Brewing Boycotts

Here's the current column Ruben Navarrete wrote for the current issue of Hispanic Trends:

The immigration debate has me rethinking my view on boycotts and other forms of economic pressure.
What changed my mind? Some ticked off Hispanics and one terrified beer company.
I liken boycotts to a temper tantrum. Whether it’s Southern Baptists calling on their flock to forgo Disney products, or the United Farm Workers union asking supporters not to buy grapes, or, more recently, a top Vatican official asking that Christians boycott the film, The Da Vinci Code, I’m not sympathetic to those who resort to economic blackmail to get their way.
But now, I’m having second thoughts. Boycotts can be an effective weapon – if used in self-defense. As the nation’s mood on immigration gets ugly, many Hispanics – especially Mexicans and Mexican-Americans – feel put off and picked on. Why wouldn’t they? What with border vigilantes burning the Mexican flag, an Internet video game letting players shoot Mexicans crossing the border, Hispanic officials in California receiving death threats, a Mexican restaurant near San Diego being firebombed, and a 17-year-old Hispanic youth in Houston being beaten and sodomized by two white boys who yelled racial slurs.
Confronted with the vile and the vicious, Hispanics have the right to defend themselves. They can organize and protest and vote. But there’s also the big gun in their arsenal – about $700 million in annual spending power, a figure expected to swell to $1 trillion by 2010.
Besides, the nation’s 40 million Hispanics are fiercely brand loyal. If you get their attention and deliver a quality product, Hispanics won’t just beat a path to your door. They’ll bust down the door, plop down in the living room, open up their wallets, and stay for decades. Likewise, if they get a bad taste in their mouth about you, your company or product, you could lose millions, perhaps billions, of dollars for much of the foreseeable future.
Which brings us back to the terrified beer company. Miller Brewing Co. is based in Wisconsin and that just happens to be the home state of Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. The Wisconsin lawmaker is also the author of HR 4437, an enforcement-heavy immigration bill that has been criticized by Hispanic organizations and immigrants rights groups as excessively punitive. The bill makes unauthorized presence in the United States a felony. Over the years, Sensenbrenner has received political contributions from - you guessed it - Miller Brewing Co.
A group of Hispanic activists in Chicago connected the dots and demanded a meeting with Miller executives, where the activists informed the company that they were prepared to launch a national boycott of their product to protest the company’s support of Sensenbrenner.
You see – and this is hardly a secret - Hispanics drink a lot of beer. In fact, marketing experts say Hispanics drink more beer per capita than other racial and ethnic groups. It seems that 50 percent of the beer consumed in the U.S. comes from just nine states - including California, Texas, Florida, Arizona, Illinois, and New York. They’re the same nine states with the highest concentration of Hispanics.
So what would happen if Hispanics suddenly got the word to stop buying Miller beer?
Something like that happened before. A generation ago, the most popular beer for Hispanic community was Coors Beer. Thanks to a series of public relations blunders in the 1970’s, and the zeal with which the Coors family lent its support to a rightwing political agenda in the 1980’s, Hispanics lost their taste for the Colorado brew.
Anheuser-Busch Inc. rushed to fill the void, and gained an advantage in market share that it seems determined to never surrender. The St. Louis-based beer company recently created a marketing division aimed at Hispanics and increased its 2006 spending on advertising in Hispanic media to more than $60 million. Today, the two top brands of beer for Hispanics are Budweiser and Bud Light, both produced by Anheuser-Busch.
As it turns out, Miller Brewing Co. has also made a substantial investment in pursuit of the Hispanic market, inking a $100 million, three-year ad package with a well-known Spanish-language television company. So when the activists threatened to boycott, it got Miller’s attention. The brewery agreed to run newspaper ads denouncing the Sensenbrenner bill and to even help the group of activists campaign against the measure in Washington.
Soon thereafter, Miller Brewing Co. put out a one-page ad in a Spanish-language newspaper announcing its opposition to HR 4437, which it described as “anti-immigration legislation.” In a statement, the company insisted that it had a history of supporting Hispanic organizations and pledged to “continue to support the Hispanic community and the rights of immigrants.”
Miller executives deny that they caved into the threat of a boycott by Hispanics. We may never know. It’s a question worth thinking about – over a beer.

