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SAN DIEGO – I’m all about regional pride. As a native of the farmland of Central California, it warms my heart to see one of my peeps break a barrier, achieve a victory or receive an honor.

Trevor Noah is now persona non grata in France. The African-born and multi-racial host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” got crossways with la République when he made a joke that didn’t strike our allies as funny.

It started out innocently enough. A few weeks ago, after France won the World Cup, Noah — alluding to the fact that 80 percent of the players on the French team were of African descent — playfully declared on his show: “Africa won the World Cup!”

I bet most people who saw that segment got the joke. Certainly, I assume, many Americans — who drink green beer on St. Patrick’s Day, and enjoy cannoli in Little Italy, and grill a juicy bratwurst now and then — weren’t especially troubled by the idea that a bunch of Frenchmen could also be seen as African.

Anyone remember U.S. Olympic track star Leo Manzano? Born in Mexico, Manzano celebrated his silver medal in the 2012 London games by waving the American flag but also the Mexican one.

I didn’t think the flag stunt was a good idea, and I said so at the time in a column for CNN. But I certainly didn’t think or say that the gesture made Manzano any less American. That’s silly.

Alas, sometimes, silliness is France’s national pastime. Noah’s throwaway line earned him an angry letter from Gérard Araud, the French ambassador to the United States.

Araud was outraged that Noah would dare refer to any of the French players as African — or as anything other than French. In fact, he wrote, all but two of the 23 members of the team were born in France. They were educated in France, he said. And, they are French Citizens, he protested.

Moreover, Araud said, it was racist for Noah to imply — even in jest — that only white people can be French. Theirs is a proudly multicultural society, he said. Not at all like the United States, he said, which refers to its citizens based on race, origin, religion. No hyphenated identity for the French, he boasted.

Whoa, France, I surrender. Sorry, bad joke.

It is easy to claim that there is no ethnic strife in a given country — say, Norway — where there is very little ethnic diversity. In the same way, the reason the French don’t have to worry about hyphens is that they are much stingier than Americans are about handing out citizenship.

In France — unlike in the United States — there is no automatic citizenship for anyone born in France. In order to get that benefit, you have to have at least one French-born parent. Children born in France to foreign parents are not barred from obtaining citizenship, but they have to put in the effort and the French authorities have made sure the process isn’t as pleasant and carefree as a stroll down the Champs-Élysées.

The fact is that — regardless of what it says about France in the brochure — there are many residents who feel alienated, unwelcomed and marginalized. Some are Muslim. Many are African. And if there is racism there, Trevor Noah didn’t put it there.

For his part, the late-night host seemed perplexed by the idea — which seemed to be put forth by Araud — that the French soccer players had to be either “French” or “African.”

Noah asked, “Why can’t they be both?” — insisting that he didn’t want the players to give up either their Frenchness or their Africanness, but to continue to identify with both.

Then he sang the praises of his adopted country.

“That is what I love about America,” Noah said. “America is not a perfect place, but what I love about this place is that people can still celebrate their identity in their Americanness.”

I quite agree. I put it like this: “Our differences are what make us similar.” There’s a lot of commonality in how Mexicans, Irishmen, Italians relate to their ethnic differences.

But the best part of this story — and certainly the most important aspect — is what Noah then went on to say about the fickleness of nations, regarding its immigrants.

Everyone loves a winner, even if that winner is an immigrant. But, the flip side of that sentiment is that those who don’t win may never be accepted as full and equal citizens.

“When the African migrants are unemployed, when they may commit a crime or when they may be considered unsavory, they are African immigrants,” said Noah. “But when their children go on to provide a World Cup victory for France, we should only refer to them as French?”

That’s it. Such a small-minded way of looking at the world. The African soccer players helped deliver a historic victory that made everyone proud of France. Is it too much to ask that France return the favor and be proud of them?

Ruben Navarrette, a contributing editor to Angelus News, is a syndicated columnist with The Washington Post Writers Group, a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a Daily Beast columnist, author of “A Darker Shade of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano,” and host of the podcast “Navarrette Nation.”

Alfredo Corchado sometimes feels like a man without a country, but he’s actually a man with two countries.

It is my friend’s burden to introduce them to each other. And it is his God-given gift that he has the skill to do it.

The Mexican-American journalist was born in Durango, Mexico, but raised for the most part in El Paso, Texas — with a brief stopover in the farmland of Central California, where members of his families picked crops such as cantaloupes and tomatoes when they first arrived from Mexico.

Alfredo, his siblings and his mother came to join his father who was a “bracero” (“laborer”), one of an estimated 5 million Mexicans who were brought from Mexico into the United States from 1942 to 1964 to do — in a phrase favored many years later by President George W. Bush — “jobs that Americans won’t do.”

Specifically, the “braceros” — who got their name from the Spanish word for arm, “brazo,” as in those who work with their arms and hands — worked in the fields.

