MARCO RUBIO

Marco Rubio’s parents emigrated to the United States from Cuba in 1956; their son Marco was born in 1971 in Miami, Florida. He was elected to the United States Senate in 2010 and reelected in 2016. He is a Republican.

Marco Rubio: Robert Kennedy is my hero. As attorney general, he prevented the third world war. That may sound like hyperbole, but if you go back as I’ve done and listen to the tapes in the Kennedy Library you will know this: If President Kennedy had done what his generals wanted him to do, we probably would have had a nuclear exchange during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Robert Kennedy grasped that Khrushchev was looking for a way out. It was a brilliant insight by a thirty-something-year-old who had very little experience in foreign policy. I’m blown away by it.

He would pick up a newspaper and say, “This is wrong, and I’m going to go do something about it.” It wasn’t like: “First I have to consider how it will play with this constituency or what people are going to say.” He wasn’t thinking about realignment or a permanent majority or how to bring a voting bloc into the Democratic Party. If he felt something was unjust, he tried to fix it.

And he wasn’t always right on every issue. He evolved. On a human level, he came to understand how unjust conditions were for African Americans, and he decided that was something he would address.

Kerry Kennedy: He had an uncompromising sense of justice. He cared deeply about civil rights for all African Americans, Native Americans, and particularly Latinos. He worked on behalf of farmworkers. Talk about your efforts on behalf of farmworkers in Florida.

MR: Florida farmworkers were being paid, say, ten dollars an hour but being charged three dollars an hour for tools. These are poor people who don’t have any political power, in rural areas where there’s not much media coverage, and someone is taking advantage of them. I just got upset about it. We brought together the farmworkers and the growers and solved it.

There was also an issue about in-state college tuition. A lot of people debating these issues—I’m not saying they’re bad people—believe that if someone is in this country without legal status, taxpayers should not be funding services for that person, and you don’t want to create an incentive for people to violate our laws. The crunch comes when you know a real person in these circumstances.

When you grow up in Miami-Dade County, people affected by the in-state tuition bill are not theoretical. They are human beings with first and last names. I know them. They came here when they were two years old, they don’t speak Spanish, and they had no idea they were illegal until they applied for college. They were going to be deported to the country they were born in, yes, but to a place where they were going to be foreigners for all intents and purposes. They were people whom the State of Florida, over a thirteen-year period, had spent a significant amount of money educating. So, wouldn’t it make sense to not walk away from them, to not send them to someplace that never was their home?

What ultimately became law was that if you went to a Florida high school and had certain other qualifications, you could pay the in-state tuition to go to college in Florida. It’s the kind of thing that can happen when people think about what their neighbors really need. You don’t get there with the ‘Us vs. Them’ mentality that’s all too prominent in our political lives these days.

One of our biggest problems as a country is that we’ve reached a point where it’s not enough to disagree on a topic; you have to convince people that the person you’re debating is evil. Our ability to govern ourselves is deeply imperiled by this notion.

I believe politics is an honorable profession. Most people I serve with want to make a difference. It’s tough to convince people of that because the only time they’ve ever seen their representatives is during a television interview. They don’t see them as human beings.

Speaking of service, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights was instrumental in getting Aya Hijazi released from imprisonment in Egypt, and we worked with you on that.

KK: Yes, she and her husband ran a shelter for street children. They were arrested on trumped-up charges and held for three years. Your advocacy made an enormous difference.

MR: She came to our office after she was released. One of the things I hope we can restore is an American commitment to human rights. I think Robert Kennedy understood that human rights aren’t about just lecturing countries; human rights are about national security.

Every major global conflict is, at its core, about human rights. Assad was violating the rights of Sunnis, making them vulnerable to radicalization. Iraq has fallen into disarray because the Shi’a, after years of abuses by the Sunni, are ascendant, so now they’re abusing the Sunni. We have migratory pressure on our southern border because of human rights violations committed by both governments and transnational criminal groups throughout Central America.

In place after place, the conflict and tumult is driven by people being abused by those in power. It is my hope that we will make human rights a priority again, and that we don’t go in the opposite direction—Kissingeresque Realpolitik to the extreme—where everything is about pragmatism.

Obviously I don’t have the standing Robert Kennedy had. During his visit to South Africa, he addressed those global challenges. I hope we in the Senate understand that we can speak on these issues.

Aya is a perfect example. Her husband, Mohamed, said that when she was in prison, someone got a phone in and played the video of the floor speech I gave about her case. For someone being held in prison and being told that ‘nobody cares about you, you’ve been forgotten,’ that was a powerful thing. For us in the Senate, it’s not just about the bills we pass; it’s also about the words we speak from this platform we’ve been granted by citizens. We can use our power, at a minimum, to inspire those around the world who are fighting for their rights. That’s an enormous opportunity for us and a huge responsibility.