NBC News has an interesting story today about the impact that Venezuelan expats are having in other countries in the region. The story opens in Argentina where conservative economist Javier Milei recently won his campaign for president. Among the many people who supported his campaign were some Venezuelans who couldn’t even vote.
It’s an increasingly common story in Argentina and throughout the Americas. Scarred by economic collapse, widespread corruption and a crackdown on civil liberties associated with socialist leadership back home, many of the millions of recently relocated Venezuelans have lent their support to right-wing movements across the continent. The diaspora’s activism has taken place against a backdrop of warnings from right-wing forces that Venezuela-style socialism risks spreading.
“Venezuela represents something like the specter of communism … The right wing in the region has found in Venezuela a clear image that symbolizes the failures of that system,” said Ariel Goldstein, a political scientist at the University of Buenos Aires.
Another Venezuelan migrant living in Argentina, Elisabet Hernández, wasn’t able to vote for Milei but she did create a TikTok account which got thousands of views.
During Argentina’s presidential campaign last year, Hernández racked up tens of thousands of views on a TikTok account titled “atrapada en socialismo,” or “trapped in socialism.” In her videos, she said she “came from the future” to warn Argentinians of the end results of socialism and she pleaded viewers to back Milei…
“The Venezuelan diaspora is extremely politically active, both around what’s happening in Venezuela, but also in the local politics of the places they find themselves in now,” Martínez said.
Now imagine that all of these die hard anti-socialists were doing the same thing here in the US. Imagine that, despite not being able to vote themselves, they reached out to everyone they knew to warn them that socialism was a dead end, something they could say from personal experience. How might that alter the politics of places where they settle? Could it moderate the socialist leanings of places like San Francisco or New York City? How would a few thousand Venezuelans respond if they wound up in AOC’s district? You don’t really have to imagine this because there are already tens of thousands of Venezuelan migrants coming to the US, far more last year than at any time prior to that.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has issued the report, a copy of which was obtained by Fox News Digital, which looks into the dramatic increase in migrants coming from the socialist dictatorship to the U.S. southern border.
It highlights how the number of Venezuelans coming to the border has skyrocketed from 50,000 in FY 21 to nearly 335,000 in FY 23.
That sounds like a lot of people but it’s still only a tiny fraction of the number who’ve fled Venezuela in the past several years. That number is estimated at roughly 7.5 million.
There’s a case to be made that having these people flee their homes weakens Venezuela’s own resistance to socialism. But it’s hard to see how Venezuela can be pulled back from the brink so long as free elections don’t exist there. The only options left are to flee or to plan a coup. For those who’ve fled, the memory of socialism as a destructive force is vibrant.
Something similar has long been the case in Florida where Cuban expats have a similar distaste for anything that reminds them of the socialist policies they fled back home. Venezuelans could turn out to be a similar phenomenon in years to come.
If there’s a silver lining in Joe Biden’s border crisis, this is probably it. Venezuelans know how socialism works. They are likely to raise the alarm when they catch its scent emanating from politicians here they will push back forcefully against it even if they can’t vote. In years to come, it could even have a major impact on the electability of socialists in places they settle, like California or New York.