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Ruben Navarrette is a member of the editorial board of the San Diego Union-Tribune, a nationally syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group and a frequent contributor to National Public Radio.

Judge Rules That U.S. Has Broad Powers to Detain Noncitizens Indefinitely - New York Times

Judge Rules That U.S. Has Broad Powers to Detain Noncitizens Indefinitely - New York Times

A federal judge in Brooklyn ruled yesterday that the government has wide latitude under immigration law to detain noncitizens on the basis of religion, race or national origin, and to hold them indefinitely without explanation.

More Americans get their news…en español??

Last week I had the chance to sit down and chat with Maria Elena Salinas, Univision news co-anchor. She’s a very smart and well-spoken woman, whose petite frame and youthful face belie her 51 years. I interviewed her for PODER about her autobiography, I Am My Father’s Daughter. Of course the conversation turned to many other topics, notably immigration (Maria Elena is the daughter of Mexican immigrants). She said that while the issue isn’t a Latino issue, it has galvanized and united the community, in her opinion. (But I’m not going to give away the store – read the rest of the interview in the July/August PODER.)

Maria Elena, who has been anchoring the news for 25 years, also told me she shares a birthday—December 30— with two other notable newswomen: Katie Couric and Meredith Viera. We talked about all the fuss being made about a woman anchoring the evening news, and Maria Elena said, “The big challenge for Katie is not to beat ABC and NBC. We often beat CBS in a lot of major markets. First, she’s going to have to beat us [Univision].”

The World Cup and Global Politics:The Rise of the Masses

People of the world are anxiously awaiting the start of the biggest global spectacle, which comes along just once every four years; the 2006 World Cup to be held in Germany. The tournament, showcasing the beautiful game of futbol, as soccer is known, clearly overshadows any other sport far and away. Consider this, in December of 2005 the draw for the World Cup finals were conducted in Leipzig, Germany. More than 350 million people watched their television sets to observe the fate of their country. In contrast, less than 100 million people watched America’s biggest sporting event – the Super Bowl. To give further perspective, the drawing wasn’t even a sporting event!

To say it’s momentous, is understating the truth. For the next two months - oblivious to the average American – the World Cup phenomena will interrupt the daily work schedules of the laboring masses, suspend political campaigns of the powerful, disrupt domestic commerce and the international trade of goods, and grip the attention of the rich and poor in every corner of the world.

To be sure, the masses who will be following the World Cup see themselves as much more than mere sports fans. The impression for most of the billions who watch the matches is that the games create a rare opportunity for the participating countries to be showcased in front of a true global audience. And as crazy as it sounds to Americans, these “fans” are in a sense participants in an international infomercial where their country’s image to the world hangs in the balance pending their team’s performance (think Ivory Coast, Ecuador, Togo, Ukraine, Trinidad & Tobago, etc). Indubitably, National pride will surge when a country’s team demonstrates dominance by winning, and the morale of the masses will receive a crushing blow when its team demonstrates weakness by losing.

Many government officials in these smaller countries recognize their World Cup team’s performance represents much more than a simple win or loss as well. It represents national identity, and they know the outcome will enhance or diminish the Nation’s standing in the global community (or at least that is the impression; and we all know what they say about impression being reality). The performance of a National team on the pitch will also reverberate in different ways. England and Argentina’s rivalry has now reached mythic proportions for instance– sure the war over the Falkland Islands raised the hate intensity a notch between the two, but it’s in a World Cup match where they’re hatred is manifested in all its true ugliness (Think English football star David Beckham getting red-carded for stomping on his Argentine opponent and causing his team to lose the match in the last Cup). The game will be resurfaced as part of World Cup lore for time infinitum due entirely to that incident.

At minimum, the games will affect the collective work schedules of every nation’s labor pool and cause a spike in beer consumption on a massive global scale. At its extreme, the results will affect the national psyche and confidence of its peoples, and in some countries it will even affect National election results. This sounds far-fetched you say?

