The trend is especially noticeable in Northern Virginia, where elections will be held Tuesday. The Fairfax County School Board race includes candidates from Korea, India and Ecuador; a Salvadoran immigrant is seeking his third term on the Arlington County Board; and natives of Colombia and Lebanon ran for the Virginia legislature.
“I grew up here, and this is my country,” said Lolita Mancheno Smoak, a business consultant who came from Ecuador as a child and is running for the Fairfax School Board. “When people ask where I’m from, I say Virginia.” Her field is management efficiency, but her passion is to help Hispanic students succeed. “I don’t think of myself as being in politics,” she said. “For me, this is more of a mission.”
Despite their diverse backgrounds and political views — and that they must be U.S. citizens to seek public office — foreign-born politicians often face competing loyalties. Ethnic groups may expect them to champion immigrant causes, and winning election may mean appealing to a broader range of constituents.
Inevitably, in an era of heated national debate over immigration in general and illegal immigration in particular, foreign-born politicians are asked: Whom do you represent? Some, such as Arlington School Board member Emma Violand-Sanchez, have taken up the liberal banner of immigrant rights. Others, such as builder Tito Munoz of Woodbridge, have cast themselves as tea party conservatives.
Most, though, are trying to move past the immigrant label and offer a businesslike mantra of better schools, roads and services to all constituents. One is Nader Baroukh, 39, the part-time Falls Church mayor. A federal government lawyer, he comes from an insular and private group: Jewish exiles from Iran.
“Our parents focused on education and economics. My generation is just starting to break out into public life,” Baroukh said. He has no trace of an accent and calls himself “Nader, as in Ralph,” to make his Persian name easy to pronounce. He said his foreign background rarely comes up in public, except once when he became exasperated at a city council meeting: “I found myself saying, ‘This is not the democratic way. This is how they would have done it back in Iran.’ ”
Although many immigrants who reach public office are models of achievement, most admit that, at some point, they have suffered the stigma of heavy accents, the discomfort of making cultural faux pas or the sting of ethnic insults.
Walter Tejada, 53, a Salvadoran immigrant running for reelection after eight years on the Arlington County Board, is a political veteran who can mingle easily at a raucous rally or a formal gala. Yet not long ago, he recounted, he was wearing a tuxedo at a fundraiser when a white woman handed him her empty glass and brushed past, assuming he was a waiter.
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