What Trump gets wrong about Hispanics in the U.S.

Toyota's Lexus luxury line is among the brands marketing toward Latinos, who injected $1.4 trillion into the U.S. economy in 2016, according to a new report (VidaLexus Presents: RPM – Reengineering Popular Music with Raquel Sofía)

By Tracy Jan
Washington Post

President Trump, as he ran for office, portrayed Latino immigrants as a drain on the U.S. economy, saying "The Mexican government ... they send the bad ones over because they don't want to pay for them."

But Trump’s campaign rhetoric ignored this fact: The growing Latino population injected $1.4 trillion into the U.S. economy in 2016, according to a new report by the Selig Center for Economic Growth. That’s larger than the GDP of Mexico.

The rapid growth of Hispanic buying power in the U.S. is not a result of population growth alone. Per capita, the buying power of Hispanics in the country has jumped from $13,880 each in 2000 to more than $24,050 each in 2016 -- accounting for every man, woman and child.

Upper-income Hispanics are fueling much of that spending power as the proportion of wealthy Hispanic households in the U.S. expands. Those making more than $100,000 a year accounted for nearly 16 percent of all Hispanic households in 2015, double the percentage in 2004, according to the Pew Research Center. More than half of those households reside in California, Florida, New York and Texas.

Corporations have taken note. Industries from real estate and banking to luxury automakers and prestige cosmetics are expanding their marketing towards this rapidly growing demographic.

“There’s definitely money, and growing money, in this segment so you absolutely cannot ignore it,” said Brian Bolain, general manager for Lexus marketing.

[Trump to order building of border wall, crackdown on sanctuary cities]

Toyota, the No. 1 auto brand among Hispanic consumers for the past decade, has created a corporate department specifically targeting Hispanics for its various vehicle divisions, including its Lexus luxury line.

As a result, Lexus is now the top selling luxury automobile brand to Hispanics, said Sara Hasson, senior vice president in Univision’s strategy and insights group who works with auto manufacturers and dealers. Other elite brands such as Audi, Mercedes and BMW are also investing millions each year in Spanish-language advertising, with luxury auto ads on Spanish television and radio tripling since 2013, Hasson said.

One ad introducing the 2017 Lexus IS line, the brand’s entry-level sedan, features a car speeding through city streets spliced with scenes from a soccer match. A male voice-over says in Spanish, “No cheerleaders. No mascots. No halftime show. All thrills. Exhilarating performance in its purest form.”

Hispanics accounted for a quarter of Lexus IS sales in 2016. But Lexus markets a half a dozen cars at higher price points each year to Hispanics, through not only traditional ads but also music videos starring Latin musicians, short programs featuring Latin chefs and athletes, live concerts, and events inviting consumers to test drive various models around a track.

“One of the things we feel that’s key to their success is they are not making an assumption that you could only afford the entry-level vehicle,” Hasson said.

Companies especially strive to build brand loyalty early among wealthy Latinos because they tend to be younger and have larger families than the non-Hispanic upscale consumer. And while the majority of the target audience is bicultural and fluent in both English and Spanish, marketers say it’s still important to create Spanish-language ads that appeal to multi-generational Hispanic families.

“Parents and grandparents, you have to address the whole family,” Bolain said. “People who have a voice and a vote in that ecosystem.”

[The group that seriously out-earns white men]

While affluent Hispanic households tended to be Cuban American or South American two decades ago, there is growing affluence among Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, said Gabriela Alcantara-Diaz, who owns her own advertising firm in Miami and who sits on the board of the national trade group AHAA: The Voice of Hispanic Marketing. The trade group, in partnership with Nielsen, a global information and measurement company, has identified Latinos earning $50,000 to $100,000 annually as one of the most influential consumer segments since the baby boomers.  

Hispanic wealth is also expanding beyond the traditional urban centers in Miami, New York and Los Angeles to secondary markets such as San Bernardino, Calif., and Jacksonville, Fla., Alcantara-Diaz said.

