In a recent interview with the Spanish media outlet El Intermedio, Univision's senior news anchor, Jorge Ramos, was completely upfront in revealing his disdain for the sizeable segment of U.S. Latinos who vote for Republicans, including for Donald Trump.
When El Intermedio correspondent Guillermo Fesser asked Ramos to explain how it is possible that Republicans nationally consistently capture about a third of the Latino electorate (and in a prime battleground state like Florida, significantly more) Ramos candidly responded that these are the Latino voters who (evidently unlike himself, and Democrat voters) are "totally identified" with the United States, and who have socially conservative values that more closely align with the GOP.
JORGE RAMOS, SENIOR NEWS ANCHOR, UNIVISION: There are people that feel totally identified with this country, that believe the same things that Donald Trump believes. If you vote for someone, you partially resemble that. And also that, among Latinos, there are very conservative values that are commonly held with the Republican Party, President Trump’s party. The, the religious issue, the importance of family, the abortion issue. This explains, in part, why one out of three Hispanics vote for Donald Trump and is so conservative.
This statement amounts to another version of his infamous post-2016 election denunciation of Hispanic Trump voters as those who “forgot their origins.” That was exactly his explanation back then, in an interview with Carmen Aristegui.
CARMEN ARISTEGUI: How do you explain...well, everything, but how do you explain the Latino vote? Something unnatural, something absurd, something that is not understandable, unless you have some sort of an idea that helps understand what is not easy (to understand)?
JORGE RAMOS, SENIOR NEWS ANCHOR, UNIVISION: I don't know what numbers you are looking at, Carmen, I've heard, but there's still some missing, that he could have attained 30% (of the Latino vote).
CARMEN ARISTEGUI: Oof.
JORGE RAMOS, ANCHOR, UNIVISION: This greatly surprised me, because Romney, with his 27%, lost four years ago. The only way to explain it is (that) immigrants or the children of immigrants that forgot their origins, and then, of course, you have to be very honest here.
If you “forgot your origins” in 2016, it stands to reason that you would “totally identify with this country” (the one that you live in and work in and raise your kids in, by the way) in 2018, at least according to Ramos’ rationale (or lack thereof).
As the full transcript of his El Intermedio interview below reveals, Ramos disdainfully framed this state of play as “inexplicable”, as if it were impossible to believe that any number of Hispanics, much less 29%, would place their own priorities and self-interest above his favored brand of racial and identity politics.
Ramos’ schtick is by no means new. Earlier during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Ramos first accused Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio of race-betrayal, then subsequently celebrated their defeat in the primaries. Ramos also allowed former United States Treasurer Rosario Marín suggestion that Jeb Bush's stance on immigration made him “more Latino” than Cruz or Rubio to go unchallenged, and had the gall to ask Beto O'Rourke whether Cruz had “betrayed...other Latinos like him.”
Ramos’ later complaint in the El Intermedio interview about the alleged lack of “proportional representation” of Latinos in the United States Senate is also patently dishonest. You can’t whine about having “only four" out of 100 U.S. Senators, and then dismiss half of them (the Republican ones) as “race-traitors.”
As MRC Latino has previously documented, on this score Ramos is guilty of using the same ugly, race-based logic as white nationalist leaders such as Jared Taylor. But the reality is that Ramos doesn't really even buy into his own logic. At the end of the day, he would undoubtedly prefer and feel better represented in the United States Senate by more Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warrens than more Ted Cruzes and Marco Rubios.
There is also Ramos’ waving away of Hispanic social conservatives (note his take that you become what you vote for). The "religious issue”, as Ramos puts it, involving matters like abortion and religious freedom, is indeed a big deal for large numbers of Hispanics throughout the nation. In his crass reductionism, Ramos also fails to mention the large number of economically conservative Hispanics who, in many cases, don't want to see the United States become that which they left behind in their countries of origin. This should be no mystery to Ramos, a longtime resident of Miami.
Once again, what is bad news for Jorge Ramos is good news for conservatives. In 2018, many Hispanics continued to buck Ramos' wishes and vote Republican, particularly in key battleground states like Florida where, according to Pew Research, victorious Republican standard-bearers Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis garnered 45% and 44% of the Latino vote, respectively.
Below is a full transcript of the above-referenced interview by El Intermedio:
GUILLERMO FESSER, U.S. CORRESPONDENT, EL INTERMEDIO: Hello, humans. Univision Noticias, Jorge Ramos, Jorge Ramos, Univision Noticias, the host with the most, the Spanish-speaking voice that reports in the United States.
JORGE RAMOS, SENIOR NEWS ANCHOR, UNIVISION: It’s a pleasure to be here with you.
FESSER: Two years have passed.
RAMOS: Yes.
FESSER: Where were we two years ago, those of us that speak Spanish, the Latinos, the Hispanics, whatever you want to call us, and where are we now? What happened with the Trump grinder, that is, what did it break? What has happened here?
RAMOS: It’s been, from the vantage point of minorities and Latinos, it’s been a very terrible journey. The economy is going very well. In other words, unemployment levels in the United States for all groups, including Latinos, are the lowest in years. In some cases, they’re the lowest of all time. That’s the positive. The negative is that we’re being pounded from all sides. In other words, Donald Trump calls us criminals and rapists, all of us. There are new laws in order to deport increasingly more people. All who come from abroad runs the risk of, despite requesting political asylum, of...of being rejected. There are constant attacks on social media, and personally, against minorities, to such, to such a degree that you feel like this isn't your country. There is danger for many mixed families, that is, (made up) of people that are citizens and of undocumented, of not knowing whether the parents will be able to come home because they might be deported. There is an anti-immigrant climate the likes of which I’ve never seen in the 35 years that I’ve been here.
