Becerras 'son of immigrants' story emerges as latest flash point in governors race

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Set us as preferred Democrat Xavier Becerra, the frontrunner to become the state’s next governor, often invokes the story of his parents’ humble beginnings as immigrants from Mexico who, through hard work, built happy and productive lives in California.“My parents came to California with $12 in their pocket.They lived the California dream,” Becerra said during last week’s gubernatorial debate with Republican rival Steve Hilton, aired nationally on CNN.Becerra for years has described himself as the “son of immigrants” when talking about his upbringing, but that claim has come under scrutiny by Hilton and other critics who accuse Becerra of embellishing his family history.

Becerra’s mother is from Guadalajara, Mexico, but his father was born in Sacramento and raised in Tijuana — making him a U.S.citizen and not a legal immigrant.“Unlike Xavier Becerra, I am an immigrant.

Unlike Xavier Becerra, my father was an immigrant.My stepfather too.

My whole family,” Hilton wrote in a post on X.Hilton is an immigrant from the United Kingdom and is the son of Hungarian immigrants who fled their homeland during a revolution in 1956.Richard Grenell, a former Trump administration official, accused news outlets of letting a lie “continue for decades” throughout Becerra’s tenure as California attorney general and then as a Cabinet official in the Biden administration.Becerra has openly discussed the details of his parents’ story, which unfolded on both sides of the border and in many ways reflects Mexican immigrant trajectories during the historical period of the 1920s and 1930s.During speeches and in interviews Becerra has described how his father, Manuel, was born in Sacramento in 1928 and taken back to Tijuana as a young boy, with few jobs for Americans during the Great Depression, and even fewer jobs for Mexic...