Kaine: America can put fear and hateful talk behind it, and Virginia shows how
Sen. Tim Kaine’s been brooding about the toxic talk about immigrants that’s erupted in this year’s presidential campaign, and this week took time to share his worries and hopes with the National Association of Hispanic Publishers & National Newspaper Publishers Association’s legislative conference.
He told them about meetings in January with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Turkish President Erdogan in Turkey.
“They both say to me, ‘what’s going on in your presidential race? This kind of rhetoric is not what we expect from you guys.’ You know, that tells you something,” Kaine told the publishers.
Kaine thinks what’s going on is “anxiety out of a majority community that is worried about losing its majority status. …. The majority isn’t going to be the majority, and there’s a lot of fear about that.”
But, he continued “There’s such a better way to look at this than, ‘oh I’m not going to be in the majority anymore and I need to be afraid of that.’”
He said Virginia provides an example.
Just in his lifetime, he said, Virginia moved from resisting integration of its schools by shutting them down, and from being a “very inward state, that celebrated, you got to be native, probably seven or eight generations really.” Virginians’ income was in the bottom quarter nationally, back then.
“Low education, insular, socially exclusive, and poor. And the poor wasn’t a coincidence, it was connected to those first three things,” he said.
“So here’s the Virginia of today … We dramatically internationalized: 65 percent of the Virginia population growth in the census decade, 2000 to 2010, was Latino, Asian American or African American who had been born in Africa and then naturalized,” he said.
“We’ve gone, when I was born, we were in the bottom five in the percentage of school age kids who attended school – forget about test scores – who attended school. Today, our public schools, which we got to make them better and we have plenty of challenges, commonly rank in the top five in the United States … And it will now not surprise you, I told you all of that, we’re top 10 median income,” he said.
“Guess what it’s coincided with? An embrace of greater diversity, an embrace of immigration, an embrace of, frankly, what we promised we would be when we called ourselves a commonwealth rather than a state,” he said. “ Commonwealth …. we use that word because the wealth we hold we hold in common. It’s supposed to be a place where everybody can be together around the table.”
Kaine said the negative rhetoric in politics these days makes it hard to be optimistic.
But he is.
It goes back to the days when he used to argue cases before juries.
“I always felt juries had an innate wisdom about them … I do have that feeling about the American electorate … we can show people, you can cross over and get on the other side and the future looks a lot better than the past,” he said.
