Latino America: How America's Most Dynamic Population is Poised to Transform the Politics of the Nation

by Matt Barreto, Gary Segura

  As it was in 2008, a critical part of the story in 2012 was Latino group solidarity, this time better stimulated by the extensive debate over immigration in the GOP primaries and through the general election season. When minority voters turned out at rates higher than anticipated by most seasoned election experts, scholars, following on the theorizing of Michael Dawson, attributed this to the strength of group identification and a common belief in a shared political destiny—what Dawson calls “linked fate.”14 His argument is that group identity shapes and structures political behavior by serving as an organizing principle for engaging the various issues at stake in the political system—in short, it is an “ideology.” While white voters may put a premium on sociotropic evaluations of the economy—how good the economy is for people in general, not just for themselves individually—the candidate who can best tap into minority voters’ shared identity and improve those voters’ perception that the candidate is “on their side” should do best.

  TABLE 8.2The Importance of Immigration and the Economy to Latinos in 2012

  Source: For the Latino Decisions tracking poll, respondents were asked, “What are the most important issues facing the Hispanic community that you think Congress and the President should address?” For the Gallup weekly poll, respondents were asked, “What is the most important problem facing the nation?”

  Indeed, existing research suggests that ethnic identification, ethnic attachment, and ethnic appeals may be an especially salient feature of minority politics.15 Even when the candidate is of a different race, scholars have shown, certain appeals may work to tap into voters’ sense of shared identity. In what is coined “messenger politics,” some researchers have found, for instance, that using Latino campaign volunteers in mobilization efforts can improve GOP prospects at the national level.16 Both Ricardo Ramírez and Melissa Michelson find similar evidence that Latino voters are more susceptible to coethnic get-out-the-vote drives.17 So a new lens is needed to understand not just minority politics but all of American politics in the twenty-first century.

  THE ECONOMY AND IMMIGRATION, 2008–2012

  In the wake of the Great Recession that began in December 2007, numerous reports detailed the disproportionate impact of the economic downturn on Latinos.18 By the end of 2008, only one year into the recession, one in ten Latino homeowners reported that they had missed a mortgage payment or been unable to make a full payment.19 Compounding the problems created by unemployment and home-ownership insecurity, by 2009 Latinos had sustained greater asset losses relative to both whites and blacks.20 By 2011 Hispanics registered record levels of poverty in general, and especially among children.21

  For these reasons and others, from 2011 through 2012 the economy was consistently the most important issue identified in our surveys by Latino respondents, and this remained true right up to the election (see Table 8.2). What is most interesting about that data point, however, is how misleading it turned out to be. Decision-makers in both campaigns thought that Latinos’ concern about the economy meant that the immigration issue had faded for them; in fact, it remained a foundational issue for many Latino voters.

  Concurrent with these economic patterns were major immigration enforcement efforts that were having a negative impact on Latino communities across the country. Chief among these efforts were the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) memorandums of agreement and “Secure Communities” programs, which marked an unprecedented shift in immigration enforcement from preventing entrance at the US-Mexico border to focusing heavily on enforcement and expulsion within the interior of the United States.22

  The fact that comprehensive immigration reform did not even make it onto the president’s active agenda during the first two years of his administration was widely viewed as a broken promise. By early 2011, against the backdrop of this record enforcement and the failure of the Senate to invoke cloture on the DREAM Act in September 2010, the Latino community was deeply unhappy. Though the Obama campaign repeatedly claimed that it was the economy that would cement Latinos to his cause, his campaign staff understood that they had a public relations problem. Even as the administration repeatedly claimed to have no choice but to aggressively enforce the law, the activist community just as repeatedly demanded some form of action to lessen the devastating impact of deportations, then approaching 1.2 million.

  In May 2010, Obama traveled to the border to deliver a speech on immigration reform in El Paso, Texas. The White House billed this event as a reboot of the immigration reform push, and it was coupled with several high-profile and well-covered meetings on the issue, but Latino voters were not buying it. In a June 2011 poll of Latino registered voters by Latino Decisions, 51% felt that the president was getting “serious about immigration reform,” but another 41% felt that he was “saying what Hispanics want to hear because the election is approaching.” He received 67% of the Latino vote when he was elected in 2008, but now only 49% were committed to voting for his reelection. The president simply didn’t enjoy the trust he once had with the Latino electorate, at least not on this issue.

  Perhaps most importantly, this poll showed that huge majorities of Latino voters supported the president taking action alone to slow the deportations, and almost three-quarters (74%) said that they favored the administration halting deportations of anyone who hadn’t committed a crime and was married to a US citizen. Support was similar for protecting other groups of undocumented persons.

  The administration’s repeated claims that they could do nothing administratively to provide relief from the deportation crisis were similarly rejected. At the 2011 convention of the National Council of La Raza, a speech by the president became an occasion for direct confrontation. When the president took the podium, DREAMers rose in the audience wearing T-shirts that said Obama Deports DREAMers. When the president again said that he was powerless to act, the crowd rose to their feet and began chanting, “Yes you can,” a bitter recycling of the president’s 2008 campaign slogan—which itself was, ironically, the English-language translation of the slogan of the Chicano and farmworkers’ movements of the 1960s, Sí se puede.