“There have been a lot of regional players more aggressive in pursuing the emerging upscale Hispanics” than national opportunities, said Alcantara-Diaz, whose firm began focusing on this demographic while working with Johnnie Walker whiskey and Publix supermarkets two decades ago. “We knew it was just a matter of time before this market would influence national trends.”

Hispanics have become key drivers of homeownership growth in the U.S., accounting for 69 percent of total net growth, according to a 2016 report by the Hispanic Wealth Project. They tend to accumulate wealth through real estate and small businesses but underperform in other assets like the stock market and retirements accounts.

“Hispanics are earning more money but not making up ground on the wealth side,” said Gary Acosta, chief executive of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, who created the Hispanic Wealth Project with the goal of tripling Hispanic household wealth by 2024.

[Hispanics are doing really well. And so is Donald Trump.]

Wells Fargo expanded its Hispanic sales force by 15 percent last year in hopes that more diverse loan officers and home mortgage consultants would better cater to its growing Latino clientele, said Brad Blackwell, an executive vice president with Wells Fargo Home Mortgage.

The bank is also opening new mortgage offices in branches that serve large Latino populations in Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix. And it has made a commitment, in collaboration with the Hispanic Wealth Project, to lend $125 billion to Hispanic homebuyers by 2025 and invest $10 million from the bank’s foundation to educate and counsel Hispanic homebuyers.  

(Wells Fargo’s commitment follows a $175 million settlement in a lawsuit alleging that the bank discriminated against Hispanic and African American borrowers.)

In contrast to the many other companies pursuing wealthy Latino consumers, Sotheby’s International Realty, which focuses on high-end properties, does not specifically tailor its marketing toward Hispanics, let alone advertise in Spanish.

In Miami, where Sotheby’s average property sale price tops well over $1 million, Latino agents make up about a third of the real estate agents. But the nuances of language and cultural differentiation tend to disappear, said Michael Valdes, a global vice president at Sotheby's and the company’s highest ranking Latino.

Winning the Latino Vote: What Republicans can learn from Chris Christie and Susana Martinez

By LESLIE SANCHEZ 

In a state where 18 percent of the population is Hispanic, the residents of Union City are 85 percent Hispanic or Latino -- more than any place in New Jersey. It was no coincidence that Governor Chris Christie chose Union City as the site for the last rally of his successful re-election campaign, an event that also featured the only out-of-state Republican Governor he brought into the Garden State to campaign for him -- New Mexico’s Susana Martinez.

Christie’s choice of Union City and his selection of Governor Susana Martinez as his surrogate go a long way to explaining how he won an outright majority (51 percent) of the Hispanic vote, the first Republican Governor in three decades to do so -- but it’s only part of the story.

In 2011, nearly two-thirds of Union City voters were registered as Democrats, compared to 6.5 percent Republicans. Just last year, 81 percent of the city’s voters supported President Barack Obama.

Yet on the night before New Jersey voted, Governor Christie and Governor Martinez were talking up a raucus crowd of 200 mostly Hispanic voters who had waited in the cold to cheer them. Martinez delivered half her remarks in Spanish.

 Christie’s choice of Union City and his selection of Governor Susana Martinez as his surrogate go a long way to explaining how he won an outright majority (51 percent) of the Hispanic vote.

They were joined onstage by the City’s Democratic Mayor Kevin Stack, and by Celin J. Valdivia, the Democratic candidate for Commissioner of the Department of Parks and Recreation. The entire Union City Democratic Committee had crossed lines to endorse the Republican Governor, as had many of the city’s other municipal officials.

Christie borrowed from Woody Allen in his victory speech, attributing his success to “showing up.”

“While we may not always agree, we show up everywhere,” he said. “We just don’t show up in the places that vote for us a lot, we show up in the places that vote for us a little. We don’t just show up in the places where we’re comfortable, we show up in the places where we’re uncomfortable.”

