It is pretty awesome when one comes from nothing and makes something of her/him self.  The thing is when one makes it, one has a responsibility to  hold the ladder to help those behind him/her.  Unfortunately, we sometimes see in Latino community that someone kicks the ladder while others are trying to climb. One has this grand notion that they have made it and to hell with everyone else, somehow forgetting that whether they admit it or not, someone helped opened doors for that person.

Adriana at LatinoPoliticsBlog has an excellent post on this phenomena providing the example of Marco Rubio, a Cubano-American, son of immigrants who took advantage of an “amnesty” given by Democrats to come to this country and prosper.  Rubio is now running for U.S. Senate as a Republican spouting the same tired rhetoric that has lost the Republicans so many elections.

I find it ironic that Marco Rubio, clearly a beneficiary within the last generation of an “amnesty” program, wants to kick the ladder out from other immigrants. If you go to his campaign website, he even mentions his parents and the jobs that they worked (bartending and hotel housekeeping like many other immigrants). It is as if he’s saying, “I got mine; now I’m going to make sure that you don’t get yours.” If this is the GOP’s new Latino outreach strategy, finding candidates who are critical of Reagan’s popular immigration policy, I don’t think that they are going to make gains with other groups that don’t have the privilege of the “Cuban amnesty.”

Que triste, ¿No?