Barrio Blues

LAST November “Hablador” Newt Gingrich (as the Speaker sometimes refers to himself before Latino audiences) told a group of Cubans and Nicaraguans in Miami that America needed to extend a “gran abrazo” to everyone in the American family. Several weeks ago in Dallas, before a gathering of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) Hablador Gingrich promised enigmatically to “rethink the entire structure of how we deal with the [Mexican] border.” Texas governor and presidential hopeful George W. Bush was also courting LULAC, praising education in “English Plus”—a program hardly different from bilingual education.

Such rhetoric might have been lifted directly from the Democratic Party’s multiculturalism repertoire. For the past year, the Republican Congress has refused to address the problems caused by large scale immigration; indeed, it has been in full flight from the very limited immigration reform measures proposed in 1996. The GOP’s new strategy of open pandering to the various Latino ethnic lobbies seems to indicate a further shift in the political winds.

SM

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Scott McConnell

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LAST November “Hablador” Newt Gingrich (as the Speaker sometimes refers to himself before Latino audiences) told a group of Cubans and Nicaraguans in Miami that America needed to extend a “gran abrazo” to everyone in the American family. Several weeks ago in Dallas, before a gathering of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) Hablador Gingrich promised enigmatically to “rethink the entire structure of how we deal with the [Mexican] border.” Texas governor and presidential hopeful George W. Bush was also courting LULAC, praising education in “English Plus”—a program hardly different from bilingual education.

Such rhetoric might have been lifted directly from the Democratic Party’s multiculturalism repertoire. For the past year, the Republican Congress has refused to address the problems caused by large scale immigration; indeed, it has been in full flight from the very limited immigration reform measures proposed in 1996. The GOP’s new strategy of open pandering to the various Latino ethnic lobbies seems to indicate a further shift in the political winds.