I know those fields, though thankfully not as well as my parents and grandparents do. They worked in them. I only grew up around them. Still, I know this much about the fields: They’re hot, brutal and unforgiving.

That was Corchado’s harsh welcome to California, and it was one reason that he spent much of his childhood pining away for Mexico and his later years plotting his escape to anyplace where Mexicans didn’t spend their days stooped over.

The personal stories of Mexican-Americans in the United States are as unique as snowflakes. No two are the same.

His heart in both

Corchado’s story plays out on both sides of the border. With one foot in Mexico and another in the United States, and his heart in both, my friend has told me that he doesn’t feel like he has to choose one country over the other.

As a reporter — most recently for the Dallas Morning News, and earlier at The El Paso Times and The Wall Street Journal — Corchado has made a living telling stories. He is good at it.

The veteran journalist can these days be found back home in El Paso, where he serves as the U.S.-Mexico border correspondent for the Dallas Morning News.

When he started writing books a few years ago, Corchado had to discover the letter “I” on his keyboard and learn to write his own story. He is good at that, too.

His newly released book — “Homelands: Four Friends, Two Countries, and the Fate of the Great Mexican-American Migration” — explores the uncertain and sometimes rocky terrain of what he calls “Mexico in the United States.”

That phrase refers to the millions of Mexican immigrants living in the United States, and the communities they create in towns and cities throughout the United States — from Boston to Chicago to Phoenix to San Jose.

America can’t seem to decide whether these folks are a positive or a negative. For Corchado, it’s a no-brainer.

“We’re not rapists, drug traffickers or thieves,” he told me. “We’re hardworking people who contribute in big numbers to the well-being of this country.”

The new book is about four friends — three of them, including Corchado, Americans of Mexican origin and one Mexican-American with a healthy dose of Spanish blood because he hails from New Mexico. The “hombres” gather in 1987 to compare cultural notes in an authentic Mexican restaurant in Philadelphia.

On the heels of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which legalized nearly 3 million people, the “compadres” start a dialogue about immigration, politics, family, hometowns, love, culture, friendship and how to succeed as an American while remaining authentically Mexican.

The conversation goes on for 30 years, against the backdrop of a massive migration of people from Mexico to the United States — a development that changed the country forever.

There is something that Corchado might be able to clear up. I call it “The Mexican Mystery.”

It boils down to a simple question. Here you have all these Americans — including but not limited to many Trump voters eager to build a “big, beautiful wall” and unleash a “deportation force” to “Make America Great Again” — who can’t stop thinking about Mexicans who live in the United States.

The Americans see these Mexicans everywhere, think the country is being invaded by them, and try to figure out new ways to get rid of them. They love Mexican food, can’t live without Mexican workers, and have plenty of exposure to Mexican people. Of course, they also have strong views about Mexicans who live in the United States.

Now the question: All that being the case, why don’t Americans who are so obsessed with Mexicans know more about Mexicans?

Knowledge trumps passion

Passion is no stand-in for knowledge. Oddly, many Americans are awfully ignorant of a subject that gets them fired up.

I think of the man who approached me in a restaurant north of San Diego to talk politics. Soon, he was opining on what ails the public schools — “too many English-language learners, all these Mexican kids whose parents don’t value education.”

As a Mexican-American who aced the public education system (despite my parents, who were almost crushed by it years earlier), my experience has been that the only things that Mexican parents value more than education are family, faith and breathing.

I also think about the middle-aged woman who approached me after a recent speech to a senior adult learning course at a community college in Oceanside. The topic: America’s ambivalence toward immigrants, and how this country can’t decide whether it wants fewer of them — or more.

The woman submitted that previous waves of immigrants from places like Italy and Germany came to the United States with no trouble and “flawlessly assimilated” into society. For instance, she said, they learned English right away. Not like the immigrants of today who, she claimed, didn’t give up their language — by which she meant Spanish.

Someone needs to point out the mistakes in that line of thinking. But it’s hard to know where to begin.

First, contrary to the popular folklore that often surrounds immigration, earlier waves of immigrants did not rush headfirst into assimilation.

They congregated in ethnic enclaves in Chicago, Milwaukee, Boston, New York, Philadelphia and other U.S. cities where they cooked up authentically ethnic dishes and kept their languages alive — at least for the first two generations, even if they often wound up losing it by the third.

With regard to Mexican immigrants, it is simply not true that they are bucking the assimilation process. People think that because, on the way to work, they see a Spanish-language billboard hocking beer. That is just an example of people selling stuff in whatever language helps close the deal. Let’s not blame the fish for the bait.

Much like the immigrants of old, most of the Mexican immigrants of today will learn a few words of English. Those who don’t learn much will someday marvel at children who speak fluent English and grandchildren who likely won’t speak a word of Spanish. Along the way, everyone will pick up a variety of customs, culture and traditions.

