New York Times
By Jackie Calmes
January 23, 2015
Jorge
Ramos, the Univision and Fusion television anchor who is often called
the Walter Cronkite of Latino America, was in his suburban Miami
broadcast studio when he all
but pounced on the chairman of the Republican Party, Reince Priebus,
who was appearing from Washington. The Republicans’ immigration policy
is “deportations, deportations, deportations,” Mr. Ramos said. “Why?”
Mr.
Priebus, who stared out from multiple screens in a control room here
looking as if he would rather have been doing anything but talking to
Mr. Ramos, insisted it was
not so. But Mr. Ramos would not have it.
“The message,” he retorted, “is anti-immigrant.”
For
years, Mr. Ramos largely aimed his ire at President Obama for breaking
his 2008 campaign promise — made directly to Mr. Ramos — that he would
propose an overhaul of
the nation’s immigration system in his first year in office, and for
deporting two million people since. Even after Mr. Obama announced late
last year that nearly half of the estimated 11 million undocumented
immigrants could apply to work without fear of
deportation, Mr. Ramos confronted him during a Nashville forum for
having “destroyed many families” by not acting sooner.
But Mr. Ramos’s focus has changed, he said in an interview here: “Now is the turn of Republicans.”
This
weekend, the Spanish-language Univision, and Fusion, its
English-language venture with ABC News, will cover the first gathering
of 2016 Republican presidential aspirants,
at a conservative forum in Des Moines on Saturday organized by
Representative Steve King of Iowa. Mr. King, an immigration hard-liner,
is well known to Latinos for remarks like one claiming that most young
border-crossers have “calves the size of cantaloupes
because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana.”
That
coverage follows Mr. Ramos’s in-depth reporting last week of House
Republicans’ vote to block Mr. Obama’s immigration orders and deport up
to four million people,
mainly so-called Dreamers brought to the United States as children and
the parents of American citizens. Given Republicans’ immigration stance,
Mr. Ramos expects to cover more such stories through 2016.
And that has some Republicans worried.
“Remember
what L.B.J. said, ‘When you lose Walter Cronkite, you’ve lost the
war’?” said Matthew Dowd, a campaign adviser to George W. Bush,
recalling the oft-cited if
disputed story that President Lyndon B. Johnson said he lost “middle
America” when Cronkite turned against the Vietnam War. Among Latino
voters, Mr. Ramos has the sort of influence and audience that Cronkite
had more broadly among Americans in his day.
Mr.
Ramos is “not only a journalist, he’s become the voice of the Latino
constituency,” Mr. Dowd said. “And that’s where Republicans have to
worry — you don’t want to
lose Jorge Ramos.”
How
Republicans are perceived among Latinos mattered little in the midterm
elections last year, when the party won control of both chambers of
Congress for the first time
in Mr. Obama’s presidency. Turnout of Latinos and other minority voters
was, as usual, much lower than for presidential elections, and most
close contests were in places with few Latinos.
But
in 2016, the Republican record will matter. Mitt Romney, the 2012
Republican presidential nominee, who said during the campaign that
undocumented residents should
“self-deport” — a position he defended in an interview last November on
Univision — got only 27 percent of Latinos’ votes. Republican
strategists say their 2016 nominee must get more than 40 percent to win.
The last Republican candidate to do so was Mr. Bush,
who had supported a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
Early
signs in both the Republican-run Congress and the presidential
nomination race suggest how far Republicans have veered from the
immigration course recommended two
years ago when the party, at Mr. Priebus’s direction, produced an
autopsy of Republicans’ 2012 losses that concluded that they must do
more to engage Latino voters and propose “positive solutions on
immigration.”
Republicans
“should pay a lot of attention” to Mr. Ramos, said Carlos M. Gutierrez,
a commerce secretary to Mr. Bush. “When Steve King made that terrible
comment about
kids with legs the size of cantaloupes, that was on Spanish-language TV
the same day,” Mr. Gutierrez recalled.
But
Sean Spicer, communications director for the Republican Party,
suggested that because Mr. Ramos had become such an activist on
immigration policy, “he’s now taken
with a grain of salt.”
“There’s
no question that he’s important and that he has a lot of influence, but
I think that people now have sort of recognized that he’s more of an
advocate than a journalist,”
Mr. Spicer said.
He
echoed a point that Mr. Romney made in November to Mr. Ramos’s
co-anchor at Univision, María Elena Salinas: Latino voters care as much
or more about education, health
care, jobs and the economy as they do about immigration.
“What’s disappointing,” Mr. Spicer said, “is that Jorge doesn’t want to have that conversation.”
Mr.
Ramos disputed that he was interested only in immigration and cited the
range of issues he covers on the nightly news program “Noticiero
Univision”; his Sunday show,
“Al Punto”; and his weekly program on Fusion for young Latinos and
other millennials, “America With Jorge Ramos.” He said that for Latinos,
“just like for the rest of America,” the economy and education were the
most important issues.
“But
immigration is personal,” he said. “Immigration is the issue that tells
us who is with us and who is against us; there’s no question about it.
And it’s very simple
to understand why — half of all Latinos over 18 years of age were born
outside the United States. It really makes no sense to attack them and
criticize them if you want their vote.”
The
issue is also personal for Mr. Ramos, 56, who has the smooth,
silver-haired look of a classic television anchor. Born in Mexico City,
he came to the United States
as a young journalist, and by 28 he was an anchor for Univision. In
2008, he became an American citizen. Univision is a media goliath, but
with the 2013 debut of Fusion in English, Mr. Ramos’s reach expanded
significantly, and with it the attention of American
politicians.
Both
parties now view him with trepidation. Last summer, after Speaker John
A. Boehner spurned his interview requests, Mr. Ramos traveled to Capitol
Hill and asked the
speaker at a news conference about why he would not allow the House to
vote on a bipartisan, Senate-passed immigration bill.
Representative
Luis V. Gutiérrez, Democrat of Illinois, said he told Mr. Obama when
the two flew to Las Vegas for the president’s announcement of his
immigration orders
that Mr. Ramos, on the air, had called it the most significant action
for Hispanics in 50 years. “He said that?” Mr. Obama replied, according
to Mr. Gutiérrez. But Mr. Ramos had no such praise when he later
interviewed the president in Nashville, only questions
about why Mr. Obama had long said he lacked the power to act.
That
interrogation, like some of Mr. Ramos’s five others with Mr. Obama,
drew approving attention on Fox News. Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly
both had him on their shows
afterward. But each man turned hostile when Mr. Ramos shifted to
criticize Republicans and said their opposition to immigration
legislation had forced Mr. Obama’s hand.
“It
is unfortunate that we’re concentrating on President Barack Obama in
our discussion,” Mr. Ramos told Mr. Hannity. “It is really John Boehner
and the Republicans who
blocked immigration reform.”
“That is a cheap shot,” Mr. Hannity replied.
Mr.
Ramos said he did not expect to get another interview with Mr. Obama.
And when Republicans, days after his interview with Mr. Priebus,
released their roster of televised
debates for presidential candidates, Univision and Fusion were not
among the chosen media hosts.
Mr.
Ramos responded with what has become his mantra. “The new rule in
American politics is that no one can make it to the White House without
the Hispanic vote,” he said.
“So we still expect all candidates from both parties to talk to us.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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