The Immigration Game in Florida

By CLAUDIA ZEQUEIRA

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis put Venezuelan migrants recently arrived in Texas on a chartered flight to Martha’s Vineyard under potentially false pretenses, opinions were quick to pop up.

Venezuelan and immigrant advocacy groups in Florida immediately sounded the alarm and called his bluff.

“It’s just … a cruel political stunt show — using human beings,” said Adelys Ferro, a Democrat who heads the nonprofit Venezuelan-American Caucus, at a press conference held in Doral, long a Venezuelan enclave in South Florida. “He’s using Venezuelans to galvanize his extremist base and to gain points for his run for the presidential elections.”

Ferro is not wrong. DeSantis is expected to run for president in 2024. Since becoming governor, he has adopted a MAGA-friendly political style that gets approval from supporters and attention from everyone else.

Scapegoating immigrants proved useful to Donald Trump when he ran for office in 2016, and DeSantis is reading from the same playbook, even if it means alienating some Latino voters, Venezuelans included. But it’s not clear how much he’ll lose. Despite the fact that many Venezuelans, including some who identify as Republican, did not agree with DeSantis’ move to relocate migrants recently, some expressed their support.

Venezuelans more firmly established in the US argue the governor is acting (correctly) on current President Joe Biden’s border policy, which some consider irresponsible. Others have said newly arrived Venezuelans are potential criminals, many of whom end up in the streets due to lack of government resources.

Vicente Ramirez, a Venezuelan residing in Kendall who was interviewed by the media recently, said DeSantis’ decision was “his way of pressuring Biden to do something about the border; he has to do something.”

Ramirez, a journalist for Radio World TV, supported the decision but recognized “it will not solve the problem.”

“I think the governor needs to create a formal plan in this regard, analyze each case individually and check for a criminal background before sending [migrants] to other states,” he was quoted as saying.

Much like the Cubans who arrived before them, many Venezuelans have turned to the Republican Party in recent years. Democratic strongholds like Doral showed a 41.4-point swing toward Trump in 2020, with Trump winning the city by 1.4 percentage points after losing to Hillary Clinton by 40 points in 2016.

Political repression followed by economic collapse made close to 7 million Venezuelans leave their homeland, with the crisis intensifying after 2014. It’s one thing to read about it, but it’s another thing to live it.

This period has been incredibly traumatic to Venezuelans. And, as much as they say they sympathize with migrants, Democrats fail to recognize the conditions that made them migrants in the first place.

While running for president, then-Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders refused to call Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro a dictator. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, criticized US sanctions imposed against Venezuela during Trump’s term as well as his support of opposition leader Juan Guaidó, an assembly leader who decried rigged elections and named himself Venezuela’s interim president in 2019.

At the time, Guaidó received significant support from established democracies across the world. Supporting his government was considered the least invasive way to push Maduro — a strongman propped up by a ruthless military — out of power. This is something most Venezuelans desperately wanted, but to some Democrats, it seemed an afterthought.

Biden has said he wishes to amend the “maximum pressure” campaign started by the Trump administration, but simultaneously, he has made efforts to gain favor among Venezuelans. Specifically, he gave Temporary Protected Status to 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants in 2021, a measure that allows migrants to remain in the US legally in extraordinary circumstances, such as war and natural disasters, for a definite period.

That opportunity may indeed have sent an unintended welcoming signal to other Venezuelans, tens of thousands of whom have made the perilous trip, mostly on foot, across the Darien Gap and through Central America this year alone. Many of the more recent arrivals are not TPS-eligible due to specific cutoff dates, but those details are often intentionally blurred by unscrupulous coyotes or simply fall on deaf ears by those desperate enough to leave home.

Republicans, meanwhile, are politically cashing in on this moment. And, as is to be the norm these days, they are doing it with particular cruelty. Migrants who ended up in Martha’s Vineyard were initially told they were going to Boston, according to some news reports, and that work and housing awaited them. Neither, of course, were true. The community then scrambled to feed and house them, until the 50 or so migrants, some with children in tow, were sent to a military base while their fate is decided.

Even after strong criticism, not only nationally but abroad (several world leaders spoke up against this maneuver), DeSantis doubled down and said he would send more planes full of migrants to “sanctuary cities” who have pledged to welcome new arrivals.

These actions have not gone unnoticed by some Venezuelans and advocacy groups who point out the contradictions of the Republican Party vis a vis Venezuelans.

Ferro, for one, said it’s “hypocritical” of GOP politicians to curry votes in the Venezuelan exile community by condemning the socialist dictatorship in Venezuela that so many thousands of refugees are fleeing, “only to turn around and then show, like this, that they really don’t want Venezuelans here.”

And in Central Florida, home to a significant Venezuelan community, the American Business Immigration Coalition Action, Casa de Venezuela Orlando, HOPE Community Center and the Florida Immigrant Coalition held a press conference where they criticized DeSantis’ “disdain for human life.”

It remains to be seen how these migrant stunts translate when elections roll around. But for now, most groups who advocate for Venezuelans in Florida and elsewhere think these moves reek of opportunism and degrade people in a vulnerable condition.

Claudia Zequeira is a native of Cuba who lived in Venezuela before immigrating to the US. She lives in Central Florida.

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2022

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