[excerpt] SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Cheering crowds in the steamy tropical heat are expected Tuesday when President Barack Obama makes a rare presidential visit to Puerto Rico.
[snip]
Democrats see the Puerto Ricans in Florida as a potential counterbalance to the larger, traditionally Republican Cuban-American community in a state Obama needs badly to win a second term.
That’s where this trip comes in.
“I am sure they will be happy about this,” said Pedro Pierluisi, the island’s nonvoting representative in Congress, who has been working to generate for support for Obama on the mainland. “We have lots of Puerto Ricans in central Florida and I know they keep close eyes on Puerto Rico.”
Reaching out to Puerto Ricans is part of a broader effort to court Hispanics, who accounted for more than half the U.S. population increase over the past decade and now number about 50 million. It’s hardly a uniform community, but there are “shared issues” of concern that include support for education, and social services, said Louis DeSipio, a professor at the University of California, Irvine.
The number of people of Puerto Rican descent, the second largest Hispanic group in the U.S. after Mexicans, grew by 36 percent over the past decade to 4.6 million, according the census. The island’s population fell by 2 percent during that time as people fled a dismal economy.
Puerto Ricans tend to be less interested in immigration overhaul because they are U.S. citizens and can move freely back and forth between the island and the mainland, but as migrants who often need to learn to speak English and face other challenges they have similar experiences, said DeSipio, chairman of Chicano-Latino Studies at the California school.
“To the extent that the president talks about issues of bringing Puerto Ricans into the U.S. mainstream that will certainly resonate with other Latino communities and immigrant communities generally,” he said. [end excerpt]
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-ap-pr-obama-06122011-20110612,0,6565861.story
There are a lot of Puerto Ricans in Florida, and we also get a lot of visitors from PR.
However, I think this guy is fixating on Newyoricans. That is, people who were the children or grandchildren of the “Marine Tigers,” people brought in on planes of that name to work in various NYC industries during and shortly after WWII. When the economy dwindled in the 60s, both blacks and Puerto Ricans were told by the Great Society that they actually were going to be life-long clients, and way too few of them stood up and kicked the government in the teeth.
Still, most Puerto Ricans who climbed upwards (in many cases thanks to the Catholic schools) are now married to other Catholics, mostly Irish and some Italians. One of the problems is that they are so assimilated that nobody even counts a New York Rivera or Hernandez as Hispanic anymore. It’s a problem only in terms of US statistics, btw, not in terms of their lives.
That said, Puerto Ricans should arm themselves with pies and get ready to pitch them at this evil/idiotic imposter who wants to exploit them.