  This more or less constant barrage of bad news with potentially significant political impact finally moved the administration. On August 18, 2011, the administration issued what has come to be referred to as the “prosecutorial discretion” directive. Based on a memo dated June 17—when the president was insisting that he had no room to act—the directive instructed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE officials to use more discretion in selecting cases for deportation. The memo was further refined on August 23, particularly in relation to parents and other caregivers.

  Most immigration advocates would say that this memo and the subsequent interpretations and administrative instructions had little practical effect, and indeed, by late May 2012 the Latino community was still deeply disaffected. The administration took constant heat from Univision anchor Jorge Ramos and others in Latino media. Ramos asked the president directly why he had deported so many immigrants who had families, even children, in the United States. Even Congressman Luis Gutiérrez, the first prominent Latino politician to endorse Obama back in 2007, publicly questioned whether Latinos should give their votes to Obama in early 2012. And Latino enthusiasm remained very low. In February, Latino Decisions found that the “certain to vote for Obama” share of the Latino electorate had dropped further, to 43%.

  As they had done in July 2011, the DREAMers stepped into action. After quietly and not so quietly threatening to take action against the Obama campaign, two DREAM-eligible young people staged a sit-down hunger strike at the Obama campaign office in Denver. They ended their strike on June 13, but not without the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA) announcing plans to stage civil disobedience protest actions at Obama and Democratic offices across the country. They hoped the visual of minority youth being hauled away from Democratic offices would move the president to act—a stark change from the images of energetic and enthusiastic youn
g people and college students supporting the 2008 Obama campaign.

  And as he had done in 2011, Obama acted. On June 15, 2012, two days after the end of the hunger strike and the same week as NIYA’s announcement, the Obama administration announced DACA—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Within existing legal constraints, the president issued a directive that prevented the deportation of youth who would otherwise have been eligible to stay if the DREAM Act had passed.

  This action was a double win for the Obama campaign. First, there was huge Latino support for the decision, and it was immediately reflected in polling numbers for Obama. Within days of the announcement, Latino Decisions—which, serendipitously, was in the field with a poll right as the policy was announced—found an increase in support for the president and in enthusiasm for the election.

  Second, since the DACA directive announced by the president was an administrative order issued by an executive agency, Romney had to decide whether, if elected president, he would allow it to continue or halt it. When asked, Romney eventually stated that his administration would not participate in the deferred action policy and instead would ask Congress to take up a permanent solution to immigration issues, a position reiterated by the Romney campaign in the last week of October.

  During the GOP primaries, every candidate except Texas governor Rick Perry clamored to be the most right-wing and hard-line opponent of immigration reform and the DREAM Act. In a GOP debate, Romney himself offered the most infamous preferred policy—“self-deportation.” The implication was that he favored a policy regime that would make life so miserable and difficult for undocumented immigrants that they would simply choose to leave rather than continue to live under such harsh rules. Most observers assumed that, once the nomination was secure, Romney would tack left on this idea and on other policy issues to appeal to a general election audience. But forces in the party, and indeed his own inner circle, made any such movement impossible.

  In spite of all this attention on the immigration front, the economy continued to be the “most important” election issue. So how can we reconcile Latinos’ economic fears—supposedly their most critical concern—with their eventual enthusiastic support for the incumbent? Did immigration concerns prevail over the economy in the minds of Latino voters?

  To begin, it is critical to understand that many Americans didn’t blame President Obama for the crushing economic times and the immigration enforcement efforts and did not lay political responsibility for these issues wholly at the feet of his administration. Conventional accounts of the economic voter insist that “it’s the economy” that matters, and that the incumbent presidential candidate gets blamed in poor economic times.23 It could be that Latinos did not see the economy as particularly bad for themselves (the so-called pocketbook view) or for other Latinos (the sociotropic view). However, survey data indicate that the disproportionate impact of both economic issues and immigration policy on Latinos was not lost on Latinos themselves. Reports from the Pew Hispanic Center in 2011 indicate that a “majority of Latinos (54%) believe that the economic downturn that began in 2007 has been harder on them than on other groups in America.”24

  In other words, the real toll of the economic recession on Latino employment, homeownership, and wealth and the adverse impact on Latinos of border and interior immigration enforcement had not escaped Latino awareness. In sum, it was reasonable to expect that, in November 2012, Latino voters would go to the polls with good reasons to punish Democrats in general, and President Obama in particular.

