New York Times
By Yamiche Alcindor
February 15, 2016
Liz
Hernandez learned what deportation was at age 5, when immigration
officers burst into her home and hauled away her father and four uncles.
Five years later, she and
her mother, younger sister and infant brother, after a brief return to
Mexico in a failed attempt to start a family farm, crossed the desert
headed north again in a sweltering van driven by smugglers.
Now
25, Ms. Hernandez is among the volunteers here for Senator Bernie
Sanders, seeing his presidential bid as “the best choice for our
community and for the change we’ve
been wanting to see,” as she put it between calls to voters from a
campaign phone bank.
“I really do believe Bernie Sanders is concerned about me having a chance,” she said.
In
the battle for Nevada, which will hold its Democratic caucuses on
Saturday, the fight is largely being waged by young Latinos, many of
them immigrants, who by the hundreds
are seizing on the chance to focus attention on the hardships they have
faced and to play a potentially pivotal role in electing the next
president.
Mr.
Sanders’s supporters, racing to persuade voters unfamiliar with the
Vermont senator to embrace his focus on economic inequality, are
determined to prove that he can
win over a diverse electorate after taking New Hampshire and coming
close in Iowa. Hillary Clinton’s supporters, drawing on a network of
alliances she forged in the 2008 presidential campaign, are equally
determined to bring Mr. Sanders’s political momentum
to a screeching halt.
But for foreign-born voters and first-generation Americans, much more is at stake in Nevada than campaign gamesmanship.
With
Republicans pledging to deport millions of people who are in the
country illegally, and Donald J. Trump promising to build a wall to keep
people he called rapists
and criminals from sneaking across the border from Mexico, volunteers
and campaign workers describe the Nevada Democratic contest, in starkly
personal terms, as a chance to make a powerful statement about their
place in American society.
“I
want people to know my story,” Ms. Hernandez said, tears streaking her
cheeks as she acknowledged that she could not vote. “I want people to
know that I am undocumented,
and that when people talk about quote-unquote illegals, that’s someone
like me, someone who was only 4 or 5 years old when I came here — that
all my family ever wanted was something more than they had.”
For
young Latinos in both candidates’ camps, the hardships the Democratic
rivals increasingly speak to in their speeches — poverty, unemployment,
discrimination and forced
separation from loved ones — are all too familiar.
Leo
Murrieta, 29, a precinct captain for Mrs. Clinton who immigrated
legally from Mexico as a week-old infant, said he and his mother,
brother and sister all lost their
jobs during the 2008 recession. They lost their North Las Vegas home to
foreclosure, too, and survived on his father’s income as a school
custodian. Adding to the family’s anxieties, he said, his brother- and
sister-in-law are in the country illegally.
Mr.
Murrieta said he had made thousands of calls for Mrs. Clinton, and
described the choice in the Democratic contest as between pie-in-the-sky
idealism and a realistic
expectation of progress.
“For
me, promises don’t keep my family together,” he said. “Plans to get
things done are what are going to keep my family together. I feel like
Hillary feels that sense
of urgency that a lot of us feel. And I don’t feel that from the other
campaign.”
That
urgency is fueling two extensive, dueling and largely bilingual
statewide field operations — a necessity, experts say, given the large
transient population and complexity
of the caucus process in Nevada, where more than one in four residents
are Hispanic.
Mrs.
Clinton opened her first campaign office in the state in April, six
months before Mr. Sanders, and claims 7,000 volunteers to his 2,000. But
Sanders aides said they
were making up for the late start with Spanish- and English-language
radio and TV commercials as well as online ads. Both are training
caucusgoers and precinct leaders in Spanish and in English and holding
events geared for Latino voters — including specific
appeals to Hispanic high school students.
Still,
Mrs. Clinton’s Nevada operation is building on a foundation laid eight
years ago, when she defeated Barack Obama in the popular vote (though he
won the delegate
count). Highlighting her record on education, health care and civil
rights, her campaign holds a lopsided advantage over Mr. Sanders in
Nevada in endorsements from Latino elected officials, community
activists and prominent so-called Dreamers, who were brought
illegally to the United States as children.
Mr.
Sanders and Mrs. Clinton will appear Thursday in a televised forum on
Telemundo and MSNBC. Each will probably face tough questions: Mr.
Sanders about his vote against
a comprehensive immigration overhaul bill in 2007, and Mrs. Clinton for
saying in 2014, amid a crisis in which thousands of Central American
children crossed the border and wound up in detention, that they “should
be sent back.”
But immigration is scarcely the only important issue.
At
a training session for Clinton precinct captains last week in a heavily
Latino neighborhood of Las Vegas, Alex Noriega, 23, said she became a
Clinton supporter in 2008
because of Mrs. Clinton’s support for reproductive rights. Then 16, she
recalled, she went to Planned Parenthood to get the Plan B medication
to avoid a pregnancy after having unprotected sex and became convinced
that the policies Mrs. Clinton was advocating
were essential for women to control their bodies.
Ms.
Noriega said she was unimpressed by what she called the “radical”
politics of Mrs. Clinton’s current opponent. “I think Senator Sanders
has an unrealistic view of
how he wants to get things accomplished,” she said.
The
candidates, who swept into Nevada over the weekend, made abundantly
clear that first-generation voters and other Latinos could play a
decisive role here. In Reno on
Saturday, Mr. Sanders told hundreds of canvassers that he would push
for a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million people who are in
the country illegally.
“I
have met people throughout this campaign, young people with tears
running down their cheeks, who are literally worried that they or their
parents will be deported tomorrow,
that they will be separated from their loved ones,” he said.
And
he described himself in terms that any first-generation American could
understand. “My dad came to this country at the age of 17 without a
nickel in his pocket from
Poland, couldn’t speak English, never made much money,” Mr. Sanders
said. “But he was as proud an American as you have ever seen because he
saw what America gave to him and his kids, the kind of freedom and
opportunity it gave.”
Mrs.
Clinton has sought to diminish Mr. Sanders by casting his call for a
political “revolution” to address economic inequality as an unrealistic
obsession.
“Not
everything is about an economic theory,” Mrs. Clinton told hundreds of
supporters from organized labor at a painters’ union hall Saturday night
in Henderson, Nev.
“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow — and I will, if they deserve
it; if they pose a systemic risk, I will — would that end racism?”
She added: “Will that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?”
By contrast, Mrs. Clinton presented herself as a broader candidate, with the credibility to back up her promises.
“I
am the only candidate who will take on every barrier to progress,” she
said. “I am the only candidate that has a record of taking on those
barriers. I am the only candidate
who will stand with you in every single fight, no matter how hard it is
or how long it takes.”
Mrs. Clinton’s huge advantage in name recognition among Latinos continues to challenge Mr. Sanders’s campaign here.
When
Sanders supporters set up an information table at the University of
Nevada, Las Vegas, last week, Santiago Gudiño-Rosales, 20, a freshman
pre-med student, stood outside
for hours handing out fliers.
Born
in Mexico, he said he immigrated at 2 and became a citizen only in
2014, after hiding his identity for years out of fear that he would be
unable to get an education.
He said he believed Mr. Sanders would help millions of others like him
become citizens, too.
“We
as Latinos have to come out and realize he’s the only candidate who is
going to help us get on that pathway we need to pursue a better life,”
Mr. Gudiño-Rosales said.
But
his path in aiding Mr. Sanders so far has been uphill, Mr.
Gudiño-Rosales said. He has knocked on about 140 doors — but nearly
every Latino voter he has canvassed,
he said, has asked the same question:
“Who is Bernie Sanders?”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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