It took a lot more than “showing up” -- and therein lie the lessons for Republicans who seek to regain the trust of America’s fastest-growing community.

True, “showing up” can represent a powerful message to a community so long isolated from the political process. At the Union City rally, Democrat Blanca Diaz told a reporter, “the other governors, they never come here.”

“The governor has built inroads into the Latino community for the past 11 years, going back to his days as a U.S. Attorney,” observes Christie campaign advisor Michael Duhaime.

But it is what happens after Republicans show up that matters. Christie has governed as a fiscal conservative and he has been a sworn enemy of the Garden State’s powerful teachers’ unions. In Union City, however, he’s remembered for working diligently and in good faith with community leaders and Democrats in City Hall on issues ranging from education reform and charter schools to property taxes and public safety.

His success is also a matter of tone. Calling Christie “plain spoken” is putting it politely, and yes, he can come off as brusque -- but it is impossible to doubt his sincerity or the quality of his intentions. That’s how to build bridges with 51 percent of Hispanics, not by insulting their intelligence or pandering.

 Christie has governed as a fiscal conservative and he has been a sworn enemy of the Garden State’s powerful teachers’ unions. In Union City, however, he’s remembered for working diligently and in good faith with community leaders.

Hispanics want what everybody else wants: a good job, a nice place to live in a safe neighborhood, and for our kids to have a better life than ours. Christie delivered that, and New Jersey’s Hispanic voters returned the favor by trusting him to continue to do so.

It certainly didn’t hurt that Christie has wisely rejected the shrill anti-immigration rhetoric of some Republicans. It offends and alienates Hispanics -- immigrants and native-born alike. Late in the campaign, citing an improved fiscal climate in the state, he even reversed his position on a state version of the DREAM Act that will allow undocumented students to take advantage of in-state tuition rates.

The Christie campaign’s reported $1 million in Spanish-language TV (from a warchest that allowed him to overspend his opponent by a margin of 10:1) was likewise clearly a factor.

It’s important to note, too, that New Jersey’s Latino population is much more diverse than in many parts of the country. Assimilated Cubans and Puerto Ricans make up fully 50 percent of the Garden State’s Hispanic electorate, and neither group directly faces the broken immigration system that motivates so many other Hispanic communities toward the Democrats (Puerto Ricans enjoy U.S. citizenship due to the island’s being a U.S. Territory, while Cubans have refugee status). New Jersey also boasts significant populations of assimilated Brazilian, Spanish, and Portugese-Americans, who tend to be more fiscally conservative than other Latino groups.

Nevertheless, the lessons of Christie’s tenure and his campaign should not be lost on Republicans elsewhere.

Governor Martinez, too, has maintained astronomically high approval ratings in a blue state. According to a poll last month by Survey USA and Albuquerque station KOB, Martinez enjoys the support of 66 percent of New Mexico’s voters, including 70 percent of women, 64 percent of independents, and 44 percent of registered Democrats. (While cross-tabs were not provided, given that nearly half of New Mexico’s population is Hispanic, it is reasonable to believe that her approval numbers are consistently high within those communities as well).

 Martinez, too, has built support by reaching across party lines to seek compromise wherever possible and by consistently putting the needs of her state’s hard-pressed population ahead of party politics and ideological conformity.

Martinez, too, has built support by reaching across party lines to seek compromise wherever possible and by consistently putting the needs of her state’s hard-pressed population (New Mexico’s poverty rate is second only to Mississippi’s and fully 20 percent of the state’s population is without health care ) ahead of party politics and ideological conformity.

Like Christie, she has worked with a Democratic-controlled legislature to fashion a workable agenda that governs from the center-right. Like him, she rejected the GOP’s prevailing ideology to expand Medicaid under Obamacare.

