hispanic chauvinism — referring to illegal aliens as “our youth”. From the standpoint of an American citizen, aren’t all American youth “our youth”?
So who is Alfonso Aguilar — the man behind these ads? Well, guess what, VDARE.COM already has an archive of articles on him (here).
Born in Puerto Rico, Aguilar served in several posts in the Bush II administration, including a stint as the first “Chief of the Office of Citizenship” in USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services).
Now, besides being a lawyer in a law firm which deals with, guess what, immigration issues, Aguilar is a professional Republican Hispanic. Aguilar runs this Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, which helped produce the ad. And Aguilar hosts a talk show on Univision where he is billed as
uno de los más importantes analistas conservadores hispanos en el país [one of the most important conservative Hispanic analysts in the country].
The talk show host calls his show La Voz de los Latinos [The Voice of Latinos].
This past December, Aguilar put down Romney, saying: “It pains me to say this, but if we have a negative narrative on immigration, it’s because of Mitt Romney.”[GOP wary of Romney’s rhetoric on immigrants, By Peter Wallsten, Washington Post, December 16, 2011] That meant Aguilar didn’t like Mitt’s primary campaign Tough-on-Illegal-Immigration phase.
On June 15th, Aguilar released a statement welcoming Obama’s unilateral “DREAMnesty”. In a nutshell, Aguilar wants amnesty, but he wants a full, completely legal and open amnesty, approved by Congress, because he wants the GOP (and his group) to claim credit — make that “credit.”
But what sort of a “conservative” is Aguilar if he’s against deporting illegal aliens? Obviously he’s not interested in “conserving” the historic American nation.
Now it’s true that, in the past, Aguilar has advocated assimilation through learning English and American history for immigrants. But of course that’s all undercut by promoting illegal immigration.
According to recent polling released by Latino Decisions, despite abandoning immigration patriotism, Romney is still deep in a hole with Latinos and is unlikely to climb out.
Latinos certainly aren’t big supporters of controlling illegal immigration. For example, 66% oppose Arizona’s SB 1070, though most Americans support it. [Implications of the SB1070 Supreme Court decision on the 2012 election, Latino Decisions, July 23rd, 2012]
But beyond that, Latinos simply aren’t that conservative. When asked if it were better to help the economy grow by lowering taxes or by government investment, 55% answered the latter. In relation to Obamacare, 60% believe it to be the government’s role to make sure everybody has access to health care [Paul Ryan, the National Debt and the Latino Vote, Matt Barreto Aug. 11th, 2012]
Furthermore, Latinos are more likely to support gun control than either whites or blacks.
Let’s face it: the Hispanic population is not going for Romney and it’s not going for the Republican party — that is, for the Generic American Party, representing (whether it likes it or not) the historic American nation.
Republican leaders and strategists might as well ignore Hispanic activists/consultants/ scamsters like Aguilar.
Does this mean that Romney can’t win the 2012 election? Not at all. As I recently explained, the logical target for Romney is the white working class vote (which at 39% is some five times the Latino vote).
With 14 million Americans out of work, why do we need any immigration? What if Romney called for mass deportations, employer sanctions and an anti-unemployment moratorium on legal immigration? Advocated boldly, those policies would energize the base.
What is Romney waiting for?
American citizen Allan Wall moved back to the U.S.A in 2008, after many years residing in Mexico. Allan’s wife is Mexican, and their two sons are bilingual. In 2005, Allan served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his Mexidata.info articles are archived here; his News With Views columns are archived here; and his website is here.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.