Ruben Navarrette Jr.

This Father’s Day, my kids and I have a lot to talk about. If only they were listening. It’s not me, it’s them. Now that they’re teenagers, they’ve tuned out their old man. Damn. Just when I was getting to the good stuff. For one thing, at 55, I feel confident in sharing my thoughts about how to live a good life. I’ve been a liberal, a conservative, and everything in-between. I’ve visited 43 states, and I’ve lived in five of them. I’ve been knocked down, and I’ve gotten up—and been knocked down again. I had an elite education, and yet […]

Wise up, America. We somehow have held onto the crazy idea that Mexico is our partner in border security. I blame Donald Trump. The former president hatched a plan to force tens of thousands of Central Americans seeking refugee status to “remain in Mexico” while their asylum claims are heard by U.S. immigration courts. Trump needed the cooperation of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. He got it. But, for the Mexican government, helping to keep Central Americans out of the United States is one thing. Helping to keep Mexican migrants out of the U.S. is an entirely different story. Diplomats […]

I’m fed up with white liberals virtue-‘splaining to people of color what we should be saying, thinking, and feeling. As a longtime Latino columnist, I give my opinions for a living, and it’s part of the job description that you won’t ever be able to please everyone. This has led to many things being virtue-‘splained to me over three decades, often by condescending white liberals who would talk down to me because they believed they were better humans who cared more about my people than I did. One exchange comes to mind, and it happened before I was even in the […]

When President Joe Biden in March 2021 gave his first primetime address, he astutely pointed to the one thing that has united almost all Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic: a shared sense of sacrifice. “We all lost something—a collective suffering, a collective sacrifice, a year filled with the loss of life and the loss of living for all of us,” Biden told the nation. Parents of school-aged children, like myself, are among those who have incurred a terrible cost throughout the pandemic, and continue to do so. Many students had no in-person instruction for a year-and-a-half. “Remote learning” is widely accepted […]

Never mind Kansas. What’s the matter with my home state of California? Or, more in keeping with the spirit of the place, given that nearly 40 percent of the state’s population is Latino: Que pasa con California? On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom took a whack at proposing the annual state budget—all $286 billion of it—and out of the piñata flew a tasty treat: a plan to expand Medi-Cal, the state’s health care program for the economically disadvantaged, so it pays the health-care expenses of all of the state’s low-income adults, including those who are undocumented. To be honest, California was already […]

America’s latest mental health crisis is kids and parents with PTSD over public school closures—the ones they’ve already been through, and the thought that more shutdowns are on the horizon. While other cities brace for the worse, Chicago is getting there. The nation’s third-largest school district is in the grip of a hostage crisis orchestrated by the Chicago Teachers Union. The crisis isn’t limited to the district’s 340,000 students and their families. It impacts the entire city because, after all, most parents have to go to work and good luck with that if children are home and not in school. And […]

Let no one question the Biden administration’s commitment to recycling. With regard to immigrants and refugees, many of its policies are failed retreads that still carry the stench of its predecessor. If former President Donald Trump craves vindication, that’ll do nicely. In a familiar pattern, Biden is doing the wrong thing because it’s easier. The wrong and easy thing is to bring back, as soon as Monday, the absurdly misnamed Migrant Protection Protocols—more commonly known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy. Trump pushed the policy, devised by Stephen Miller, to wash his hands of the refugee crisis on our southern border. […]

The latest eruption in the overheated culture war over how public schools are run began with a cry for help from a national association tasked with looking out for school board members. And it ended with hyperventilating right-wingers crying about how Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department are supposedly targeting concerned citizens and “criminalizing parenting.” In a memo released this week, Garland instructed the FBI and U.S. Attorneys to meet in the next 30 days with federal, state, and local enforcement agencies to discuss strategies to combat what the DOJ described in a press release as an “increase in […]

On Thursday, the Biden administration unveiled a modified immigration enforcement policy where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who hunt for undocumented immigrants in the interior—and by extension the Border Patrol agents who patrol la frontera—were apparently told to stand down by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. This could be a big deal, but don’t buy it just yet. We’ve seen this play before and it doesn’t work out the way the headlines it’s meant to inspire suggest that it will. Under the policy, U.S. immigration agents are not supposed to aggressively pursue, detain, and arrest undocumented immigrants who […]

SAN DIEGO—California Republicans, and the leading Republican challenger in Tuesday’s gubernatorial recall election, Larry Elder, showed the country a neat trick. One can be a sore loser before one actually loses. No point in waiting until the last minute, I guess. The Elder campaign and the GOP started claiming that the gubernatorial recall election had been stolen and the whole process was rigged on Monday, one day ahead of the polls actually opening. One accusation was that the estimated 8 million mail-in ballots turned in to election officials before Election Day were rife for fraud. No evidence of malfeasance was presented. […]