As Republicans and Democrats alike study the lessons of Chris Christie’s stunning victory among Hispanics, each side should consider the words of Martin Perez, President of the Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey: “In the past,” he said, “what has happened is that the Democratic Party that we have endorsed a lot of times has taken us for granted, and the Republican Party didn’t pay much attention. We have to look beyond labels and look at what is in the best interest of community. He [Christie] tries to find common ground.”   RF

Leslie Sanchez, author of “Los Republicanos: Why Hispanics and Republicans Need Each Other,” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), was Director of the White House Initiative on Hispanic Education and is a Republican political strategist.

Opinion: Putting a perverse publicity stunt in perspective

Students at UT Austin

by Stephen A. Nuño, @StephenANuno 

 In the continuing learning process of how to act in a changing society, a conservative group at the University of Texas’ flagship university in Austin got a lesson in humility it will surely want to forget.

Young Conservatives of Texas were to hold a “Catch an Illegal Immigrant” event this week, where club members would wander around campus “wearing signs that say, ‘illegal immigrant’, and students who capture them and take them to the Young Conservatives’ recruiting tables will get $25 gift certificates”.

This level of diaper-wearing attention-seeking by the group’s chairman, Lorenzo Garcia, would be embarrassing enough to any parent. Yet Garcia was desperately seeking attention for his sick publicity stunt, and the media gave Garcia what he was looking for.  A story on the prospect of “an illegal immigrant hunt” was bound to get clicks, so the media gave Garcia what he was looking for.

Yet it’s important in a democratic society to respond to the littleness of such ideas precisely because of its privileged source.

Insensitivity to human suffering is one thing, and promoting policies that needlessly contribute to human suffering is yet another. But reveling in that suffering by mocking those caught in the claws of our immigration system is a level of sociopathic behavior that can only be matched by the irony of the event being held at a university of immense privilege, in fact already a majority-minority school, by a kid with a Hispanic surname.

In fact, the same kid recently held an affirmative action bake sale.  Students were sold baked goods on a price scale where minorities paid less than whites and Asians, the message being that whites and Asians are being discriminated against by affirmative action policies.

One wonders what access to privilege students like Garcia are yearning for when the median wealth of whites is almost twenty times that of blacks, and whites outpace blacks in almost any socio-economic measurement imaginable.  Acknowledging our history of discrimination against minority groups is a small gesture by institutions of higher learning to consider in the admissions process, and the current gauntlet of depravity thrown at minority communities known as the “war on drugs” is yet another reason to fight for comprehensive admissions policies.

Our immigration policy is but another system of control over minorities, most of which who come here as a result of American foreign policy decisions that are impoverishing the homes of the immigrants among us we now resent, and Mr. Garcia finds so much joy in his perverse publicity stunt.

The response by the Greg Abbot for Governor campaign was to rightfully call this a “repugnant effort” and to distance itself from the Young Conservatives leader.

Garcia was forced to cancel the event when the President of UT-Austin voiced his denunciation of the young conservatives’ proposed stunt and the Office of Diversity and Community Engagement objected to the event by calling it a violation of the student honor code.

Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, but only because social media and our institutions of information compelled others into the admission that the sources of power are changing.

Lesson learned, for now.


Stephen A. Nuño, Ph.D., NBC Latino contributor and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University. He is currently writing a book on Republican outreach into the Latino Community.

 

(New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie talks to the media as he visits Jose Marti Freshman Academy in Union City, N.J. Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2013, the day after defeating Democratic challenger Barbara Buono to win his second term as governor. (AP Photo/Rich Schultz))

Analysis: Christie win with Latinos will be tougher nationally

by Suzanne Gamboa, @SuzGamboa 

Gov. Chris Christie pulled off in New Jersey what Mitt Romney failed to do nationally – attract lots of Latino voters. Now, can he or any other GOP presidential hopeful do the same nationally in 2016?

Christie’s capture of 51 percent of the Latino vote helped return him for a second term as governor. Just as important, it’s given Republicans a shining example showing other GOPers they can rebound from Romney’s 27 percent showing with Latinos in 2012.

“The results show we can win the Latino vote,” said Izzy Santa, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, which assisted Christie’s campaign. “Our work isn’t done there. We are going to evaluate where we need to be to keep growing the electorate.”

