As presidential elections approach, once again the state of the Latino vote gets discussed. While the Latino population keeps increasing, many are non-citizens, very young and in parts of the country that are not contested. So to what extent does it really matter to mobilize Latino voters in November? We speak to Ray Suarez, host of the PBS News Hour, and to Antonio Gonzalez, executive director of the William C. Velasquez Institute, to get a sense of the figures and the strategies.
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Antonio Gonzalez is President of the William C. Velasquez Institute. WCVI, founded in 1985, is a paramount national Latino public policy and research organization.Gonzalez assumed the presidency of WCVI in 1994, after working in various capacities for WCVI founding President Willie Velasquez as well as his successor Andrew Hernandez during 1984-94. He assumed the presidency of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, a non-partisan voter mobilization entity, in 1994.
Ray Suarez joined The NewsHour in October 1999 as a Washington-based Senior Correspondent. Suarez came to The NewsHour from NPR where he had been host of the nationwide, call-in news program “Talk of the Nation” since 1993. Prior to that, he spent seven years covering local and national stories for the NBC-owned station, WMAQ-TV in Chicago.
I agree with you Ana and Josh. Immigrants are a big part of this country’s ecmnooy. Many of the people that are in favor of those laws have benefit their pockets at least once; using immigrants’ cheap labor, and then they have the guts to target us as delinquents. Do they stop to think that base on their accusations against illegal immigrants; they are also delinquents by hiring illegal immigrants. They’re the most hypocrites that ever walked on earth. I have to step in their shoes to try to understand their point, but then why do they look for immigrant’s cheap labor? Guess why? because to keep their ecmnooy stable, money needs to be saved, and hiring illegal immigrants (from small things such as yard work and home improvement to big companies hiring cheap laborers) is a good way to do it. Many of those immigrants are not even getting paid. They are being subject to all kinds and levels of abuse.