That is the mischievous trick that America plays on immigrants. Assimilation happens, whether people are ready for it or not – and whether they want it or not.

Corchado seems to accept that. But he also insists that it is easier to leave Mexico than to forget it. Part of the reason has to do with proximity.

“Mexico is right next door, a constant reminder of our homeland, or parents’, grandparents’ homeland,” he said. “It’s like slamming the door to your relatives when they’re standing right across from you. Even those who want to forget find it increasingly difficult to cut the ties. I certainly don’t want to forget.”

A short walk home

On a personal note, I’d like it if my friend — this keen observer and talented storyteller — didn’t forget his way home to Catholicism. Though a self-described “lapsed, nonpracticing Catholic,” he doesn’t seem too far away. It could be a short walk.

Since he lived in Mexico — an almost entirely Catholic country — for 20 years, I was curious about what he thought faith meant south of the border and, just as importantly, what it meant to him.

“I don’t know that I can answer that question,” he said. “Here is what I can say: My mother says the rosary and prays on both sides of the border. I have long questioned how anyone can believe so much. It is a question that has long haunted me. I grew up Catholic in Mexico and the United States, but when I was old enough I stopped going to church.”

But one doesn’t escape faith that easily.

“Having said that, I must also confess that living in Mexico for more than 20 years, a country where democratic institutions remain too weak, impunity too high, I find myself relying on simple faith and humble prayer,” he said. “In the darkest of moments, I too believe.”

My brother journalist has a dangerous gig, having in the past poked at the hornet’s nest of drug cartels.  I believe he has a guardian angel watching over him.

“I’ve also noticed over time how the Virgin of Guadalupe shadows me on both sides of the border and throughout the continent. ‘La Morenita’ is sometimes all we have.”

Corchado is not alone in believing that.

“I hear this sentiment repeatedly and more poignantly these days whenever I interview immigrants,” he said. “When the most powerful nation on earth can take away their children, all they have left is their faith. That’s powerful and humbling.”

Amen, brother.

Clearly, Bill O’Reilly is no Alex Haley. The former Fox News host went to Ireland recently to connect with his roots. But, while in the Emerald Isle, instead of writing a bestseller, he tweeted some of his worst instincts.

First, I have to give the Irish-American broadcaster his props. I appeared on O’Reilly’s cable show for about 10 years, and he has been my guest when I’ve hosted radio shows. He has called me a friend, and I do the same. He was the king of cable news for a reason. He has the ability to simplify the complicated, explain a confusing world and relate to everyday Americans.

But what O’Reilly doesn’t have is a good grasp of American history and a mature perspective on white privilege.

He tweeted: “Enjoying my time in Ireland. Visited County Cavan where my ancestors were evicted from their land in 1845. That forced them to come to America legally so they wouldn’t starve. Pardon me if I reject the ‘white privilege’ scenario if applied to my family.”

Saints alive! Where should I begin?

Irish immigrants did have a hard time at first

First, I’m sorry that O’Reilly’s ancestors fell on hard times, and that they had to come to America for a second chance. But I’m also grateful they came. The Irish immigrants who were brave enough to make their way to these shores in vessels so dangerous that they became known as “coffin ships,” and sturdy enough to survive and succeed in this country when faced with nativism, exploitation and discrimination deserve our respect.

They didn’t always get it. The Donald Trump of the early 20th Century was Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts who despised various immigrant groups — Italians, Jews, Russians, Austrians, etc. — who he claimed hurt the U.S. economy and lowered “the quality of American citizenship.”

I can relate. My family knows what it is like to struggle financially and persevere against prejudice, as do many families in the Latino community. There is only one immigrant in my ancestral tree — my paternal grandfather, Roman, who came to the United States with his family during the Mexican Revolution to escape poverty, corruption and violence in Mexico. Like many Mexicans, my grandpa worked hard his whole life, overcame obstacles and raised children who served in the military and lived their versions of the American Dream.

As for coming legally, my family can relate to that too. Like each of the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans who left Mexico during the revolution, my grandfather came legally. But no gold star for him.

With a few exceptions like those immigrants from the Far East targeted by the Chinese Exclusion of 1882, it was very difficult for anyone to come illegally until after the Immigration Act of 1924. Also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, the bill set quotas on the number of immigrants who could come legally from certain countries. It favored the English, German — and to a lesser degree Irish — and kept out immigrants from “Southern Europe.” The legislation might as well have been called the “Italian Exclusion Act.”

The same goes for the O’Reilly brood, which we’re told came to the United States shortly after 1845. Of course, they came legally. At that time, how else could they come? Bill should be humbler about that fact.

Lastly, O’Reilly “rejects” the idea that his ancestors — or their descendants — benefited from “white privilege.”

So what? He can reject it all he wants, and he might have a point when it comes to that initial wave of Irish family members from County Cavan. But there have been two or three generations of O’Reillys born in the United States since then.