For as long as there have been immigrants and refugees coming to the United States, there have been those who tried to keep them out by labeling them as diseased, infected, or ailing. Today, Republicans—including those concerned that the white population of the U.S. is declining, while the Latino population continues to grow—are using fear of COVID-19 and the Delta variant as an excuse to keep out refugees from Central America and to shift blame for the rapidly rising infection and hospitalization rates in red states where Republican leaders have resisted basic public-health measures. It’s ghoulish work, but Republicans with an […]

The issue that divides America now divides the Democratic Party as well. A major immigration fault line erupted this week when the Biden administration extended a controversial policy from the Trump era that kept out migrants and refugees, and the American Civil Liberties Union and immigrant rights groups immediately responded by saying they would resume a lawsuit filed during the Trump administration but had been paused after Joe Biden was sworn in to give the new president a chance to change course. The policy at issue is Title 42, which allows Customs and Border Protection agents to expel migrants from the […]

Nativists have long warned that the border states are undergoing an invasion. They’re not lying. But, it turns out, the invaders aren’t Mexican immigrants eager to do the dirty and dangerous jobs that Americans won’t go near at any price. Like the rest of the country, which is grappling with severe worker shortages as we come out of the COVID-19 lockdown, the biggest problem Americans have with immigrants at the moment is that we can’t get enough. The real menace swarming Texas and Arizona right now is a wave of slimy and opportunistic Republican governors from around the country racing to […]

In her first five months in office, Vice President Kamala Harris has learned at least one important lesson about immigration: You can run to the border, but you can’t run from the border. That’s because sooner or later the border will find you. That’s especially true when you’re a U.S. elected official in 2021, whether you’re pandering to white nativists who want to keep out Central American refugees, or Latino activists who want to let more of them in. This week, the border found Harris. The California Democrat — who never showed much interest in immigration while representing a border state […]

After many early stumbles, the Biden Administration seems finally to have found its footing in dealing with immigration. To be honest, it still loses its way now and then—usually when it follows, preserves or defends some remnant of former President Trump’s atrocious immigration policies. But, lately, it appears to be headed in the right direction. The question is whether the Biden administration can stay on course over the next year against what is likely to be a stiff political wind blowing in from the right—just in time for the 2022 midterm elections. It’s no secret that Republicans in Congress have decided […]

At least now we know why Kamala Harris wasn’t picked to be Secretary of State: Her diplomacy stinks. The vice president’s trip to Guatemala and Mexico was supposed to help get at what she says are the “root causes” of the current crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border. Instead, it may have made matters worse. First, this root-causes business is horse crap. The spinners within the Biden administration concocted that line to skirt the embarrassing fact that Harris is tasked with solving the border crisis but can’t find her way to the border, and that, despite this administration’s rhetoric, not all problems […]

Republicans are crazy about immigration. No, really. The issue makes them loco. Just listen to the things they’re saying. Many of them have lost touch with reality. Or maybe Republicans are crazy like a fox. The GOP seems to have once again pinned all of its hopes for retaking power—in this case, by winning back control of the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections and possibly regaining seats in the House of Representatives—on the immigration issue. If either of those things happen, Republicans will be in decent shape to try to retake the White House in 2024. President Joe Biden has […]

President Joe Biden is throwing the kitchen sink at immigration reform. And that’s good, because there is a lot to clean up. Biden is working both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Not only did the president keep his promise to send over, on his first day in office, a proposed immigration reform bill for Congress to chew on—and fight over for the next several months. He has also, in his first two weeks on the job, issued a slew of executive orders intended to fix some of what former president Donald Trump broke, tarnished, or sullied with his heartless, harebrained, and half-baked […]

When California Secretary of State Alex Padilla got the shock of his life on a video call Tuesday with his old friend California Gov. Gavin Newsom, he stayed in character. As a California-based Mexican American journalist who has covered elected officials for 30 years, here’s my executive summary of how Latinos approach politics: We’re passive, deferential, and respectful. We fall in line, and we don’t challenge authority. We don’t protest, demand, pressure or threaten. We accept what we’re given by the powers-that-be with humility and gratitude, head lowered and hat in hand. We don’t strut, act entitled or complain—even though, as […]

Latino voters like to make a grand entrance. They were absent from too much of the political conversation for much of the 2020 Election, neglected by both parties. But they showed up when it was time to be counted. And Latinos sure counted on election night, showing up big for Joe Biden and helping the former vice president carry the lion’s share of the 10 states where Latinos have a big footprint. Before we get to the politics, here’s a quick geography lesson. Latino America is based in the Southwest, because that’s where you find the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who make […]