In Mexico for example, political strategists predict that the performance of the National Team will tilt the results of the tight presidential election race. According to many political insiders, the conservative party candidate, Felipe Calderon stands to benefit from a favorable performance by “El Tricolor” while the opposing candidate Manuel Lopez Obrador will benefit from a miserable result. Calderon even met with the team at its training ground in Mexico City. He traded jokes with the players, got a group photo while displaying the team shirt and gave them inspirational praises, all in front of the TV cameras.

The free market reformer, Calderon has been holding political rallies recently where he has made continuous remarks about the National Team, while Lopez Obrador, who promises to put an end to free market reforms by creating massive infrastructure projects and new welfare programs, has bandied gratuitous references to the World Cup as well in order to gain the favor of the masses.

It gets uglier people; many in the global community shudder at the thought of having team Iran beat the teams of freedom-loving democratic nations. Politicians around the world are aggressively pushing an effort to have the Cup’s governing body, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), boycott Iran’s National team from the World Cup. To be more accurate, the reason for the request to have FIFA intervene is to pressure Iran’s hardline leadership into terminating their nuclear program.

In fact, pleadings are now falling on Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, to keep Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, from coming to Germany and participate in the World Cup. One newspaper, the Rheinische Post, said there had been “clear signals” that the governments of Britain, France and Germany, which have been involved in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, will ask the European Union to impose a travel ban on Iran’s political elite.

FIFA is trying to avoid the getting involved by delaying an answer and praying that the avid soccer fan, President Ahmadinejad, will announce he is too busy to watch Mexico beat Iran (wink, wink). Bottom line is I think it speaks volumes about the importance of the World Cup when political leaders leverage it as a tool to eliminate national nuclear programs.

I suppose it was inevitable that politics would rear its ugly head into such an immensely popular event when you consider that it is obsessively followed by the masses in every corner of the world. As absurd as it sounds, leaders will rise and fall based on the ability of its nation’s eleven man team to score more goals than the opposing nation’s eleven man team on a soccer pitch.

And so from now until the end of the games, politicians will look for clever ways to associate themselves to the good fortunes of the national team despite FIFA’s past attempts to avoid it’s premiere event from getting mired in politics. To borrow a cliché “If the World Cup masses won’t go to politics, then politics will go to the World Cup masses”.

I guess the World Cup turns out to be like everything else in life; you have to take the good with the bad.

A Gigante of American Cinema

I watched a 1950s classic over the weekend, Giant, the saga of a Texas ranching family. Great stuff. The film, starring Elizabeth Taylor (at her gorgeous best) and Rock Hudson (at the height of his gorgeousity, as well as the height of his height), spans some 30 years in the lives of the Benedict family, wealthy landowners and cattle ranchers. One of the subtexts of the movie is the strangely cozy and cozily strained relationship between the Mexican ranch hands and the Texan ranchers. The ranchers certainly have a fair command of Spanish (they give grammatically correct orders and berate their servants in excellent Castilian) and there is a muted affection on both sides. A muted affection, yes, but also an appalling lack of awareness—or is it a lack of interest? —of the abysmal living conditions of the hard working and impoverished ranch hands.

The Rock Hudson character, ‘Bick’ Benedict, undergoes the most interesting character development, by far. When his new bride Lesley (Taylor) gets off the train from Maryland and speaks warmly to one of the Mexican ranch hands, Hudson gruffly hurries her along. Over the years, Lesley befriends and helps the ranch hands. Bick stands by; he doesn’t stand in her way…(doesn’t help either). Twenty some years later, their doctor son Jordan (played by a puny and redheaded Dennis Hopper – Easy Rider was still a decade away, folks) marries Juanita, a beautiful and noble Mexican health care worker. Lesley enthusiastically welcomes her new daughter-in-law; Bick is not quite sure what to make of it all, but—give him credit—he welcomes Juanita, nonetheless.

