Mitch Perry
Los Angeles Democratic U.S. Rep. Xavier Bacerra warns GOP presidential candidates in Wednesday night’s CNN debate that they should stop copying Donald Trump‘s rhetoric that slurs Latino-Americans.
A Mexican-American, Becerra says it’s disappointing how other GOP presidential candidates have become more “Trump-lite” as the financier continues to dominate the polls.
“It looks like now that Marco Rubio is saying he agrees with Donald Trump that we should build a wall around America,” he said in a conference call set up by the Democratic National Committee on Tuesday.
“It’s not where I thought our country would be in the 21st century. It’s not what my parents thought this country would be in the 21st century,” Becerra said.
“.My sense is that Senator Rubio, Jeb Bush, some of those who might have been expected to actually appeal to Latinos will show us their true colors. Either they are Trump-lite or they are going to stand on their own two feet and show the American public and Latinos what they really are made out of.”
He said only in next year’s elections will the public as a whole shows what it thinks about the issue. “But right now, it’s pretty disturbing to watch how people that you would have expected to know better seem to be echoing the Trump line to try to get Trump votes at the expense of Latinos, immigrants, and a lot of folks who worked pretty hard to build this country.”
Becerra, 57, has representeda part of Los Angeles in Congress since 1992.
Warning that the GOP is playing with fire with such provocative remarks about Latinos, Becerra invoked former California Gov. Pete Wilson as a cautionary tale. He said Wilson made a “major mistake of personalizing the issue of immigration … and made it possible for our state to become so blue.”
Wilson was governor from 1990 to 1998. His legacy in GOP California politics is not a good one. While running successfully for re-election in 1994, he championed Proposition 187, a ballot measure to set up a state-run immigration system that would deny most public benefits – including K-12 education – to undocumented immigrants. Widely viewed as one of the harshest anti-immigrant measures in the country, the measure won 59 percent support from state voters, but was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge more than a decade later.
The backlash against the GOP began long before that in the Golden State. The number of Latino voters grew quickly in California in response to the perceived attacks, with Hispanic voter registration in California increasing much faster than anticipated by population growth alone.
Not only did they start voting more, they voted heavily against the Republican Party. Since then, the previously purple state that had elected and re-elected Republicans Ronald Reagan, Wilson and George Deukmeijian governor in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s has become fiercely Democratic, with no Republicans winning statewide office in nearly a decade.
“Will we see the Trump circus continue where everyone follows Donald Trump’s lead when it comes to an issue as important as immigration?” Becerra said. “If we respect our immigrant roots, we’ll talk about how we move forward with a fix to a broken immigration system, not how we just build walls, but that seems to be the discussion: building walls, denying children born in this country their citizenship. Calling children ‘anchor babies.’
“Somehow it seems like we are discrediting our path as Americans that we once too came from immigrant stock.”
