As the new Trump administration has ramped up the president’s promised mass deportations in the first whirlwind weeks of his new term, protesters have taken to the streets here and across the country to voice their opposition.
They are marching and shutting down freeways and chanting “¡Sí se puede!” and holding signs that read “Stop Separating Families" and they’re proudly waving Mexican flags. Not American flags.
It’s a show of home country patriotism that has some critics calling foul. Why wave the flag of another country — and not the one immigrants want to call home? But it’s the kind of protest that our first guest this morning calls "good trouble."
Gustavo Arellano, a columnist for The Los Angeles Times, joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Good morning there, Gustavo. Thanks for coming back on.
GUSTAVO ARELLANO: Gracias for having me.
GILGER: So what do you make of these protests that are playing out in Los Angeles, here in Arizona, and kind of across the country and the way that protesters are going about protesting?
ARELLANO: I mean, this is something that is not new. It's been going on for 30 years in the American Southwest, where you have politicians pushing anti-immigrant anything, and the reaction, and we're talking specifically right now about young people, high schoolers, college students is to go back to, you know, if people are saying you're not American, then they're gonna wave the flag of their family's country. This is not the country where they were born. It's their ancestral roots.
Almost all these kids are American citizens, so you're going to say, OK, you're not American, we're going to go to a cultural identity where we don't feel shame, and so we're gonna wave it in your face. Now, I think they should all be waving American flags. I think that the American flag has been turned into something from the left that it shouldn't be, but I also understand why these kids are doing it. And again, I've been seeing this for 30 years.
GILGER: 30 years, like the history of this goes back a long way, and you do say that there is an argument here, right? For waving the flag of your home country. Those people who have done that in the past have seen real results.
ARELLANO: And that's the interesting thing, because it's almost like you lose the battle, which is, of course, all these people getting upset. Why don't you wave the American flags, you're treasonous, you're traitors, you don't deserve to be Americans, but it's those kids who are in the, how do you say, the crucible of this that end up going on to become better activists, better people.
Here in Southern, here in California, the entire state. I mean, one of our U.S. senators, Alex Padilla was doing these types of protests all the way out in MIT back in 1994 when California passed Prop. 187, which was basically the grandfather of SB 1070 for you folks in Arizona. And so he's a U.S. senator. The entire state of California became blue because of these people back in'94.
I've seen it with the protest against the Sensenbrenner bill in 2006, and you're going to see this right now in the years to come.
GILGER: You say it's, it's counterintuitive, right, though, and that you do think they should be waving the American flag out there and that's really, you know, got a lot of critics saying this is not the right message. Even if you are pro-immigrant, this is not the right message. Do you think they're helping the cause they're protesting against?
ARELLANO: And it's not just people, by the way, who might be against illegal immigration. We're talking about advocates who do believe in some sort of amnesty, Latinos themselves, politicians saying, hey kids, wave the American flag. It's like the worst possible optics imaginable.
And again, my and I used to be one of those people because I've, again, I've seen this play out in real time, but just seeing the historical perspective, seeing how it all plays out, if this is what it takes to get Democrats and especially, you know, pro-immigrant people to get more people to care, to shake them out of any fear that they may have, to shake them out of any stasis, then this is what needs to be done.
And that's the logic that the kids have, and I, I can respect that. I again, I think it should be the American flag, but I can.
GILGER: Right, you said you have been one of these doubters in the past. I wonder, Gustavo, watching all of this and, and having seen, you know, kind of ebbs and flows of this this debate in the past, what you make of the broader reaction to these mass deportations,, to the kind of broader anti-immigrant kind of sentiment in the country right now.
ARELLANO: It waves and flows and ebbs and all of that. What I have found very fascinating, and I've written about this for the LA Times, is how with Latinos especially even children of immigrants, opposition to illegal immigration is higher than it's been in a generation in Arizona, in California, all across the United States.
Now it was easy to say “oh if you're anti-immigrant you're anti-Latino and you're racist,” but when it's Latinos feeling that way and by the way, the the levels are still you know, a majority of Latinos still think that there should be a way toward legalization so it's not an over like a majority but still the numbers are through the roof.
So this is one thing that the immigrant rights movement needs to wrestle with, and that's why I do understand why, you know, the optics might be more fraught than ever. But again, history has, history does its own thing, it doesn't care what we think about what's going on right now and history, what was it? Mark Twain, I think said history never repeats itself, but it rhymes.
GILGER: But it rhymes. I mean, so, so looking at that, looking at the shift within the Latino electorate itself, right? What do you make of that? Where do you think that's coming from?
ARELLANO: Oh, I mean, that's easy assimilation and specifically anti-Latino sentiment among Latinos. So my dad was an illegal immigrant and he came in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I had a bunch of cousins who came in the ‘90s, so it's easy to march for in defense of illegal immigrants when they're your own kind, and Mexicans still are the supermajority of Latinos in the United States, but then the sentiment gets watered down once those immigrants are.
Coming from El Salvador, from Central America, and they're basically nonexistent when it's Venezuelans when you don't have, even though you might speak the same language, they're not your same people, so to speak, and by and at this point you have an entire generation of people saying, “hey, our parents, our parents came here illegally the right way. Our parents didn't get any government subsidies. Our parents didn't do any of that. Why do these Venezuelans get all these benefits?”
I hear this from my own cousins. I have to tell them like. Hey, nuestros tios, our uncles, they came here illegally. They, people talk the same sort of trash that you're talking trash on now when it when it's Venezuelans, and they insist to me it's completely different, and I think especially again, the pro-immigrant movement, they need to wrestle with that, and I don't think enough of them are because look, protests are important.
I think waving the flag, if that's gonna motivate kids to do more in their communities, that's great, but the fact is you have Republicans owning the House, owning the Senate, the presidency everywhere. How are you going, and hose are the people who at the end are the ones who have the ability and the power to either make more deportations or bring some sort of amnesty. So how are you going to beat or how are you going to win their minds?
