Hope in Florida
Janice Kennedy on immigration reform,
In sunny Florida, where every day is a holiday for Canadian snowbirds, the burdensome complexities of daily life go stubbornly on.
Even in paradise, banks get robbed and ambulances race to accidents. Republican governor Rick Scott takes heat from voters, presumably Democrats, for his record in education spending and Medicaid policy. The nation’s intense gun debate is as impassioned in the Sunshine State as anywhere else.
And nearly a million Floridians continue to keep the economy ticking along nicely, despite the reality that most of them are underpaid and exploited, and all of them are unenfranchised. Some, crowded into appalling living conditions, pick the produce that northerners eat in winter. Others clean five-star hotel rooms, polish luxury cars to a high gloss, maintain the lush gardens around executive homes in wealthy enclaves.
Many of them, brought to the United States as young children, have lived here for years, speak American English, make ends meet with low-wage American jobs, maintain American hopes and American dreams. But they can’t get drivers’ licences. They can’t hope for spots in publicly-funded colleges. And they can’t vote.
In short, they can never be fully American.
Florida, which has long boasted a significant Hispanic Cuban population, has also become home to a large population of newer Latinos, the so-called “illegals” — undocumented immigrants — from elsewhere in Latin America, especially Mexico. Across the U.S., only California and Texas have more than Florida.
So it is fitting that a local boy, Miami-born Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, is front and centre with new proposals to address the stubborn problem of U.S. immigration reform. Just a day before Barack Obama spoke about his own hopes for reform, eight U.S. senators — including Rubio and Arizona senator John McCain — unveiled their bipartisan plan. One of its key features speaks to the presence of the undocumented 11 million and lays out a hopeful “path to citizenship.”
The 41-year-old Rubio, a far-right conservative and one of the party’s rising stars, spoke at a press conference Monday to announce the senators’ proposal.
(And so impressive was his speech that Sarasota Herald Tribune columnist Jeremy Wallace saw in it a glimpse of hope for the future
Between both the senators’ initiative and Obama’s, surely there is hope here for the resolution of a long-standing injustice.
of the Republican Party. For once, wrote Wallace, a key Republican was not referring to “illegal immigrants,” or, worse, “illegals.” He actually referred to 11 million “human beings.” Imagine. The implications of such an acknowledgment, he suggested, could even be the beginning of the foundering Republican Party’s redemptive reclamation.)
Between both the senators’ initiative and Obama’s, surely there is hope here for the resolution of a long-standing injustice. This is not about creating porous borders or hanging on to undesirables. This is about helping a large population of mostly productive, if often exploited, people integrate fully into a society for which they labour.
Besides, there’s already a kind of cosmic justice at work. Back in the 1830s and 1840s (that temporary Alamo setback notwithstanding), it was the U.S. that engaged in a monumental land grab from Mexico. Uncle Sam, star-spangled and English-speaking, became the face of Texas, California, New Mexico. Now, of course, a tide of reversal is washing over the U.S. coastline. Spanish may not be officially American, but it’s the de facto language of millions of American residents, citizens and otherwise. That includes Rubio’s “11 million human beings,” the unenfranchised people who — barred from pursuing it themselves — serve the American Dream of others.
They’ve been a largely invisible population up to now, there but not there. Shadows cleaning cars, trimming hedges, picking produce, they exchange words like “good morning” and “thank you” with the people they serve, but there’s no real interaction. They live in a world apart, coexisting but not touching.
The Americans they work for can’t afford to acknowledge them — and can’t afford to lose them. Their ubiquitous and considerable labours provide support to an already fragile economy.
But now, with proposals from the president and Senate group, a national discussion is beginning, and there is some hope. Recognizing that the nation is changing and its population evolving is a good start. So is dropping all that Romney like wishful thinking about “self-deportation,” which will never erase the demographic reality of 11 million human beings — or the political reality of another 52 million Hispanic Americans largely sympathetic to them. Offering a hand, and some hope, to people who are not going to disappear, no matter how you feel about their presence, just makes good practical sense.
In its pursuit of social justice, it also makes undeniable moral sense. Effectively, if not officially, these are Americans. The time has come for the U.S. to invite a vast portion of its own people out of the shadows and into full daylight.