Some US presidential candidates are dusting off their Spanish dictionaries and practicing their ”buenos días” to try to gain the crucial Latino electorate. Donald Trump launched his campaign with the opposite approach, by railing against Mexicans:
“They’re bringing drugs. They are bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” he said in his remarks on June 16 in New York.
Today, Jorge Ramos, Univision’s main news anchor, named as one of Time 100’s most influential people and featured on the magazine’s cover for his sway with Latinos, answered Trump’s rant in an op-ed in Spanish published both on Univision and on his blog:
It is hypocrisy to criticize Mexicans while, at the same time, you benefit from their work. In the last few months I visited Trump’s hotels in Doral, Florida, and the Trump International Hotel and Tower in New York, and many of the extraordinary employees who attended me were Mexican. What do the employees think of their boss now? Why does he speak of Mexicans with such hate?
To Trump, who is so fond of setting challenges in his television show, The Apprentice, I propose the following: to spend one single day -just one- without their Mexican and Latino employees. He would not be able to do it. His businesses would be paralyzed. A day without Mexicans would stop the Trump empire.
Ramos also addressed Trump’s idea to close the 1,954 miles of Mexican-American border (“I would build a Great Wall, and nobody builds walls better than me,” Trump said).
It would be a waste of time and money. Nearly 40 percent of all undocumented immigrants arrive by plane; They come with a visa and then stay. No wall built by Trump could stop that. Furthermore, why does Trump want a wall when the number of undocumented Mexicans arrested in the southern border has dropped from 1.6 million in 2000 to 229,000 in 2014? It is the lowest in four decades.
Ramos, who has disclosed that his daughter will be joining Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in a communications role, has stated several times on air that no candidate will be able to make it to the White House without the support of the Latino community. Ramos, a US citizen born in Mexico and living in Miami, considers himself an immigrant.
If Trump thought that his biased statements were going to get him votes, he was wrong. It’s the other way around. He has already lost the Latino vote and, therefore, the White House. He’s fired.
On the other side of the border, some Mexicans have another way of getting back at Trump for his comments: with a piñata of his face. Beat it and you win candy.