2021 is coming to a fast close and Washington DC is in a flurry of end-of-year urgent actions including the 2022-23 budget and Democratic priority legislation. But it has been a year of disruptions due to the COVID19 pandemic ups and downs caused by emerging variants, changing dictates, and public attitudes on the effectiveness of vaccines, masks, lockdowns, social distancing, and the like. These disruptions have impacted Hispanics visibly at universities and colleges, in the evolving “Latino” electorate, and the corridors of power in DC. Here are some sum-ups of this year through the eyes of UNCENSORED:

Hispanics and Higher Education in 2021

The closing of school campuses and switch to remote learning throughout the country during most of 2020-21 impacted student registration numbers at all institutions of higher education. The slow unsure opening of colleges in the fall with varying masking restrictions, hesitant faculties, limited programs, quarantines, and almost full tuition did not encourage a surge of returning students – especially male students. Finances were the factor often cited, including student obligations to stay close to home to help struggling families.  And the job market was changing in favor of workers: higher wages, better hours, chances to advance that seemed to be particularly attractive to male students.  Some analysts portended that universities had become too focused on sensitivities and what came to be known as “micro-aggressions”. Some called them “too woke”.

At the same time, attacks seemed to ramp up by Democratic activists on educational establishments that many Hispanic students and families increasingly support. Those include charter and private primary and secondary schools (including Catholic and evangelical), for-profit institutions offering training and certification in especially medical fields that middle-class Hispanic families increasingly work in, and community college certificate programs.

The attacks on the private for-profit institutions of higher education often focused rightly on the five-figure-plus fees and tuition charges they demand. But similar five-figure-fees and tuitions charged at America’s so-called elite “not-for-profit” colleges and universities and their graduate professional schools in law, medicine, business, and even journalism, are not the focus of debate. To fix the problem at public institutions, the new Democratic Congress and Biden administration promised student loan forgiveness and free community college as the solution. But by year’s end, neither of those programs appeared likely to pass.

Instead, one student sector that pays full fare was encouraged to grow in 2021 after suffering historic drops (some 20%) in 2020: foreign students and scholars. The total number of these international students, scholars, and English-language learners dropped below one million in 2020 for the first time in ten years, causing great concern to many institutions that depend on these students on temporary non-immigration visas to pay full fare without college or state-based scholarships or grants. But by September 2021 the numbers of international students were back up over 1 million. Many had managed to stay in the States despite COVID rules that they must return home; in fact, many from countries banned by COVID rules in the Trump era were even housed in dorms barred to American students during the pandemic – paying full tuition even while taking classes remotely. College recruiters are reportedly turning to wealthy students in Latin American countries such as Chile and Argentina, to fill the classrooms. Mexico continues to be the biggest source of Latin American foreign students.

Latinos in Politics, the Electorate and on the Hill

Meanwhile, Hispanics, in general, have found their demographic image is changing. The 2020 Presidential election and the 2021 Virginia election suddenly jolted political activists into realizing that segments of the so-called Latino electorate (that is U.S. citizens with Hispanic heritage who are eligible to vote) are more diverse than had been assumed.  Larger percentages of Hispanic heritage citizens voted Republican in 2020 than ever before – significantly in Florida and Texas – and supposedly some 55% of Hispanic voters in Virginia cast a ballot in November for Governor-Elect Republican Youngkin.

The Biden administration had appointed Democratic Latinos as cabinet-level Secretaries of Education, Health, and Human Services. In November 2021 the four Democratic Hispanic heritage Senators demanded that President Biden appoint more Latinos to assistant and deputy assistant positions in the White House.

But the issues are changing for the Hispanic voter. Education and parent participation was big in Virginia. Many Republican Hispanics have told this reporter that Democratic abortion overreach was a key reason they were voting Republican in 2016 and 2020. That is something that Democrats will need to consider as they gear up to make abortion rights their focus issue after the Supreme Court oral arguments on December 1st, which seemed to point to the more conservative court upholding strict abortions regulations in state laws like the one in Mississippi, undermining Roe vs. Wade.   

Democratic Comprehensive Immigration Reform is the other issue that may be losing Hispanic voters as the face of asylees changes from Central Americans to massive surges of supplicants from other countries; and the majority of Biden’s increased refugee slots are most likely going to go to Afghanis and Iraquis. Many Hispanic heritage citizens are not for open borders that allow human trafficking and drugs, nor ending law enforcement in poorer immigrant neighborhoods. Even advocacy for Dreamers seems to be evolving, replaced by demands for the legalization of all unauthorized immigrants in the country, not just those who came in as youths. Democrats may need to consider arguing for priority immigration issues piecemeal rather than buried in multi-thousand-page bills.

In fact, there are indications that many political activists on the left and the right are realizing that the “Latino vote” is not one that revolves around monolithic-issues, and that Hispanic heritage citizens are highly diverse. The new theme for Hispanics in 2022 on Capitol Hill may well be that they represent the diversity of America in every way -- the ultimate American. •