Sorry, O’Reilly, white privilege is real

It’s hard to know what breaks these members of the family — including Bill himself — got as a result of being born white, or put differently as a result of not being born Latino or African-American. In response to O’Reilly’s tweet, some people did point out that the Irish Americans of today have never experienced a time where their ethnic heritage limits opportunity in America.

This much I do know: white privilege is real. It rears its head all the time and in a variety of arenas — from the job market to media to universities to the criminal justice system.

For example, all human beings fail. But many of the white men I know have the tendency to fail up; when most of my Latino and African-American friends fail, they fail all the way down. White males often get multiple chances to correct mistakes, reinvent themselves, or launch a new career; my Latino and African-American friends often find it more difficult to bounce back, and they frequently have to overcome rigid notions of how they should think or behave. And how many times do we have to read about a white judge handling down a lighter sentence to a white man that he’s not ready to write off, when Latinos and Africans who come before the bench are written off all the time.

The point is, if you don’t see white privilege, it may be because you’ve experienced it for so long that you just consider it normal. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Again, I’m glad O’Reilly went to Ireland. All Americans should try to uncover our family history. Hopefully, once we do, instead of trying to set our ancestors apart, we’ll develop more of that one commodity we all need more of these days: empathy.

Ruben Navarrette Jr., a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, is a syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group and host of the daily podcast, “Navarrette Nation.” Follow him on Twitter: @RubenNavarrette.

No mas, Newt!

After two decades of watching the former House speaker wrestle clumsily with Latino outreach, I can’t take any more flip-flopping.

Newt Gingrich cannot seem to make up his mind about whether Republicans get more benefit from approaching America’s largest minority with an open palm — or a clenched fist.

Judging by a recent appearance on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” — which is must-see TV for nativists — Gingrich is gambling on the fist these days.

Gingrich said that Democrats are trying to make it legal for noncitizens to vote and that this is why they’re soft on illegal immigration.

It’s a fine theory — except that illegal immigrants don’t seem all that eager to vote when the choices are between “bad” and “worse,” and Democrats are often harder on illegal immigration than Republicans. Compare Democrat Bill “The Hammer” Clinton with Republican George W. “Open-Borders” Bush.

Undeterred by fact, Gingrich told Carlson that Democrats can’t win the votes of “law-abiding Americans.”

By “law-abiding Americans,” we can assume that Gingrich is not talking about former Trump campaign advisers or ex-Arizona lawmen who defy federal judges.

Gingrich also took a jab at fellow Republicans for not pushing for tough immigration laws, including a crackdown on those mythical “sanctuary cities” that don’t actually offer much sanctuary. Republicans “lose their nerve,” he said, because the liberal media “smears” them by calling them “xenophobic” and “anti-foreigner.”

I’ve written about Gingrich and Latinos since the second term of the Clinton administration, when the former assistant professor at West Georgia College (now the University of West Georgia) was the leader of the opposition.

In 1998, Gingrich was so preoccupied with the looming impeachment of President Bill Clinton that he missed a revolution that was brewing under his nose. Far away from Washington, GOP mayors and governors were doing very well with Latino voters. They included Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Arizona Gov. Jane Hull and Texas Gov. George W. Bush. All of them got more than 30 percent of the Latino vote, which threw their Democratic opponents off balance because they had lost a big chunk of a core constituency.

About these impressive inroads, Gingrich was not impressed. I know this because, during the week of the 1998 midterm elections, Gingrich was in Phoenix for a fundraiser. At the time, I was a columnist for the Arizona Republic and a guest host at a conservative talk station. So I got to interview Gingrich twice in one day. I asked him both times whether the national GOP couldn’t learn something from the success that local and state officials were having with Latino voters.

Gingrich replied that, if the GOP were a strong party, Latinos — and all voters — would find their way to supporting Republican candidates.

But by 2007, it was a Newt day. After he got in hot water for saying that Spanish was “the language of living in a ghetto,” Gingrich — who had been taking Spanish lessons — overcorrected by posting a video statement on YouTube in both English and Spanish. He said that he has “never believed that Spanish is a language of people of low incomes, nor a language without beauty” and that it was “not my intention to offend the Latino community.”

In 2009, Gingrich tried to ride the Latin wave by creating a bilingual, Latino-themed website — dubbed “The Americano” — to promote conservative viewpoints and Latino heritage. About the same time, he proposed a “zone between deportation and amnesty” that would allow illegal immigrants to work legally in the United States.

Amnesty Newt pandering to Latinos en Espanol? What would those fire-breathing immigration hardliners say?

In November 2011, while running for the 2012 Republican nomination for president, Gingrich suggested that one way to keep immigrant families together was to issue “red card” visas that would allow the undocumented to remain in the United States legally.

But later that month, he veered to the right again by promising to make English the official language of the United States and applauding states like South Carolina for trying to make their own immigration laws.

