Marco Rubio's Lonely Fight

There’s something about Senator Marco Rubio that inspires seething hatred in his detractors. But what is it, exactly? It’s natural that progressives wouldn’t be terribly fond of him, as he is an avowed conservative. What’s puzzling, though, is that Rubio seems more intensely disliked on the left than politicians well to his right, who don’t share his zeal for making the tax code more generous towards the working poor. Rubio’s critics on the right, meanwhile, ridicule him for his inconstancy, and his supposed tendency to buckle under pressure. Yet many of these same critics are admirers of President Donald Trump, who is hardly a model of ideological rectitude.

The real reason Rubio is, Jiménez observes that assimilation is not just a straight-line process in which newcomers, whom he defines as immigrants and the children of at least one immigrant parent, come to resemble established Americans, his term for the U.S.-born children of two U.S.-born parents. Rather, it is a process, which “involves back-and-forth adjustments in daily life by both newcomers and established individuals as they come into contact with each other.”