Hispanic Fanatic

So two months into America’s slow-motion collapse, it’s time to ask, what do Latino leaders think of our sociopathic, incompetent lunatic of a president?

Well, 403 Hispanic opinion leaders recently took part in what the National Institute for Latino Policy (NILP) calls, “the closest thing to an ongoing survey of national Latino leadership in existence today.”

Now, the NILP takes the rather odd position of breaking down survey results by Latino subsets (e.g., Puerto Rican, Mexican, Other Latino), so overall numbers are difficult to ascertain.

Still, the range of responses is pretty consistent across demographics. For example, the percentage of Hispanic leaders who think Trump will create “the wrong kind of change” in America ranges from 84% to 93%. That’s a pretty tight grouping.

So we can safely say that, for example, Latino leaders believe Trump is a menace on immigration, because anywhere from 93% to 98% of them think that.

As you can imagine, the survey’s results are fairly grim for the Orange Menace. We see that 93% to 99% of Latino leaders believe that Trump will divide the nation. And it’s clear that Trump’s Muslim travel ban isn’t exactly popular with Hispanic leaders, in that 87% to 96% of them disapprove of it.

So is there any good news for Trump in this survey?

Well, this is as close as it gets to positivity for the president:

Latino leaders are divided over whether Trump should be impeached for his business conflicts of interest, or for his shady dealings with Russia — with some even saying he should be impeached for his refusal to disclose his tax returns.

That’s right. Latino leaders aren’t split over whether Trump should be removed from office. About 65% to 73% of them want that.

The only bickering is over the precise way to do it.

For Trump, this constitutes a victory lap.

The biggest story in America right now — not the biggest Latino-themed story, but the most talked-about news item, period — is the humanitarian crisis at the border. As we all know, tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants — many of them children — are massed in overrun detention centers, awaiting their fate.

Meanwhile, whole towns of god-fearin’ Americans are making it clear that they don’t want no stinkin’ illegals in their neighborhood.

Yes, this is the latest, most impressive imbroglio over immigration. And in the minds of many Americans, all immigrants are undocumented, all undocumented people are Hispanic, and all Hispanics are undocumented immigrants. It’s a nice little A=B=C theorem.

But the funny thing is that there are 11.7 undocumented migrants in the U.S. By comparison, the overall U.S. Hispanic population is 53 million. Although “immigration is the issue most associated with Latinos…it is not necessarily the most interesting issue to Latinos.” One could argue, in fact, that “most Latinos would probably love not to have to deal with it.”

Indeed, Pew Research says that the top issues for Hispanics are education, jobs and the economy, healthcare, the federal government debt, and (in fifth place) immigration. Even among Hispanic immigrants themselves, only one-third say immigration is an extremely important issue to them personally.

The discrepancy between immigration’s status in the media and its actual importance to the Hispanic community has provoked some Hispanic leaders to say that immigration “occupies almost all the Latino policy agenda, sucking up…all the oxygen on Latino issues.”

Latino leaders say that Hispanics “need to strike a better balance” and not allow immigration to stifle “the Latino agenda for the 21st century. We have to get to the point where we can walk and chew gum at the same time, and focus on other things like discrimination, education, and the infrastructures in our communities.”

It’s a fair point. But immigration is not going away as a media hot topic anytime soon. It’s been pointed out that whether “we are talking about health care or voting rights, there are those who keep inserting immigration into the mix, whether it pertains to a particular issue or not – and normally in a detrimental way.”

And let’s not forget that the media “tends to reduce our diversity down to one issue [and] treat us all as perpetual immigrants.” 

But just you wait, someday soon a national Latino leader will be invited to a Sunday morning news program, and he or she will be asked about the deficit or the Israeli-Palestinian problem or guns in schools or whether the president should be impeached for wearing white after Labor Day or whatever.

And nobody will mention immigration. And it will be pretty cool.