Now Gingrich is back to talking tough in the culture wars, even if it alienates the same Latino voters he once tried to court — in Spanish, no less.

Dizzy yet?

They say familiarity breeds contempt. I’ll buy it. I’m so familiar with Gingrich’s double-talk to Latino voters that contempt is all I can muster.

© 2018 Washington Post

I’ve had enough of this cheap outrage at the border. Liberal Democrats with short memories are making spectacles of themselves.

When Barack Obama was president, these folks never cared about refugee families being separated at the border, people being whisked away into deportation proceedings without due process, children being housed in cages, toddlers having to play lawyer and defend themselves in immigration court, or allegations of physical abuse against children in the custody of U.S. immigration officials.

But now that Donald Trump is president, they can’t stop talking. The mistreatment of Latinos by this administration has become shorthand that allows Trump bashers to emphasize their main point: “We’re much better people than anyone who voted for this president.”

Consider the scene caused by Whoopi Goldberg on a recent episode of “The View.” When Judge Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News Host, accused Goldberg of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” the host shot back.

“Listen, I don’t have Trump derangement,” Goldberg shouted. “Let me tell you what I have. I’m tired of people starting a conversation with ‘Mexicans are liars and rapists.’”

Or listen to Sen. Elizabeth Warren discuss what she saw during a recent trip to a Border Patrol processing center in McAllen, Texas. Upon returning to Washington, she sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Health & Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.

Warren wrote: “I was appalled by what I observed first hand, and I was shocked by the stories told by the people detained at these facilities.” She continued: “One man called out to me that he just wanted a shower — he said he’d gone six days without a shower or the opportunity to brush his teeth. Another man told me that his two children, aged 15 and 16, were being held separately in the other room.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad so many people on the Left are up in arms and moved to defend powerless and voiceless refugees who have their lives upended at the U.S.-Mexico border by U.S. immigration officials.

But this outrage is awfully convenient. Today, liberal Democrats are sanctimonious. During the Obama years, they were silent.

Back then, they said nothing, heard nothing, saw nothing and admitted nothing. And they had plenty of excuses for Obama’s hardline at the border, his use of local police to enforce immigration law, his record number of deportations, his dumping of thousands of U.S.-born children into the foster care system after deporting their parents, etc.

Whenever I wrote about these things, Obama sycophants would say that he had no choice but to enforce the law, that Congress appropriated enforcement funds that needed to be spent, that the rule of law had to count for something, that the parents were at fault for putting their children in harm’s way by coming to the United States illegally etc.

Now, whenever anyone brings up the fact that — with his immigration crackdown — Trump seems to be stealing from Obama’s playbook, the former president’s defenders start splitting hairs.

It’s not the same, they say. Separating families at the border is much worse than separating them once they’ve settled in the interior, they claim. Trump taking children away from their parents and locking them up is much worse than Obama locking up children who showed up at the border as unaccompanied minors, they insist. There is a big difference between Trump carrying out a family separation policy, the expressed purpose of which is to discourage future migration, and Obama simply enforcing the law with family separation as an unintended consequence of that enforcement, they argue.

Each excuse was lamer and more desperate than the one before.

Now some Obama defenders are even going to the trouble of rewriting history. They insist that the reason they missed this story the first time around is because the number of Central American refugees that Obama dealt with was much smaller than the numbers facing Trump.

They have it completely backward. Trump is being rightly criticized for separating a little more than 2,500 families. In 2014, under Obama, more than 80,000 refugees from Central America — mostly women and children — streamed across the U.S.-Mexico border into Texas.

Four years ago, many of the people were mistreated — denied access to legal counsel, separated from their children, held indefinitely in detention facilities that were never intended to hold families, etc.

Most Americans, including many on the Left, didn’t care. Now, we’re supposed to believe, they suddenly do — just because there’s a different person in the White House?

I don’t buy it. For too many people, this is just politics. They didn’t care then, and they don’t care now.

Sadly, the ambivalence that Americans feel toward the suffering of the desperate and less fortunate who walk across along our southern border may be the only constant in this story.

Ruben Navarrette, a contributing editor to Angelus News, is a syndicated columnist with The Washington Post Writers Group, a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a Daily Beast columnist, author of “A Darker Shade of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano,” and host of the podcast “Navarrette Nation.”

SAN DIEGO — Have you been keeping track of the telenovela in New York’s 14th Congressional District? If not, you’re missing quite a show.

The primary election may be over, but the drama continues. And instead of the picture getting clearer for Democrats in a district that is made up of Queens and the Bronx, the outlook is murkier than ever.

The plot is about three things: power, power and power. And there is plenty of intrigue, with no sense of who can be trusted.

The old saying goes: “It’s the pioneers who take the arrows.” And in politics, the arrows come from friend and foe alike.

