WHERE IS THAT COURAGEOUS REPUBLICAN VOICE?

The regime media are calling attention to a campaign opportunity.  "Venezuelan immigrants boost right-wing candidates across the Americas, U.S."  Nikki Haley, are you paying attention?  Donald Trump, will you stop and think?  There are still huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, and they've been hard done by in communist regimes.

When far-right economist Javier Milei was inaugurated as Argentina’s new president last month, his supporters thronged the streets of the capital, Buenos Aires, bearing the national flag and donning Messi soccer jerseys.

Scattered among the sea of light blue and white were a handful of Venezuelan flags — a recurring sight in Milei campaign gatherings.

Holding one of them was Laura Ruiz. When Milei emerged from the presidential palace to give a speech, Ruiz waved her flag with gusto. Her hope, she said, was for Milei to see the flag — and to know that Venezuelans like her support him.

The 36-year-old immigrant couldn’t register to vote yet in the October election, but she says she became “indirectly” involved in the political process, advocating for Milei and against the left within her circle.

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.

Mr Milei is most emphatically not a "far-right economist." His possible future voters in Argentina understand that he has the success sequence to see off both Bolivarian socialism and the Professional Managerial Classes overreach.  If you want to ensure that the United States will not become a socialist country, it might be wise to ... get refugees from socialist countries participating in the economy and filing their applications for citizenship pronto.

The two other right-wing figures Milei is often compared to — Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro — have tried mobilizing voters with similar rhetoric.

Experts say that there’s been a receptive audience for that kind of discourse among growing Venezuelan diasporas across the region. In recent years, over 7.5 million people have left Venezuela, setting off the most severe migration crisis in modern Latin American history.

Bolsonaro is not Milei is not Trump, but I digress. Perhaps the only thing worse than people fleeing into your country is people fleeing from your country.  I think Ron DeSantis, who recently suspended his presidential campaign, grasped this.

Many are starting new lives with a stark opposition to left-wing movements or candidates, which they associate with the dysfunction they had to leave behind.

In the U.S., that dynamic has helped bolster Latino support for Republicans in Florida, contributing to a right-wing shift in recent elections in the longtime swing state. Similar shifts could be in the works in places continent-wide that have a high concentration of recent Venezuelan migrants.

Weeks before Milei won in Argentina, the regional right clinched another victory with Daniel Noboa in Ecuador. He was also buoyed by the Venezuelan diaspora’s support.

“The conditions that forced you to leave Venezuela make you see everything in black and white,” said Eugenio Martínez, a Florida-based Venezuelan political analyst. “But the politics of receiving countries aren’t black and white.”

No kidding.  "We're still higgling over the same things, and I can't help but think that neither major party is getting the policy mix right. It does little good to treat the people who milk the cows and pack the cheese as criminals, nor does it do much good to treat those people only as future taxpayers."  That NBC report recognizes an opportunity for advocates of free minds and free markets, should they take it.  "As relative newcomers to the countries they’ve settled in, most Venezuelan migrants are unlikely to have become naturalized citizens, meaning they can’t yet vote. But many have found powerful platforms on social media to share their views."

Perhaps there's even an opportunity to reverse Illinois's experiment with soft-on-crime tax-and-spend Combine politics.  "Many of the 34,000-plus migrants who’ve arrived since August 2022 could qualify for work permits, but, with a long wait to get them, some cook, wash windows, sell candy for cash."  The article notes that many of those migrants are ... from Venezuela, and it's Bureaucratic Inertia, not animus from Donald Trump or the residents of Woodlawn, that's keeping work permits out of willing hands.

Like others among the more than 34,000 migrants sent to Chicago from Texas and other states since August 2022, [Venezuelan migrant Jesus] Fernandez is desperate for money. Many are seeking asylum and might qualify for work permits. But the application process can take a long time. And not everyone knows where to go for help. Most migrants don’t speak English, making it harder to find work.

So migrants get creative. They do manicures, cut hair, cook food, clean houses and work construction, part of an underground economy that for years has been fueled by undocumented immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America.

Leonardo Bonilla Gonzalez is one of the new entrepreneurs. He cooks about 80 Venezuelan-style food lunches — meat, rice and plantains — out of his apartment and sells them for $10 outside migrant shelters.

“They place their order, and my job is to have it ready for them the next day,” Bonilla Gonzalez says in Spanish.

Immigrants from several failing states are already eligible for work permits, although bureaucratic delay is the natural order of things, whether it's student visas or dairy farm hands seeking lawful status.

To help address the migrant crisis, the Biden administration granted Venezuelans who were in the United States as of last July 31, temporary protected status, which allows them to apply for work permits and temporary relief from deportation. The administration also launched a humanitarian parole program for Venezuelans and migrants from Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua.

The federal and state government recently partnered with city officials and the Resurrection Project, a Chicago nonprofit, to assist migrants staying at city shelters who are applying for work permits. They estimate that of the more than 15,000 migrants in shelters, roughly 4,650 are eligible for permits. As of Tuesday, some 916 people have received work authorizations through their efforts. Advocates say many migrants are looking for help outside these clinics.

Meanwhile, the labor market dynamics of the existing underground economy are ... interesting.

Some undocumented immigrants who arrived before the migrant crisis worry new migrants are bringing wages down in the construction business. Outside a Home Depot near Avondale, a group of workers from Central America say they have been getting construction gigs outside the store for years. But now about 30 migrants stand near the store in the mornings and work for as little as $5 an hour, which is about three times less than what other groups of workers make.

“They don’t know that is not a living wage,” says Mauricio Huertas of the Latino Union, which advocates for immigrant workers. “And part of the conversation around that is telling them, like, ‘OK, sure, right now you have these transitional benefits to get you set up. But how do you expect to pay for housing … when you’re earning $5 an hour?’”

Other labor experts say the influx of migrants should be viewed not as a crisis but an opportunity to boost the economy and strengthen the labor force.

“Texas is going to feel so sorry they’ve shipped out the actual workforce to other states,” says Jaime di Paulo, president and chief executive officer of the Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “In 10 years, Chicago and New York are going to have a very, very strong labor force because of that.”

We'll see.  There is still net migration of productive people from Illinois or New York to Florida or Texas, and that will be material for future demographers and labor economists to chew over.  What I say about native-born youngsters, "Give these kids an America to buy into, and an America that buys into these kids, and we'll be OK," is as true of refugees from failed socialist states, and the first Libertarian or Republican politician to offer assistance with getting work permits, getting those hair and nail services through the regulatory thickets (if you think the drug cartels hacking through Mesoamerican thickets are scary, try dealing with the licensing cartels), and maybe working with those farm hands to turn them into owners of their own dairy herds.