The Sun of Ohio | July 28/ August 11, 2017
GUEST EDITORIAL
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“Trump should show some political courage and endorse immigration protection for Dreamers” Seven years ago, Congress had a chance to take a humane approach to people living in the United States illegally not through their own actions, but through the actions of their parents. Arriving as children, some of these immigrants were smuggled across the border while others entered legally but their families failed to leave when they were supposed to. Many weren’t even aware of their immigration status until they tried to get a job or had some other official contact that required proof of citizenship or a Social Security number. Many also know no other country — they have been raised as Americans, educated in American schools, and share American dreams and values. It would be cruel to send them packing now. To lessen the threat of deportation for those who arrived in the United States as children, the House in 2010 passed the Dream Act, which would have provided a path to citizenship for those who met certain conditions. But Democrats in the Senate failed to muster enough support to bring it to a vote, so it died. In the wake of that political debacle, President Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, using prosecutorial discretion to grant temporary relief for
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people who met roughly the same conditions spelled out in the failed Dream Act. Of the 1.3 million people eligible for protection — a renewable two-year card granting permission to live and work in the United States — some 750,000 have applied for and received it. Enter Donald Trump. One of the mainstays of his presidential campaign was demonization of immigrants in the country illegally and bellicose promises to deport them all, build a wall along the southern border and make Mexico pay for it. But Trump was strangely, for
GUEST COLUMN
By Eduardo Lago El Pais In the United States, 57 million people consider themselves Latino and 40 million speak Spanish, out of a total population of around 308 million. These facts highlight a historical constant: the ability of the Spanish language to resist an institutional environment that has been, and is currently acting, hostile. Laws attempting to eradicate bilingual education have systematically failed, because the use of a language depends on the people who speak it, and not on legislation. Data support faith in the vitality of Spanish in the United States, from its use in homes and communities, to its presence in the
media, especially on television. Spanish also has considerable weight in American academia. Despite the fact that US President Donald Trump added an official Twitter account in Spanish, what does the news about the deletion of Spanish from the White House’s website mean? In a video from 1960, which today seems rather poignant, Jacqueline Kennedy speaks Spanish, asking Latinos to vote for her husband John F. Kennedy, who at the time was a senator. This was not an isolated case. Throughout the more than half-a-century since then, the Spanish language has been used with certain regularity in the presidential milieu, by both Republicans and Democrats. Everyone remembers George W. Bush’s attempt to engage with Spanish. Meanwhile, his successor, Barack Obama, thought it important that the official White House webpage
him, conciliatory about the Dreamers — those who would have been eligible for protection under the Dream Act. After initially pledging to “immediately end” the program once he moved into the Oval Office, he softened on the campaign trail. He should show some political courage, endorse the DACA provisions and defend them should Texas carry through with its threat to sue. As well he should. The usual arguments for escalating deportations — that lowwage immigrants compete unfairly with U.S. citizens,
and that they somehow pose a threat to public safety — are especially hollow when applied to those brought into the country as young children. As president, Trump has expressed sympathy for the Dreamers’ plight and has left the DACA program alone even as he ramped up deportations and ended Obama’s planned extension of protections to parents of citizens and legal residents, but who are themselves in the United States illegally. Yet Trump also has not endorsed DACA, likely fearing backlash from political supporters who
bought into his draconian views on immigration. Those waters were further muddied recently when Texas and several other states threatened to file a legal challenge to DACA if Trump did not rescind it. Last week, Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly told members of Congress that he thought the Obama executive action that created DACA was likely illegal and an abuse of executive power. He questioned whether the Trump administration would defend it in court if the states did sue. Trump
responded that he would make the decision on DACA, not Kelly or U.S. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions (whose antipathy to immigration runs deep). Meanwhile, the Dreamers are left in limbo as the infighting in the White House continues between the hard-liners who want to end DACA and those whose hearts aren’t made completely of ice. The best solution here is a comprehensive immigration overhaul that would include a reprieve for the Dreamers, but it’s quixotic to think that this White House, and this Congress, would ever agree on humane reforms. The closest we came was the 2013 “Gang of Eight” Senate bill that, while imperfect, offered a bipartisan blueprintfor dealing with immigrants who are in the country illegally, among other improvements in the law. That measure died in the House when Republican Speaker John A. Boehner refused to let it come to a vote. Trump can move us in a better direction. He should show some political courage, endorse the DACA provisions and defend them should Texas carry through with its threat to sue. That would leave some of his core supporters frothing at the mouth, but that’s what a leader does — makes the tough calls in the country’s best interests regardless of the politics.
The danger of speaking Spanish in the United States do justice to the bilingual reality of the United States, integrating Spanish into its design. Spanish is not the only thing that has disappeared from the White House’s webpage: also deleted are allusions to Cuba, climate change and the Iran nuclear deal, among other things.
“In terms of the demographic force of the Latino community in the United States, Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez solemnly summed it up when he said: “It was not us who came to the United States. To deny the importance of Spanish in the United States is as insane as denying climate change – something that, incidentally, the new administration is doing with complete impunity. The historical, social, political, economic and cultural weight of Spanish
in the United States is an unquestionable fact; the problem is that facts do not matter when it comes to a political agenda where reality is denied on a systematic basis. In terms of the demographic force of the Latino community in the United States, Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez solemnly summed it up when he said: “It was not us who came to the United States. It was the United States who came to us.” And how did they do it? Through a simple operation of buying and selling. In 1848, after a military conflict, Mexico ceded half its territory to its northern neighbor for $15 million under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Overnight, a huge part of the Spanish-speaking population became part of the northern territory. A survey of place names serves as a silent witness to the trampling of this territory by the United States. Names such as Los Angeles, San Francisco,
Nevada, Colorado, among many others, each have their own history. If geography is unequivocal, the same cannot be said about history, which AngloAmericans have always told badly, prioritizing the vision of an expansive horizontal movement from coast to coast; heading west. The Hispanic vision, centered on an examination of a vertical South-North axis, has been emphasized by researchers such as Professor Fernández Armesto in Our America(the title, as is well known, comes from Cuban national hero José Martí), but it is systematically ignored. More data. California, which sometimes flirts with the dream of independence, is, besides being the richest state in the country, a pre-eminently Spanishspeaking territory. In Miami one can get by without speaking any English at all. Another fact worth underlining is that, despite what is usually
argued through imprecise statistics, the use of Spanish does not decrease from one generation to another in a lineal way, given that the constant flow of new immigrants counteracts any such fall. Other languages such as Yiddish, over extended periods of time in places like New York, have disappeared without a trace: Spanish, in contrast, has not stopped growing, a trend that the new administration seems determined to halt. The ever-changing history of relations between Spanish-speakers in the US and their maternal language switched from being defined by an inferiority complex to a phase of assertion and pride. But now there is an additional element: fear. Speaking Spanish in public could be dangerous in the face of the threat of a massive wave of deportations. *Eduardo Lago is a writer and the former head of the Cervantes Institute in New York.