Clearly, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scares Republicans. It’s amusing to hear folks who handed their party and the nation to a carnival barker with zero political experience and a knack for rattling the Republican establishment now wring their hands over a self-declared democratic socialist with zero political experience and a knack for rattling the Democratic establishment.

But the 28-year-old insurgent also frightens many Democrats, including those who are part of the machine that has been put in place by Rep. Joe Crowley, the 10-term incumbent who outspent Ocasio-Cortez 18-to-1 and still managed to lose by 15 points. The Democrats may need to worry less about socialism, and more about cronyism.

After the daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and Bronx-born Latino father ousted the son of an Irish immigrant who said he couldn’t help being “born white,” I wrote a column warning Democrats that the times they are a-changin’. The way I saw it, the upset puts white Democrats on notice that they will no longer be able to represent areas that are increasingly nonwhite.

The 14th District is nearly half Latino and 68 percent nonwhite.

An angry reader told me I was wrong and claimed that the Democratic Party is one big happy family and insisted that Crowley was supporting Ocasio-Cortez. After all, the reader said, Crowley had — on election night — picked up a guitar and dedicated to his opponent a rendition of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.”

But due to a quirky provision in New York election law, write-in votes that were registered on the line of a third-party — the Working Families Party — have resulted in Crowley’s name being on the ballot in November’s general election. When Ocasio-Cortez learned this, she hit the roof. Then she hit Twitter to accuse Crowley of conspiring in, or at least going along with, an attempt by some of his supporters to return him to Congress and keep the gravy train going.

“So much for ‘Born to Run,’” she tweeted.

Crowley tweeted back: “Alexandria, the race is over and Democrats need to come together. I’ve made my support for you clear and the fact that I’m not running.”

Yeah, here’s the thing. There must be dozens of ways for Crowley to prove that he is not in on this shenanigan and that he is genuinely ready to retire. He could campaign with Ocasio-Cortez and raise money for her, or he could declare — a la Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman — that he won’t serve if elected. Instead, he reportedly doesn’t want to remove his name from the ballot, despite the fact that leaders of the Working Families Party have asked him to do so.

I tell you, something is rotten in the 14th District.

Say, maybe Crowley picked the wrong Springsteen tune. Perhaps he should have gone with “Brilliant Disguise” whose lyrics must be ringing in Ocasio-Cortez’s mind right about now.

“So tell me who I see when I look in your eyes. Is that you, baby, or just a brilliant disguise?”

Welcome to the big leagues, Alexandria.

You’re learning the first three rules of politics: leading from the front means having to watch your back; when the long knives come out, they are often held by people in your own party; and insurgents may emerge victorious, but — because of the very nature of insurgency — they’ll never be fully welcomed.

Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez is continuing on full steam ahead. She is using Republican attacks on her to raise money from supporters. She is also not afraid to challenge old-school Democrats with moxie and blunt language. And all this is getting many on the left excited again.

Silly Democrats. You shouldn’t be trying to stop Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or trying to tame her. You ought to be trying to clone her.

How did this country of ours – which has its origins as an agrarian society founded not by politicians but by farmers – come to have such ambivalence toward farming and those who struggle every day to make a noble living at it?

It’s weather and dust. The more I think about it, the more I come back to weather and dust.

Those are the things my parents were so desperate to escape when, as pre-teens in the 1950’s, they resolved to one day get a job that let them work indoors. It didn’t matter what kind of labor there was to be done, only that this new task would take them out of the fields where my grandparents worked hunched over or atop ladders picking fruits and vegetables for $1.50 an hour.

Farm work has always been hard and thankless work that those who spend their days in offices are only too happy to avoid. I dare say that, in many cases, those who work indoors either feel sorry for those who work outside, look down on them, or don’t give them a thought.

So where does this leave those who spend their days outside, dodging weather and choking on dust – not just farmers but also farm workers and labor contractors, whose task it is to find what are usually foreign hands to do work that American hands will not do?

The great divide in America isn’t between rich and poor, native and immigrant, black and white, Trump voter and Trump hater. More than 200 years after George Washington retired from the presidency and returned to his plow at Mt. Vernon, the deepest and widest split is still between the country mouse and the city mouse.

You either grasp the importance of farming and understand the frustration of farmers, or you don’t.

As someone who was raised in farm country but has spent many years living in cities, it’s been my experience that most Americans don’t. Even if your parents or grandparents were themselves farmers, it only takes a few years of city life to wipe your memory clean.

Farming is not for the weak of heart. You’re at the mercy of pressure by labor unions, and subject to the ups and downs of the market. You get up early to feed the livestock, and you stay up late doing paperwork. You worry about having enough water to irrigate your fields and but not so much that you’re rained out.

You have to deal with insects one minute and politicians the next. Pick your parasite. You inherited the family farm and spend your whole life caring for it — only to have your own children announce that they have no interest in carrying on the family business. So maybe you’ll sell the land to the farm workers who have helped you care for it all these years. The farm will live on, even if you’re no longer part of it.

