The Venezuelan voter FAFO is a dagger to Miami-Dade County's (and FL's) future
Miami-Dade is already bleeding domestic-born population faster than Los Angeles. FL's 400,000 Venezuelans just made illegal by their fellow Venezuelans who could vote were compensating for that.
In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump won the vote in Miami-Dade County, helped largely by the Hispanic vote, including naturalized Venezuelan Americans. That's one reason why Ferro and many others here say they're shocked and disappointed. "Beyond betrayed," she said. "They used us. During the campaign, the elected officials from the Republican Party, they actually told us that he was not going to touch the documented people. They said, 'No, it is with undocumented people.'"
Yes, of course they used you. It’s what they do. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve written a series of articles about how old Florida is, as a state, (America’s 2nd oldest, at best) and how it aggressively chases its young and native born people away to replace them with more old people for whom “home” is somewhere else.
The particular article I’ve pasted below noted that the Miami-Dade COVID in-migration narrative was ridiculous tech bro fan fiction.
Key excerpt:
Brutally expensive Monroe County — of Key West and Jimmy Buffet fame — also lost population. And Miami-Dade absolutely hemorraged domestic population for the second straight year. See chart below from the Census.
Indeed, Miami’s total COVID era (April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2023) domestic out-migration was a massive 134,000 people. The Census says Miami-Dade lost total population during this time, shedding more than 26,000 people. Other analysts dispute that specific number, but not the general migration story. See discussion here.
Miami-Dade’s 2023 rate of domestic out-migration relative to its actual population was a massive 1.8 percent. That’s higher than any of the California counties on the table above. And it was a full third higher than Los Angeles County, which is almost 4X as large overall as Miami-Dade. L.A.’s outmigration percentage was just 1.2 percent.
Moreover, L.A.’s domestic out-migration is slowing while Miami-Dade’s is accelerating. [This was before the fires, obviously—ed. insert] That isn’t making it into any of Doofus DeSantis’ goofy talking points for gullible Fox watchers.
How did Miami-Dade narrowly avoid overall population decrease? It added 54,000 international immigrants and a 7,000-birth “natural” increase in births over deaths. That also isn’t making it into any of Doofus DeSantis’ goofy talking points for gullible Fox watchers.
Here’s how that looks in images. This is county-by-county domestic migration. Red means negative domestic migration (losing domestic population).
Now here’s international in-migration, of which Venezuelans with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) are a big chunk.
How many of those population-sustaining Venezuelan immigrants in Miami-Dade did Trump and Stephen Miller just turn from legal to illegal as their reward for putting Trump and Miller and GOPers in power? It’s hard to tell exactly.
But my best estimates, based on reading, suggest that roughly 200,000 people of Venezuelan descent live in Miami-Dade. And that population surged in recent years as people fled the Chavez and Maduro regimes.
Trump tends to back down/take back anything that presents real political/social jeopardy to him. It makes much more dictator sense, from his point-of-view, to destroy USAID than it does Miami-Dade County. It would not surprise me if this get reversed like his Gaza invasion nonsense and tariffs.
But for now, here’s a good rundown on what’s happening to Florida’s Venezuelans because of, in part, the choices of Florida’s Venezuelans.
MIAMI — Venezuelan migrants in South Florida say they feel betrayed by a Trump administration decision to end legal protections for hundreds of thousands of people who fled dictatorships and sought refuge in the U.S.
New regulations scheduled to be published this week would end temporary protected status (TPS) for more than 300,000 Venezuelans in early April. Protections for a second group of some 250,000 Venezuelans currently extended through September but now also seem likely to be removed.
The move by the Trump administration is a turnabout of a long-standing U.S. policy that has extended TPS to more than a half-million Venezuelans. …
…. Venezuelans started migrating in large numbers to the U.S. in the 1980s. The numbers surged in recent decades as people fled the political and economic turmoil of the authoritarian regimes of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.
Nearly 400,000 people who left Venezuela now live in Florida. Adelys Ferro, the director of the Venezuelan American Caucus, says, "We are human beings who work here, who are small business owners." Ferro says Venezuelans exiled here "actually believe that the TPS was the right way to get legal in the United States, to have our work permits, to have a social security number, to be able to buy a house."
Florida's largest Venezuelan population is in Doral, a Miami suburb. Ferro and other activists held a press event there Monday but didn't want any TPS recipients to speak out. They were worried they could be targeted for deportation by federal immigration authorities.
I’ve written before that this entire spectacle — the entire last decade or so — is best thought of as a national murder-suicide attempt, where the murderers may or may not grasp the suicide aspect.
Our job as libs and decent people, who are not in power, is to survive, support each other, gradually re-assert a future, and point out without moral mercy what people do to themselves in the effort to get them to stop doing it to others. It is hard enough to protect innocent people from abuses of power; we absolutely cannot protect people from themselves anymore. They have to feel it personally; and we cannot take responsibility for any of it.
Miami-Dade, I think, is probably the bellwether for how Americans will react when it becomes clear that suicide is a condition of the national murder they voted for.
It was actually a lie. But that’s between you and the Venezuelans silly enough to believe it.
No sympathy.
They were warned. They knowingly voted in a lying, grifting, adjudicated rapist and convicted felon.
Next time try reading instead of listening to propaganda. If there’s a next time.