The resulting offspring, the adorable Jordan III, inherited his mother’s dark beauty (thank God) and not his father’s geeky redheadedness. Typically, the grandson breaks the ice, and his grandfather’s reserve. As the movie draws to a close, Bick not only seems to have dropped his guard about race; he seems oblivious to how his fellow white folks treat Mexicans…until his ire is provoked by a little name calling. Just as the Benedict family is settling in for a lunch of cheeseburgers at Sarge’s diner, the owner kicks out a humble Mexican family at a neighboring table. Bick/Hudson tries to cajole Sarge into letting them stay, to no avail. When Sarge calls the Mexicans “wetbacks”, Bick throws the first punch. As the two men trash the diner and pummel each other, “The Yellow Rose of Texas” plays in the background. (That scene alone is worth the price of admission.)
What I found truly remarkable about Giant is how aware the filmmakers were of the times in which they lived—and how fearlessly they portrayed an uncomfortable truth.

It's Now or Never

After six years of promising to fix the Nation's broken immigration law, President George W. Bush is finally oh so close to an immigration reform bill landing on his desk and making good on that promise. Our Nation stands at a critical crossroad.

If a bill is passed millions will be plucked out of the shadows and be allowed to contribute freely to the American experience; employers will have a labor bonanza that will continue fueling the Nation's surging economy; and the President would be pleased that a new generation of grateful Hispanics will be voting Republican candidates into office for years to come.

Regrettably, if enforcement-only Republican and Democrat members in the House and the Senate successfully derail passage of a bill they stubbornly believe to be amnesty they will assure years of status quo that will damage us all socially and economically; spoil the President's second term signature legislation which he badly needs; and drive the Hispanic voter away from the Republican party for a long time to come.

This is lamentable when you consider that no three people have done more to ensure passage of an immigration bill than Republican President Bush, Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Republican Senator John McCain. Yet ironically, it is the Republicans who are going to get beaten up if a bill is not passed.

Why? Well you see, while the debate on immigration reform rages on in every corner of our country, negotiators from both chambers will work feverishly to reconcile the differences and agree on a compromise to the opposing immigration reform bills approved in both Republican-controlled chambers of the Capitol. A majority of Senators are hoping House Republicans (and a few Democrat members) will be reasonable enough to consider expanding their enforcement-only bill passed several months ago and consider offering citizenship to millions of immigrants currently undocumented in the U.S.

But when questioned whether he would accept any legislation that would put undocumented immigrants on a path to citizenship, Congressmen Jim Sensenbrenner, R-WI, answered a flat "no" on NBC's "Meet the Press".
The Senate's insistence to offer undocumented immigrants an opportunity at citizenship looks to be a deal-breaker that will prevent passage of a compromise on immigration reform, he added. This is important because the man chairs the critically important committee that is leading the immigration reform effort on the House side.

So who can save the day for the Republicans? Well believe it or not, Democrats! Just as the NAFTA Bill needed the Republicans to save the day during the Clinton Administration, the immigration reform bill is most likely going to be a bill passed with help of Democrats in the House and the Senate over the objections of many enforcement-only Republicans (even though Democrats are having their own challenges fending off admonitions from labor unions to resist backing any immigration bill that includes a temporary worker program). And that is the beauty of our legislative system; sometimes our parties need each other.

I think this is defining legislation for the Hispanic community as well because this issue is personal to us; it's about family, culture and recognition of our desire for policy that is reflective of a collective Hispanic agenda.

Latinos are the fastest growing segment of the electorate, and Hispanics are going to vote in large numbers in the next Presidential election. Their votes are the all-important swing votes in many states. Thousands of Hispanic-Americans joined non-citizens in street protests to denounce the House bill and call for broader legislation. The question of whom they will vote for is up for grabs, and I believe the bill's outcome will weigh heavily in that decision.

And while politics has been an undercurrent the entire time that the Senate has tried to write this legislation Republican party leaders continue to steadfastly resist granting "amnesty", polls show that voters back the proposal by an overwhelming 63-29 percent. Even Republican voters say yes by 63-30 percent.

Given the political storm unleashed by this latest round of immigration legislation debate I fear that if Congress fails to get a bill during this session, the President may not be able to revive an immigration effort next year, and we will have lost all opportunity to address our Nation's broken immigration policy.