Thread: Lionel Sosa wants to share the American dream with others

Lionel Sosa wants to share the American dream with others

By Ruben Navarrette
San Diego Union-Tribune
August 18, 2007 6:00 AM

Mexican-American businessman Lionel Sosa has enjoyed great success but still hungers for new challenges. He sure has one now: namely, bringing together two countries that, while neighbors, sometimes appear worlds apart.

Then again, this man is a first-rate bridge builder. He has helped Fortune 500 companies reach out to Latino consumers and helped Republicans - including President Bush - connect with Latino voters.

More recently, the 68-year-old co-founded a binational think tank to help bridge the divide between Mexico and the United States. According to him, MATT.org - which stands for Mexicans & Americans Thinking Together - has more than 1 million members on both sides of the border.

Sosa is convinced that the key to bringing together the two countries lies with the 24 million people of Mexican descent who live in the United States.

"We love Mexico, we love the U.S.," he told me recently. "We have our souls in one place and our hearts in another."

For many members of MATT.org, which just marked its first anniversary, immigration is an open wound. The group supports a comprehensive approach to our broken immigration policy that secures the border while providing illegal immigrants in the United States - most of whom are Mexican - a path to legal status. As the recent debate in Congress proved, getting there is easier said than done. In fact, it became virtually impossible once anti-Mexican sentiment sidetracked the discussion.

But Sosa is not easily deterred. He has faced long odds before and come out on top. Sosa virtually created the industry of Latino marketing in the early 1980s when he launched Sosa & Associates, a San Antonio-based advertising agency designed to help some of the largest companies in the world reach Latino consumers. Clients included Coca-Cola, Burger King and Anheuser-Busch. Soon, the agency was billing more than $100 million annually. Sosa also has worked as a Latino media consultant for six Republican presidential campaigns. In the 1990s, he helped Bush, a fellow Texas businessman with no political experience, get elected, then re-elected governor.

In addition to working on political campaigns, Sosa has written books, lectured extensively and served on boards and commissions. In 2005, he was named one of the 25 most influential Latinos in the United States by Time magazine.

All that from humble beginnings. His father emigrated from Mexico as a child and, with the rest of his family, set up a laundry at home where they washed and ironed clothes for neighbors. When his father turned 21, he opened his own laundry. For Sosa, his family's story is an embodiment of the American dream - the same thing he wants others to enjoy.

Besides offering illegal immigrants a path to legal status, Sosa also likes the concept of importing guest workers.

What he doesn't like, however, is the idea of making guest workers return to their home country after two years before being allowed to reapply for the program. Nor does Sosa think Americans can solve the immigration problem with concrete and barbed wire.

As for those immigrants who come legally, Sosa also strongly objects to something else that was part of the immigration debate - a proposal to restructure the system for admitting newcomers so as to put greater emphasis on education and skills rather than family reunification.

"Immigrants have always come into the country with low levels of education," Sosa said. "Whether it's the Irish or Italian or Polish, here is the land of opportunity. It's where people come in at the bottom and build themselves up. To try to bring in people who have already made it is un-American. When did we ever do that before, and why are we considering it now?"

Good question. Seems not everyone wants a bridge between the United States and Mexico.

Navarrette is a columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune. His e-mail address is ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com.

http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ ... _OPINION06

( a more accurate headline would be Lionel Sosa wants to steal the American dream from others - namely Americans)

"We love Mexico, we love the U.S.," he told me recently. "We have our souls in one place and our hearts in another."

First lets determine where the heart is; then determine where the soul is!

Let's say for planning purposses the Soul is in the US and the Heart is in Mexico.

Second - lets see about getting you A_ _ where the heart is and all will be well

More recently, the 68-year-old co-founded a binational think tank to help bridge the divide between Mexico and the United States. According to him, MATT.org - which stands for Mexicans & Americans Thinking Together - has more than 1 million members on both sides of the border.

That board is a farce. They pretended that they were representing both sides. Whatever memberships that are listed are no longer active. They kicked off every single poster against amnesty (including me) and now have 3 anti-illegal members that they allow to post for appearance sake and the majority of the pro illegal alien posts are posted by DEE who is MATT who assumes various names who ironically have 1 or 2 posts and then magically stop posting. It's representative of all of the reasons the illegals should be escorted to the border and displays the behavior of the majority of illegal aliens in this country . . . . DELUSIONAL, LAWLESS AND PSYCHOTIC.