Adding insult to injury, farmers are accused of spraying the fields with cancer-causing pesticides, hogging the water supply, hurting the environment, polluting the air, exploiting their workers and more.

Now, with California’s unemployment rate at a mere 4.2 percent, and farmers in the Golden State having unprecedented difficulty finding workers to bring in the summer harvest, there is a new slander circulating about the folks in farming who keep alive my native Central California – a region of such agricultural abundance that it produces more than half the fruits and vegetables for the entire country, and still has enough product left over to ship around the world.

California also has unique labor needs. On farms in the Midwest where the crops are wheat, corn, cotton, or alfalfa, the labor demands are not as great since machines do the harvesting. But in California, there are dozens of crops that – even today, and for the foreseeable future – must be picked by hand, including tomatoes, peaches, plums, nectarines, wine grapes, avocados, mushrooms, lettuce, strawberries, blueberries, oranges, lemons and more.

The slander blames the victim. It suggests that the only reason that farmers can’t find enough workers to pick their crops is that farmers aren’t paying good wages. If only farmers paid more, the argument goes, U.S.-born workers in their teens and twenties would take these jobs.

My life experience, and a healthy dose of farm-bred common sense, tells me otherwise. I’ve heard this argument for the last 15 years, from journalists, TV pundits, politicians, radio hosts, and amateur economists. They all have one thing in common – the prideful and naïve belief that there is no job that American workers will not do if the wage is high enough. So, they reason, if there are jobs that Americans won’t do, it must be because they’re not being offered enough to do it.

But farm country is where this theory goes to die. I often wonder what that magic figure is. I remember the call that I got from a reader about 10 years ago who volunteered to pick lettuce in the Salinas Valley if he could get his asking price: $1,000 per week. Of course, he admitted, he had never before picked lettuce.

In fact, it seemed, the closest he had come to that particular crop was visiting a salad bar. So, I asked him, why did he think he deserved $1,000 per week. He said it was because, as a U.S. citizen, he knew his rights so he wasn’t going to be exploited like an illegal immigrant.

Rights, we have plenty of. We need perspective. To get it, I’ve come home to listen to the stories of farmers and labor contractors. These are the folks who deal everyday with weather and dust, and they’re getting fed up with being told how to make their living by people who work in air-conditioned offices in Washington DC and New York.

We meet in a local steakhouse, which is located about 20 minutes away from where I grew up. Before the salad is served, I start to tell them what is being said about them: That they caused their own labor shortage by paying wages that are too low to interest U.S. workers.

A few of them snicker. I learn that, in Central California, it is often workers and not employers who set the price.

Here’s how it works: In any given farm town, labor contractors–who are hired by farmers to act as middlemen and get paid a percentage of the total harvest–approach workers in the wee hours, maybe 4:00 AM. The workers are up, dressed, ready to work, and waiting at gathering spots all over town. They also have, thanks to scuttlebutt, a good idea about which employer is paying what wage to do what kind of work. From experience, they also know how difficult each job is, how long it would take to complete, and how much it’s worth.

Now it’s time to negotiate. When a labor contractor tells the workers that he needs hired hands, they then tell him what it will cost. If the labor contractor balks, fine. The day laborer who misses out on the opportunity of picking peaches can instead spend the day building homes, doing landscaping, cutting wine grapes, laying out sprinkler systems or doing a host of other jobs that need workers.

The demand gives workers the leverage. And, on top of all that, the price often changes from day to day. At present, I’m told, farmers are paying $20 per hour to pick mandarin oranges, and $25 per hour to pick tomatoes. And on the coast, about four hours away in Santa Barbara, according to media reports, avocado growers are paying as much $400 per day.

Still, no one can find enough workers. I ask the group what bothers them about how the national media covers agriculture, and I get an earful. They complain that reporters don’t take the time to visit farms and talk to the people who own them or work there. They claim that there is a general “lack of knowledge” about the agricultural industry and a reluctance to cite the positive contributions of those who help feed the nation.

Finally, they say, they’ve all but given up hope that issues like the labor shortage, or the need for temporary guest workers, or the ongoing debate in Congress about whether the United States should limit the number of “unskilled” immigrants might be covered in a fair way. After an hour or so of this, I learned three things:

1. Farmers and ranchers are not responsible for the labor shortage; it’s a total lie for the right and the left to come together in a conspiracy of ignorance and suggest that farmers aren’t paying high enough wages, that they exploit workers, and that they want “open borders” so they can bring in more workers and pay lower wages.
2. It is simply not the case that the three legs of the agriculture stool (farmers, farm workers, and labor contractors) are at war with one another. In truth, when one of these groups does well, the others do too. When one does poorly, so do the others. It’s not a predatory relationship. It’s a mutually dependent partnership.
3. The labor shortage did not begin in the fields, and it won’t end there. It started with the American family. Too many parents have failed to give their children a work ethic. Many teenagers today don’t have summer or after school jobs. They’ll never work in the fields, not at any price. None of this is the fault of the agricultural industry.

