Representative Luis Gutierrez, one of the most passionate amnesty advocates in Congress, reacted to the House border legislation with his trademark restraint and sobriety: “It is almost as though they despise and hate all of our children.”
Many commenters recoiled from the tried and true leftist tactic (Gutierrez is a former member of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party) of emotional manipulation through appeals to “the children.” But what I found more disturbing was his use of the possessive pronoun “our” in referring to the illegal aliens from Central America crossing into South Texas. For Gutierrez is clearly a tribal politician, one who sees himself as a spokesman and leader not for his fellow Puerto Ricans, or even for Americans of Hispanic origin in general, but for Latin Americans wherever they are. This kind of politicized ethnicity is poison to a multi-ethnic democracy. The only way to avoid going down the road of Bosnian Serbs, Kosovar Albanians, Tutis vs. Hutu, and all the rest is by comprehensively privatizing ethnicity and actively cultivating a strong trans-racial American nationalism. On both counts the Left fails.