With ballots out, the latest controversy is over whether Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra is the son of immigrants or merely the son of an immigrant.
At issue are statements made by Becerra about his family history. “My parents came to California with $12 in their pocket. They lived the California dream,” he said in the only debate of the general election season. He has also referred to himself as the “son of immigrants.”
One apparent hole in this, as raised by right-wingers who discovered how to Google, is that Becerra’s dad was actually born in Sacramento, then taken by his family to Mexico, and then went back and forth across the border working various jobs. It’s a story familiar to any Mexican American. He ultimately married Becerra’s mother—originally from Guadalajara, Jalisco — and the couple went to Tijuana before coming to America. Becerra’s mother is a legit immigrant no matter the definition, so he is definitionally the son of an immigrant for sure.
Speaking of definitions, to be tedious about it, I pulled up Merriam-Webster and looked up the definition of immigrant: “a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.” Now, maybe Merriam-Webster is woke, but that definition seems to work for Becerra’s dad. So did Dictionary.com’s definition, which is: “a person who migrates to another country, usually for permanent residence.”
Now, obviously, dictionary definitions don’t necessarily fit perfectly onto how words are actually used or thought about. And there’s something about those definitions that seems overbroad because they seem to leave out the normal association of an immigrant being someone who was born in x country and then going to another.
On the other hand, if we’re going with that idea in mind, it seems like if Becerra’s dad was born in one country (America) and went to another (Mexico), he is indeed an immigrant. To Mexico, yes, but definitionally he had engaged in immigration in his life. If that sounds like I’m playing word games, you’re right, but that’s mainly because this seems like a goofy thing for Republicans to make their stand on and this whole debate is a frivolous distraction.
Xavier Becerra is definitely the son of one undisputed immigrant and the U.S.-born-but-Mexican-raised-son-of-Mexicans-who-crossed-borders. His shorthand is functionally adequate even if it invites hairsplitting objections. He could just say he’s the son of Mexicans or a proud Mexican American, but I get he wants that “son of immigrants” line and he’s really, really close to qualifying without objection.
In any case, I’m less interested in whether his dad counts as an immigrant and more interested in how he knows his parents had $12 in their pocket. What point in time did they have $12? Why $12? Was it actually $11.55? Is that inflation adjusted? Did they actually have U.S. dollars? Or is the $12 in their pockets figurative and they had a couple hundred bucks or something? Did they also have pesos? Was it actually all in pesos?
Anyway, if this is where the California gubernatorial race is, we should all be ashamed of ourselves.
Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com