Getting that large share of the Latino vote was done by treating Latinos like everybody else and getting in the trenches long before election time, Christie said in a post-election news conference.

RELATED: In Chris Christie’s re-election, Republicans see blueprint for Latino support 

“The problem politicians make is they look at a specific community and say what can I say to appeal to them? That’s not my approach. Latino folks want the same thing that everyone else wants,”  Christie said.
Mike Duhaime, Christie’s top political strategist, voiced what is likely to become mantra for Republicans who have been steadily losing Latinos amid anti-immigrant and anti-Latino rhetoric.

“There’s no chance to win a blue state if you don’t go out and win over Hispanics, win over a larger portion of  African Americans, win a large chunk of Democrats,” Duhaime told Chuck Todd on Wednesday’s morning’s “The Daily Rundown.”

But New Jersey’s Latino population is not a mirror of the Hispanic population at large. What plays in Jersey, may not play in New Mexico, even if that state’s governor was at Christie’s side on the final day of his campaign.

The state’s largest Latino group is Puerto Rican, about 30 percent of the Latino population, according to Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project. Among eligible Latino voters, four-in-ten are Puerto Rican, 13 percent are of Dominican origin, about 9 percent are of Cuban descent and five percent are of Mexican origin. Another 31 percent are of other Hispanic origin.

Nationally, 59 percent of eligible Latino voters are of Mexican origin, 14 percent are Puerto Rican, 5 percent are Cuban, 3 percent are Dominican and 16 percent are of other Hispanic origin, according to Pew.
There are many issues that resonate throughout the Latino community, but not all have the same ranking of importance when it comes time to vote.

“There’s plenty of research that shows Puerto Rican Hispanics are much less supportive of liberalized immigration reform. It’s not an issue that affects them in the same personal way as Mexican-origin Hispanics,” said Ali Adam Valenzuela, a political scientist at Princeton University.

In addition, Election Day exit polling was done only in English, meaning Hispanics who were reached were likely to be more “assimilated,” educated and higher income, Valenzuela said.

Those differences are likely to make courting a national Latino population more complex for Christie in a 2016 presidential run as well as for any other candidates. There is little expectation that a candidate could get 51 percent, but winning nationally generally means getting at least 35 percent of the Latino vote.

What Christie did right was to stay away from the extreme policy positions and rhetoric of other Republicans. He didn’t repeat the mistakes Romney made of calling for “self-deportation” of people illegally in the country.

Immigration had the potential to become a thorn in Christie’s humming-along campaign, when young immigrants began pressing him about in-state tuition for DREAMers – the young immigrants brought by their parents to the U.S. illegally.

Christie had opposed in-state tuition for DREAMers but changed his view, diffusing the issue that could have ripped into the Latino support he had been building.

“He literally embraced diversity, when he talked about all the different people he had hugged in the campaign. That was meant to speak to the potential non-white Republican voter,” Latino Decisions political scientist Sylvia Manzano said.

The issue was front and center for Republican Ken Cuccinelli, who lost his gubernatorial bid to Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia Tuesday night. Though Cucinelli dialed-down some of his rhetoric on immigration, he was unable to walk away from previous positions and actions on the issue.

“It is telling that (Christie) won and Cucinelli lost and you know, the party needs to understand whether those are two isolated events or if there is a connection because there were two very different Republican messages, I believe,” said Carlos Gutierrez, former Secretary of Commerce under President George W. Bush who has worked with the GOP to attract the Latino vote.

Overall, Christie was a well-liked and formidable candidate who related to Latinos, Gutierrez said. “As many people say,” Gutierrez said, “the candidate makes the difference.”

Latinos want national leader, have trouble naming one

(In a recent poll, 5% of Latinos questioned named Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Florida Senator Marco Rubio as an important Hispanic or Latino leader.)

by Suzanne Gamboa, @SuzGamboa 

More than 50 million and growing, Latinos are hard-pressed to name someone among them as their national leader, even though there is desire for one, according to a new report from Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project.

