When President Barack Obama speaks tonight at the State of the Union Address, he will bring up immigration reform. Again.
And the cameras will likely pan to the parade of DREAMers (read: human stage props) invited to the White House as symbols of the struggle.
Again.
Among them will be Mayra Rubio Limon, a young Mexican-born daughter of farm workers from Homestead invited by Congressman Joe Garcia, who has sponsored the bill he hopes will be introduced in the House — which stalled the Senate reform bill last year, objecting to the citizenship part — with 196 signatures as of today. The 22-year-old student at Miami Dade College came to this country when she was 3 months old and didn’t even know about her illegal immigration status until she started looking at college applications her sophomore year in high school and her mother told her not to. Rubio has been active in immigration reform advocacy and awareness since then.
It is a story shared by many of the other DREAMers invited, like Cristian Avila, 23, of Arizona, who will sit with First Lady Michelle Obama. It is also a story shared by DREAMers who paraded in the White House in 2013, like Jose Godinez-Sampeiro or Alan Aleman, who find themselves in exactly the same situation this year as they were last January when immigrants everywhere declared “This is our year!”
Or, wait, wasn’t that 2012? When DREAMers were front and center at the Democratic National Convention and “poster child” Benita Veliz — who replaced “poster child” Gaby Pacheco — was brought on to the convention stage by TV and radio personality Cristina Saralegui making the young immigrant’s plight known to millions on a live national broadcast?
There are so many names and faces that you’ll have to forgive Ladra for this politically incorrect observation, but all these DREAMers are starting to look alike.
And the politicians are all starting to sound alike. On one side of the aisle you have people talking like parrots about a “moral obligation” and on the other they chant “no amnesty.”
I remember when Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — who seems to have flip-flopped on this issue so often he’s lost credibility — stood before a group of NALEO members in Orlando in 2012 and told them that immigration reform was never going to happen as long as the issue drives dollars into campaign coffers and fear into the hearts of voters who bring that anxiety with them into the polling places.
He was right then. And Ladra is afraid the same is true now, despite the watering down of the bill, so to speak, and the new “practical agenda” for immigration that Obama is expected to talk about tonight. Or maybe I’m just so jaded I won’t believe anything the President says anymore. I mean, hasn’t he promised to do something “in my first year” in two first years?
Garcia disagrees. He is expecting the 196th signature on his HR15 and says that while he may have preferred last year’s Senate bill, this one has a better chance of getting the bipartisan support it needs. The main difference is that border enforcement provisions in last year’s bill were taken out and replaced with a separate bill on border security which is moving its way through committee.
“We have 195 co-signors… no, 196 because a new one signed yesterday — and that is why Republicans are looking at doing immigration reform finally,” Garcia told Ladra.
“Everybody declared immigration reform dead. But this is how it works. We are trying to move policy,” Garcia said.
And I guess that includes moving people emotionally. Maybe Garcia believes that having all those Mayra Rubios at the address will get more people to sign on the dotted line.
“I didn’t invite anyone last year,” Garcia told Ladra. “But I’ve been a leader on immigration reform since before I got to Congress. And Mayra is indicative of the spirit of all those people who come to this country for a better life, not just for 
them, but for their families and who are immorally denied these opportunities because of their status as undocumented immigrants.
“We underestimate our power to take people from all over the world and make them Americans,” Garcia told me. “She is American in everything except documentation. She is barred from fully participating as an American by a piece of paper, but she is just as American as my 16-year-old daughter who was born here.”
Ladra was able to speak to Rubio on the telephone for a few minutes as she was given a tour of the House and shook hands with some of the co-signors of the bill. She is more optimistic than I am that “this is the year.” My words. Not hers.
“It’s definitely not a parade,” she said, maybe taking issue to my characterization of her role. “It’s a battle that has been fought for many years and we are slowly gaining ground. That is why we have more people supporting this bill now than before.”
South Florida is not necessarily a “battle ground” on the issue. Not as much as, say, Arizona or Texas might be — if only because all of the electeds here are on the same page. Heck, Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was one of the first to sign Garcia’s bill, before dozens of Democrats. And while he understands Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart‘s reluctance to publicly approve a targeted Dem’s bill, we all know that the co-sponsor of the last immigration bill to be stalled will vote in favor when the time comes — if the time comes and the GOP leadership bring the bill to the floor, as they should.
But it will likely become a battle issue on the ground game in the Congressional race for District 26, where Garcia — who beat former U.S. Rep. David “Nine Lives” Rivera in his third try for the seat last year — will face a Republican challenger from what is pretty much a three-way primary. One of those candidates, Miami-Dade School Board Member Carlos Curbelo, supports immigration reform but agrees with Ladra’s assessment that this is all sort of a dog and pony show.
“The Democrats are adept at using the immigration issue to score political points and many secretly prefer that reform does not get done so they can keep using the issue against Republicans,” Curbelo told Ladra Tuesday.
He says the proof is in the pudding: Obama, who campaigned on immigration reform within the first year of his first administration, failed to do anything when he had a filibuster-proof Senate and majority in the House. And he questions the Democrats commitment to reform when they put Garcia — a freshman Congressman who was plagued last year by an absentee ballot fraud scandal in his 2012 campaign — in charge of it.
“Can you imagine how the liberal media would have flipped out if Boehner would have asked Rivera to lead a delicate and important legislative initiative,” Curbelo asked.
I can. And it’s not pretty.
But Garcia said his constituency — which does happen to have the largest number of Colombian-American voters in any Congressional district in the U.S. — stands to benefit more from immigration reform than most. And those benefits, he said, are for immigrants with legal issues and those without as well as the rest of us. And not just because we could add around 11 million people to the tax rolls.
“The majority of people in my district are people that were born elsewhere. But when undocumented immigrants are discriminated against, also documented people get discriminated, too,” he said. “Second, we have the most workers per agricultural acre and reform would make the land more profitable.”
Other benefits would be to the state university system and the demand for high-tech talent that we are currently driving away with current immigration laws.
But I bet Mayra Rubio isn’t thinking about any of those things. Neither is Cristian Avila. Nor Jose Godinez Sampeiro. Nor Alan Aleman. Nor Beatriz Veliz. Nor Gaby Pacheco.
They just want to continue to live their American lives as they always have — and stop being useful stage props for politicians.
“It’s not just my family’s but every story is going to be changed,” she told me.
I hope it’s not just a line they fed her.
Dejavu: Joe Garcia takes Homestead DREAMer to SOTU added by Ladra on
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