Tim Kaine, en Español

On June 11, 2013, Tim Kaine requested permission to do something unprecedented on the Senate’s floor. “I ask unanimous consent that I be able to deliver a floor speech on immigration reform in Spanish,” Kaine said. With permission granted, he started to talk about the importance of the language he had learned while performing missionary work in Honduras as a twenty-two-year-old. “This is a language that has been spoken in this country ever since Spanish missionaries founded San Agustín, Florida (today’s Saint Augustine), in 1565,” he explained. “Close to forty million Americans speak the language today.” Kaine then congratulated the group of senators who had crafted S.744, the ultimately unsuccessful bipartisan immigration-reform bill that would later be dryly known as the Gang of Eight bill. During fourteen minutes of uninterrupted, effortless Spanish, Kaine laid out how immigration reform would work under the bill, including a nuanced description of border security, while making an argument for the benefits of both high- and low-skilled immigration into the United States. Kaine concluded on a conciliatory note: “We will show our country and the world that this piece of legislation is not Republican or Democratic but, rather, strongly bipartisan and American.”