The study released Tuesday reported that nearly three quarters of Latinos in the United States believe their community needs a national leader. But about the same share of the 5,103 Latinos surveyed could not name one. The study was done by Pew’s Hispanic Trends and Religion and Public Life projects.

Mark Hugo Lopez, lead author of the study, said the finding that Latinos feel they need a national leader to advance the concerns of the community is a new one. Earlier studies only asked Latinos to name national leaders. That prompted questions of whether Latinos thought one was needed.

Lopez said the desire for a national leader was more important among foreign-born Latinos who prefer Spanish, which he said may be a function of getting news from media outlets that give more attention to issues within the Latino community.

When respondents were asked to name the most important Hispanic or Latino leader, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who is Puerto Rican, and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, of Cuban descent each were cited by 5 percent of participants.

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and immigration reform champion Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., were cited by 3 percent and 2 percent respectively.
The leading answer was “don’t know,” 62 percent, while 13 percent came up with other names and 9 percent said no one.

The lack of a name of a national leader on the tip of Latinos’ tongues reflects a cultural aspect of the community where years ago the leader was a mother, a father, a parish priest or a local wise person living in the neighborhood, said Sylvia Puente, executive director of the Chicago-based Latino Policy Forum.

“What’s happened with the Latino community as it has developed and matured is there are literally thousands of leaders at the local and community level,” Puente said.

Look at immigration reform, she said. “You can look at the community and see hundreds of people working to keep that issue alive,” said Puente, whose organization advocates on issues of education, immigration reform and housing for Latinos and works to build leaders in the community.

Puente said part of the reason Latino leaders are not better known is because as the community has grown and their issues have matured, the community is not given its fair share of coverage in the media. Latino leaders are not turned to by the media and “it’s the media who designates who those leaders are,” Puente said.

Ray Suarez, who compiled the stories of several Latino leaders over the centuries in his book “Latino Americans,” said the idea that a community of 53 million people can have a single recognized leader “seems a little bit of a long shot to me, but I can see why that has appeal.”

The idea of a single national leader does not seem that useful in the 21st century, Suarez said. “What we need in a disperse community growing in every part of the country is lots of people who come to mind locally,” said Suarez, whose book accompanied a six-part PBS series on the 500-year legacy of Latinos in the United States.

Suarez said a national leader – even a Latino president – is something that emerges organically, from being governor of Texas or a U.S. senator from Califorina. “It won’t be the kind of thing where everyone thinks you are a leader and therefore you are one. You have to have real influence over real events.”

Potential leaders varied by Hispanic origin for some groups. Rubio was most named among Cubans and Sotomayor most named among Puerto Ricans.

Hispanics of Mexican and Salvadoran origin were least likely to name a leader, with just a quarter coming up with a name. But Latinos of Mexican origin split at four percent each in naming Sotomayor and Villaraigosa.
Salvadorans named Gutierrez, 7 percent, and 9 percent of Dominicans named Sotomayor.

The need for a leader also became less of interest if the Latino surveyed was born in the U.S. While 82 percent of foreign-born Latinos said it was extremely or very important the community have a national leader, 64 percent of U.S.-born Latinos said the same.

The Pew study was conducted May 24 through July 28 by landline and cell phone in English and in Spanish. It carries a margin of error of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.
Other findings of the survey included:

_ Four in 10 Latinos surveyed say that Latinos of different origins share a lot of the same values, while 39 percent say they share some and 19 percent say only a little or almost nothing.

_ One in five of the respondents say they most often describe themselves as Hispanic or Latino. A majority, 54 percent say they most often describe themselves using Latino origin descriptions such as Mexican, Dominican or Puerto Rican and 23 percent use “American” most often.

_ Half of the respondents say they have no preference for being called Hispanic or Latino. But when a preference is expressed, Hispanic is preferred over Latino by 3-1.