Joe Biden talks to the immigrants
MIAMI — Joe Biden is a nice guy. He has the smile of an actor, Paul Newman-style, the easy and flowing gab of his Irish ancestors and the warm voice of a well-trained announcer.
Today he was the commencement speaker at the Homestead campus of Miami Dade College but arrived two hours late. Parents, grandparents, siblings, children and the graduates themselves were at the end of their tether. However, once Biden stepped up to the podium and smiled his best smile, his listeners welcomed him, willing to forgive him everything.
To start, he apologized for his delay and did not introduce himself as Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., 47th vice president of the United States of America, or as the Democratic senator who drafted the Violent Crime Control Act and the Violence Against Women Act.
Today he was simply the husband of Jill Biden, a professor at a community college in Delaware, very similar to Miami Dade College.
Saying that he’s married to a community college professor brings Joe Biden closer to the students. Saying it suggests, very subtly, that he knows them first-hand, that he understands their fears, doubts, anxieties, that he knows that they are the incarnation of almost all the meanings of the word “sacrifice.”
Community colleges are public institutions that, among many other programs, offer financial aid to low-income students. Almost everyone graduating today belongs to that category. They are students who cannot study full time because they must take small jobs to pay for their tuition.
They sleep little, seldom amuse themselves in their free time. The evening before an exam, they may be serving tables or selling clothing in a store.
Joe Biden knows all this. And he also knows that these graduates are mostly immigrants or the children of immigrants. Graduating today are Mexicans, Argentines, Colombians, Chadians, Pakistanis, Salvadorans, Venezuelans, Chinese, Jamaicans, Haitians, Guatemalans, Britons, Ukrainians, Spaniards, Canadians, Swiss and Cubans. That’s why Biden’s speech deals with the very important role that immigrants have played in the history of this nation, a country founded, built, and sustained by immigrant hands.
It was people like you, he says, who made America the great nation that it is today. And he adds: “I have visited many countries, almost all the flags that have been flown here today, and I can assure you that in none of them have I seen a graduation with men and women from so many different places. This can only happen in America.”
Then he tells the story of his latest trip to China, when he made a stopover in Singapore to visit former President Lee Kuan Yew. Lee, according to Biden, is a 90-year-old very wise man who remains fully lucid and speaks perfect English — which is not surprising because English is one of the official languages of Singapore, an old British colony.
Joe Biden went to see him because he needed advice. Maybe the elderly gentleman is something like his political “sensei.”
“Tell me,” Biden asked, “what are the Chinese doing? What do they want? What are they looking for?” Like any self-respecting sensei, the former president answered with a metaphor.
“Do you see the search being carried out over the Indian Ocean to find the black box of the vanished airliner? That’s exactly what the Chinese are doing: they want to find America’s black box. They want to know why you are the only country that constantly rebuilds itself. They want to know the source of that capacity for adaptation that has enabled you to remain the world’s leading power for such a long time.”
And Joe Biden, who not only can listen attentively but also can respond with great eloquence, answered: “I can tell you what’s in America’s black box, what our secret is. It’s two fundamental elements.
“First, the capacity to question what has been established. We encourage our young people, our students to never take anything for granted, to question and cast doubt on everything they learn, every convention, every pre-established truth. That turns us into a country that renews and reinvents itself all the time.
“Second, the huge mass of immigrants who have nourished our culture. We have always opened ourselves to men and women from other regions who enrich our nation.”
I’ll never know what else the sensei said, because just at that moment, someone in the crowd shouted, “Stop deportations!”
I don’t know if you appreciate the gesture in all its magnitude, but someone had just interrupted the speech by Joe Biden, Vice President of the United States, the man who told Slovodan Milosevic, “I think that you are a damned war criminal and should be treated as such,” the man who supported NATO’s bombing of Serbia and the war in Iraq, one of the few who sat in the Situation Room watching — live and in high definition — the operative staged to execute Osama Bin Laden.
One has seen this type of incident on television — signs unfolded by spectators in Congress, shoes flung at someone — but nothing compares to seeing it live. Joe Biden thought it was a student, some young troublemaker eager to make the headlines. But he was wrong. The person who shouted was an older woman, with Indian features, sitting in the relatives’ section.
I didn’t know her, had never seen her, but it is very likely that she was the mother of one of the graduates. Maybe an undocumented migrant who left her country, her people, her language, crossed the desert and fought off coyotes, who struggles with English as best she can, who has two jobs, who can’t complain to anyone if the boss pays her less, who walks faster when she sees a cop, who is afraid that her husband will be deported. All that because she wanted to give her children an opportunity, because she rejected the fate that befalls those who are born on the other side of wealth.
Or maybe not, and the woman only felt like shouting. The fact is that, to those of us from other cultures, this was a transcendental, unprecedented experience. I instinctively looked around for the guard who would come to escort the woman out of the hall, demand her identification or, at least, recriminate her for providing fodder for the enemy’s attacks.
Present there were the Secret Service, the FBI and the County Police. When I walked in, they looked even into my Kindle, perhaps looking for terrorist literature. Down the aisles walked agents with earpieces and microphones under their sleeves, like in the movies. If I — who sometimes leave home with socks that don’t match and never remember where I parked my car — could identify the woman with absolute clarity, some of those James Bond wannabes must have seen her.
But nothing happened. The ceremony continued as planned and the lady didn’t have to account to anyone.
And what did Joe Biden do? A man renowned for his public blunders — one of them cost him the presidential race in 2007 — had learned his lesson. This time he smiled, Paul Newman-like, and retorted: “We’ll do that, too, kid,” (he still thought it was a student) “but let me finish my speech.”
He said that with such certainty and aplomb, with such deep conviction, with such genuine sincerity in his eyes, that I’m almost certain that most of the 2 million deportees — a record figure in the Obama administration — were returned to their native countries by mistake and someone will have to pay dearly when Mr. Biden finds out.
[Photo by Abel Sanchez.]