Just because so many Americans have left the farm doesn’t mean they should leave behind the kind of common sense that grows there.

It’s been a few weeks since the Fourth of July. And yet, an image that circulated on Facebook that day still haunts me.

A brown-skinned boy is locked in a cage, staring up as fireworks explode in the sky. The caption: “Not feeling very patriotic this year.”

The meme wound up being passed around by many of my Latino friends. It seemed to sum up how a lot of them were feeling, living as brown-skinned people in Donald Trump’s AEW — Age of Extreme Whiteness.

The meme’s message: “America, you’re mistreating us, and you obviously don’t love us. Therefore, we’re not sure we love you either.”

For the record, I don’t agree with any part of that sentiment. I’m a U.S.-born, Mexican-American Yankee Doodle Dandy who loves my country unconditionally, even if I don’t support everything it does.

But I fully understand the sentiment, and I know where it is coming from. It’s been festering in the U.S. Latino community in the three years since Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower and began his ascension in American politics. Trump got far by accusing Mexico of “not sending their best” and instead “sending people that have lots of problems” — criminals, rapists, drug traffickers etc.

Since then, it’s been one insult after another toward Latinos from the Offender-In-Chief. And all that targeted abuse has predictably made Trump one of the most hated figures in U.S. history, as far as America’s largest minority is concerned. What Gov. George Wallace of Alabama was to African-Americans, that’s what Trump represents to Latinos.

Yet what wasn’t predictable, and what is truly regrettable, is that some of that animosity has now spilled over to something much bigger and grander and nobler than Trump: the United States of America.

Part of the reason for the spillover could be that many Latinos haven’t yet forgiven our friends and neighbors for saddling us with Trump in the first place. Obviously, they weren’t bothered by his racist appeals to our darker instincts. What does that say about them?

Or it might be that we think Trump has uncorked a racist brew that was bubbling for years. You want to talk about civility: White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was denied service in a Virginia restaurant; conservatives insisted that civility was dead. No kidding. No one knows this better than America’s most vilified minority.

A white woman in Southern California scolds a Mexican woman doing the landscaping for speaking Spanish. A woman in Chicago is berated by a white man for wearing a t-shirt with the Puerto Rican flag on it. An elderly man in Los Angeles is beaten bloody by an African-American woman wielding a brick who told him to “go back to your own country.”

We’re way beyond missing brunch. It’s open season on Latinos.

Some people blame that on Trump, but others blame the country that elected him. That is why so many Latinos are so ambivalent about love of country. It’s not just Trump. It’s the fact that someone like Trump could get elected president. Who do we see to complain about that?

For Latinos, patriotism has always come easily. It started when we crossed the border — or, more accurately, as is the case with many Mexican-Americans, when the border crossed us. Our ancestors came from impoverished countries, and so we felt an incalculable debt to this country that took us in and gave us a second chance at our dreams.

As a down payment on what we owe, Latinos have higher-than-normal rates of military service. We have more than our share of Purple Hearts, Silver Stars and Medals of Honor. We practically grew up at grandma’s house, where we saw black-and-white photos of deceased uncles in uniform resting on the mantle, a string of rosary beads draped over one corner. We’ve heard our fathers and grandfathers tell stories about Iwo Jima, Pork Chop Hill and Khe Sanh. And now, we pray to the Virgen de Guadalupe to keep our brothers and cousins safe in Kabul and Fallujah.

The nativists and racists can talk all day long about how Latinos aren’t real Americans, but we know the truth. When it comes to loss, sacrifice, and heartbreak, we gave at the office — and then we gave some more. Our love for this country is complete. We’re all in.

We know America isn’t perfect. Who are you telling? We’ve seen discrimination up-close. But we also know this country has the capability of correcting mistakes and reversing course.

This momentary ambivalence toward patriotism will pass.

What will endure is our love of country, and our recognition that everything we have — from our love of freedom to our sense of personal safety to our material possessions — we owe to this “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Ruben Navarrette, a contributing editor to Angelus News, is a syndicated columnist with The Washington Post Writers Group, a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a Daily Beast columnist, author of “A Darker Shade of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano,” and host of the podcast “Navarrette Nation.”

SAN DIEGO — When we argue about California’s so-called “sanctuary state” law, we might as well be arguing about unicorns.

Just as there is no such thing as a one-horned fantastical creature, so too is there no sanctuary for illegal immigrants in California.

It’s a blatant lie that, as Trump administration officials claim, California is preventing Immigration and Customs Enforcement from rounding up and removing illegal immigrants in the Golden State through “laws designed to protect criminal aliens.”