Marco Rubio Exposed

From the beginning of time, most immigrants to the United States-- obviously the slaves who were brought here by force excepted-- came looking for better economic opportunities for themselves and their families. That's still the way it is... and it's certainly the way it is for the country's fastest-growing minority, Hispanic immigrants from Latin America. It's a long American tradition, and it's what's helped fuel America's powerful economic development, catapulting this country into a premier position in the world. And there's always been a bigoted reaction against it-- whether it was against Germans, Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Slavs, Jews. Historically, conservatives have always seen the end of their world in the arrival of immigrants and have fought it tooth and nail. Akin to the Tea Party of today, the nativist Know Nothing Party of the mid-1800s was hysterical about Catholic Germans and Irish flooding into the U.S. and ruining it. This was its platform in the 1850s:

* Severe limits on immigration, especially from Catholic countries

* Restricting political office to native-born Americans of English and/or Scottish lineage and Protestant persuasion

* Mandating a wait of 21 years before an immigrant could gain citizenship

* Restricting public school teacher positions to Protestants

* Mandating daily Bible readings in public schools.

* Restricting the use of languages other than English

Sound familiar? How much tinkering would it take with this platform to get Florida's Tea Party extremist, Marco Rubio, to get behind it? Why bring up Rubio when there are a couple dozen Republican senators who are just as adamantly anti-immigrant as he is? Ah, glad you asked! Florida's Little Lord Fauntleroy created a narrative for himself about his heroic origins, a narrative that fell to pieces this week. The Washington Post said it was "embellishment."

During his rise to political prominence, Sen. Marco Rubio frequently repeated a compelling version of his family’s history that had special resonance in South Florida. He was the “son of exiles,” he told audiences, Cuban Americans forced off their beloved island after “a thug,” Fidel Castro, took power.

But a review of documents-- including naturalization papers and other official records-- reveals that the Florida Republican’s account embellishes the facts. The documents show that Rubio’s parents came to the United States and were admitted for permanent residence more than 2 1 /2 years before Castro’s forces overthrew the Cuban government and took power on New Year’s Day 1959.

The supposed flight of Rubio’s parents has been at the core of the young senator’s political identity, both before and after his stunning tea-party-propelled victory in last year’s Senate election. Rubio-- now considered a prospective 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate and a possible future presidential contender-- mentions his parents in the second sentence of the official biography on his Senate Web site. It says that Mario and Oriales Rubio “came to America following Fidel Castro’s takeover.” And the 40-year-old senator with the boyish smile and prom-king good looks has drawn on the power of that claim to entrance audiences captivated by the rhetorical skills of one of the more dynamic stump speakers in modern American politics.

The real story of his parents’ migration appears to be a more conventional immigrant narrative, a couple who came to the United States seeking a better life. In the year they arrived in Florida, the future Marxist dictator was in Mexico plotting a quixotic return to Cuba.

...On Sept. 9, 1975, Marco Rubio’s parents also petitioned for naturalization [4 years after Marco was born]. Their petitions list the same date of admission to the United States as the petition of Rubio’s brother. It is unclear why Rubio’s parents chose to wait 15 years to seek naturalization.

The parents’ naturalization papers have begun to circulate on the Internet as part of a “birther” controversy related to Rubio’s eligibility for future presidential tickets. The controversy, which was reported this week in the St. Petersburg Times, has been compared to the frenzy surrounding President Obama’s birthplace, but in reality it bears a closer resemblance to the fight over Sen. John McCain’s eligibility in the 2008 election. Both the McCain squabble and the low-simmer Rubio case center on the definition of who is a “natural-born citizen.” In the last presidential cycle, some suggested that McCain was ineligible because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone.

Rubio's aggressive stance against comprehensive immigration reform, the Dream Act, bi-lingual education is looking more and more hypocritical and more and more akin to hysterical Republican closet queens who always screech the loudest and the longest against equality for gay people, hoping to hide behind a deceptive wall of fear and hatred. It's becoming increasingly clear that Marco Rubio is not going to solve the Republican Party's self-inflicted Latino problems, not in 2012 and not anytime soon. (And, yeah, Rubio hates gay people too.) Ironic that if Rubio's parents were actually fleeing from an authoritarian dictatorship, it was that of Fulgencio Batista, a fascist whose ideology is pretty much identical to Marco's!