  So why, when Latinos should have been especially prone to retrospective economic voting and when they also had expressed real concern about the immigration enforcement targeting their community, did they support the Democratic ticket? While President Obama was certainly responsible in the minds of Latinos for the historic levels of immigration enforcement, by July 2012 two key developments related to immigration served as correctives to the perceptions among Latinos that Democrats were hostile toward their community. The first was the Supreme Court decision on Arizona v. United States, and the second was DACA, the executive order on “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.” Latinos credited Obama and the Democrats with both the judicial outcome and the executive order that provided key relief for the Latino community. The shift in the perception of Democrats as hostile to seeing them as “welcoming” sharpened the contrast with the Republican Party. As Mitt Romney called for “self-deportation” and referred to Arizona as a “model” state for immigration policy below the federal level, the hostility they perceived in the Republican “brand” only increased for the Latino community.

  Although the Great Recession provided the central backdrop for the 2012 election cycle, the specter of record levels of deportations, coupled with the salience of the Supreme Court case deciding the role of sub-national actors in the enforcement of immigration policy, reduced the centrality of economic issues for Latino voters in a way not seen among non-Latino voters.

  THE 2012 CAMPAIGN

  As campaigns have become more technologically sophisticated, they have fine-tuned the practice of micro-targeting specific messages or appeals to different subgroups of voters. In 2012 targeting Latinos became a significant endeavor for both presidential campaigns: in key battleground states such as Florida, Nevada, Colorado, and Virginia, Obama spent nearly $20 million on outreach to Latino voters, and Romney spent $10 million. Some researchers have found that campaigns that target Latino voters with ethnically salient get-out-the-vote appeals win more Latino votes.25 Data on campaign advertising also reveal that Spanish-language television and radio advertising can increase Latino turnout.26 The outreach efforts during the 2012 campaign were hardly “by the book,” however, nor were they equal in their effort. To understand why ethnically based messaging mattered so much in 2012, we first take a cursory look at the outreach efforts of the Obama and Romney campaigns.

  In direct contrast to the 2008 election, in which Latino voters were fought over state by state in a competitive and long-lasting Democratic primary contest, the 2012 election included a Republican primary contest in which Latinos often felt under attack. Attempting to attract what they perceived as an anti-immigrant voting bloc in the conservative primary elections, the leading Republican candidates took a very hard-line stance against undocumented immigrants, bilingual education, and bilingual voting materials. Most importantly, Mitt Romney, who feared being called a moderate by the more conservative primary candidates, staked out a firm, unwavering, and unforgiving position on immigration. As mentioned earlier, Romney said that he would address the issue of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States through a policy of “self-deportation.” In repeated follow-up interviews and debates, when asked what self-deportation actually meant, Romney explained that he wanted to institute a series of laws that would crack down on unauthorized immigrants by making it so impossible for them to work that, unable to make ends meet, they would have no choice but to “self-deport” to escape their miserable lives in America. While this may have sounded reasonable to some Republican primary voters, Romney’s “self-deportation” statement and continued explanations of the policy sounded ridiculous to most Latinos. On November 7, 2012, the day after the election, Latina Republican strategist Ana Navarro quipped via Twitter that looking at the exit poll data for Latinos, “Romney just self-deported himself from the White House.”

  The “self-deportation” comment was not Romney’s only trouble with Latinos. During a presidential debate, he said that he would “veto the DREAM Act.” About the same time, Romney named Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, as his principal adviser on immigration. Kobach was the architect of the Arizona SB 1070 anti-immigrant legislation (see Chapter 7) and had a hand in crafting copycat legislation in Alabama; he is widely despised by Latino activists. In addition to his close connections with Kobach, Romney appeared in photographs alongside Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the law enforcement officer from Maricopa County, Arizona, who perhap
s more than other figure today embodies anti-immigrant and anti-Latino policy. Nationally known (and under Justice Department investigation) for his outlandish policies, Arpaio has publicly embraced racial profiling, consistently uses bias in making arrests, persists in using excessive force against Latino inmates, and has failed to investigate more than 400 sex crimes.27 Besides associating with Arpaio, Romney called the myriad anti-immigrant legislative initiatives in Arizona, during a primary debate in that state, a model for the nation and said that he wanted to implement mandatory “e-verify,” a workplace program that would crack down on undocumented immigrant workers.

  When Romney finally wrapped up the Republican nomination, the many who predicted that he would moderate his views on immigration pointed to the several high-profile Latino Republicans he appointed to his advisory committee and then dispatched to speak on his behalf. Even these surrogates, however, were often at odds with the official statements issued by Romney or by the Republican Party. Speaking to Univision anchor Jorge Ramos during the Republican National Convention, Romney supporter Carlos Gutierrez, former secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush, agreed with Ramos that the official Republican platform ratified at the convention was troubling to many Latinos. The platform endorsed more Arizona-style anti-immigrant legislation and called for an end to the Fourteenth Amendment, which affirmed citizenship for anyone born in the United States. Republicans vowed to strip citizenship from children born in the United States if their parents were undocumented immigrants. Gutierrez struggled to explain to Ramos and his viewers that Latinos should pay no attention to the Republican platform—whose positions on immigration he called “minor administrative matters”—and that the real choice was the candidate, Mitt Romney.