Our Q&A with Lionel Sosa, San Antonio marketing executive and a founder of Mexicans & Americans Thinking Together (MATT.org). He was in Dallas last week to meet with the editorial board.
As a Republican, you've done Hispanic outreach for GOP presidential candidates since Ronald Reagan's day. Didn't you leave the GOP last year over the immigration issue?
I didn't leave the Republican Party. I'm still a Republican, and I will always be. But I felt that they're being unnecessarily nasty. Look, you can say I stand for law and order, I stand for border security, but we also need to understand that economically, and for our own good,
are persons we need, and we need to find a way to make it work. McCain is very close to that answer. That's the kind of message that any Republican should have.
The Republicans aren't doing their job because they're nasty, and the Democrats are not doing their job because they're not stepping up to the issue, you know? Everyone wants to stay away from it because it's too darn controversial. Once the two presidential candidates are chosen, it's going to be a different story.
There's no way that a Romney or a Giuliani – who we all know get it but who want to get nominated, so they change their stance to be anti-immigrant, when they really aren't. So they're going to come back to where they really are because now they're the nominee, and they know they're going to have to get at least 40 to 45 percent of the Hispanic vote, or they're going to lose.
What about Texas Republicans and their future in a state that's going to be majority Hispanic in about a decade?
Oh, Cornyn, if he stays where he is, he's going to take a drubbing. In Texas, you have to be sensitive to the Latino. The Cornyn camp says Latinos don't want illegal immigrants, either. I don't know who's doing their research, but when somebody says, "Send them back; they're criminals," and I'm a Latino and as Republican as you can get ... we say, "What the hell's happening here?" We can't be with people who are that nasty. And we can't be the only people feeling this way.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-pointofcontact_13edi.ART.State.Edition1.37b09a3.html
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