FESSER: How do you view the march by these terrible criminals that come from honduras and Guatemala? Terrible criminals with, that are mothers and babies and such because
RAMOS: I just, I just returned from over there. And, what are they? They’re mostly Central Americans, largely from Honduras. Close to 7,000 left originally, (including) about 2,500 children who,m according to UNICEF, all they are asking for is political asylum. They want to be political asylees in the United States. (Both) International and U.S. laws allow for that but Donald Trump is portraying them as criminals, full of diseases, as a national security threat. Along the U.S.-Mexico border there is a far larger military presence than the American military presence in Iraq or Syria. This, then, is precisely the threat that Donald Trump is selling Americans. He is saying, “they are invading us.” In a country where, with 320 million residents, 5,000 or 4,000 or 7,000
FESSER: Immigration isn’t currently a problem in the United States, is it?
RAMOS: It isn’t.
FESSER: The current economy, and knowing that if you go to a restaurant the guy that is serving your soup is Mexican, if you go to a field the guy picking your beets is a Mexican. If you pull Mexicans out of this country, it’ll be like in Span when we expelled, first the Jews and then the Arabs, and we were left in the aforementioned fields with no one to pick anything for us.
RAMOS: It’s a problem. There’s a demographic revolution in the United States, and we Latinos are 60 million, when I arrived to this country in ‘83 we were 15 million, and within 30 years we’ll be over 100 million, One out every three people in the United States will be Hispanic. They’ll be like us. Very well. The problem is that we’ve not gone from great numbers to power. We don’t have political power. We’re close to 20% of the population, but have only four senators. Four out of 100. And 29% of Latinos voted for Donald Trump. That, to many, is inexplicable. There are…
FESSER: And what is the explanation for the few?
RAMOS: The explanation is that there are people that feel totally identified with this country, that believe the same things that Donald Trump believes. If you vote for someone, you partially resemble that. And also that, among Latinos, there are very conservative values that are commonly held with the Republican Party, President Trump’s party. The, the religious issue, the importance of family, the abortion issue. This explains, in part, why one out of three Hispanics vote for Donald Trump and is so conservative.
FESSER: The latest Trump thing is that people born in the United States automatically, because of the Constitution, become U.S. citizens. But Donald Trump says, now, perhaps alfo in order to avoid the Latinos that, according to him, come here to give birth because it seems that everyone is interested in becoming American, no one wants to live in their own home(land), they come voluntarily, and now he wants to take away the right of someone born here to be considered and to have all the rights.
RAMOS: Donald Trump is an anti-immigrant president, opposed not only to those who look and sound different than he does, but to those who come from abroad. And he is reflecting the terrible anxieties of white people in this country, who in 2044, we’re all going to be minorities in this country...whites, Latinos, Asians, African-Americans. Everyone. And that’s the great fear that Donald Trump represents. That is, that Trump is saying to white people, “there’s increasingly less of us, but don’t worry because I’ll make sure that whites remain the majority in this country.”
FESSER: Back to immigration. You’ve returned from seeing this caravan (full) of so many desperate humans…
RAMOS: Yes.
FESSER: Because we’re ultimately in the age of desperation. What do you think is going to happen? The armed forces, what are they going to do? In other words, how do you see, how do you imagine on the Univision anchor desk, what story will you tell? What’s going to happen, huh?
RAMOS: You know, in the end, if I had to choose between betting on Trump’s idea or the immigrants’ idea, immigrants always win out. Trump will lose again. Because what these 7,000 will do, and then a second and a third caravan and a, and there will be a fourth and a fifth and ten other caravans. What happens is that they arrive at the border and there’s (their) fear and hunger are far greater than Donald Trump. And so, they’ll arrive at the border- they’ve gambled everything. And they’ve gambled everything because they’ve lost everything. And so, they simply don’t return. They stay along the border with Mexico, they get through little by little, on a drip, one by one they request asylum and then they stay here. I think I’d do the same. In other words, if I lived in Tegucigalpa or San Pedro Sula, and my teenaged son could potentially be recruited by the gangs, or my daughter could be raped if she didn’t accept the gangs’ conditions, then, what would I do? I think I’d leave.
FESSER: Elections.
RAMOS: Yes.
FESSER: The U.S., two years of Trump, we’ve talked about the oppression, the disaster, this grinder that is demolishing so many things. But is there something positive that we might say, “man, in reaction it turns out that there’s an angry woman in Wyoming that" Is there something? Something?
RAMOS: There’s, there are wonderful things. There’s an entire current within the United States that has emerged in opposition to Donald Trump but that are doing wonderful things. You have the Dreamers, these kids that arrived here undocumented, that have organized wonderfully, that go into Senators’ and Congressmens’ offices. They don’t allow them to eat in restaurants and harass them wherever they go.
FESSER: They do the famous mass harrassments.
RAMOS: Until they change the immigration laws. We live 40 minutes away from the Parkland school in Florida where, several months ago, 17 students and teachers were murdered. These...
FESSER: How moving.
RAMOS: ...high school kids are changing gun laws in the united States. There’s a very strong “Me Too” movement, (comprised) of women, above all young women, that is changing the balance of power within all the corporations and within the government, so I see very positive things here. I am still a very optimist guy with a lot of hope.
FESSER: Well, we’ll leave on that note. There are elections. Whoever wins, there is hope among humans. We’re saying goodbye. Thank you very much, Jorge Ramos.
RAMOS: Humans, is that how you sign off?
FESSER: Yes. Goodbye.
RAMOS: See you later. Thanks.
