Immigrant journalist & bigoted Prez
growing up. Today, they are comfort foods for those of us who return to visit.”
But as a child, Ramos also looked forward to the American candies brought back by his relatives after trips to Texas. And as a high school senior, he dreamed of the opportunities across the border.
His parents couldn’t afford the cost of an American college, so Ramos studied communications in Mexico before working on local radio and TV stations. He prospered, but quit when a story he wrote about political corruption was censored.
It was time to go to America.
Ramos jumped feetfirst into the melting pot, arriving in Los Angeles with a suitcase, a guitar, a student visa and a spot in a UCLA extension course. Home was a semilegal collection of rooms rented to students from Ghana, Iran and Pakistan.
Their meals were lettuce sandwiches and salty ramen. Their calls home depended on a communal quarter, tied to a string and dropped, then retrieved, from the pay phone in the hallway.
A year after arrival, Ramos secured a three-month tryout at a Spanish-language station. He hasn’t stopped since.
Nor has he stopped confronting the powerful about their treatment of the powerless.
Party affiliation doesn’t matter. Ramos still has a grudging affection for President George W. Bush, whose Texas roots seemed to connect him with the Mexican people and their culture.
“The first American President who thought he spoke Spanish,” Ramos teases.
He remembers Barack Obama less fondly.
Despite promises dating to the 2008 campaign, Obama never passed an immigration reform bill. Once in office, he stepped up the expulsion of undocumented workers, leading Latino activists to dub him “the deporter-in-chief.”
“Our first mistake, I realize now, was to believe in a political promise and to not do enough to make sure Obama followed through,” Ramos writes of the missed chance. “It was a serious case of political naiveté.”
Ramos continues to use his pulpit to promote the immigrant cause and rebut the stereotypes. Immigrants are half as likely as native-born Americans to end up in prison, he writes.
They not only take on the hard jobs, but create good ones for others — some 40% of the founders of Fortune 500 companies are immigrants or the children of immigrants.