There is a certain irony that the Biden administration is granting temporary legal status to nearly half a million illegal immigrants from Venezuela so they can pursue work. Many Republicans are likely to see this as a step towards amnesty, and many Democrats are likely to see this as a step towards adding another half a million Latino voters, aligned towards their party, into the electorate.
But the political dynamics of recent immigrants from Venezuela may well be the opposite; anyone who has fled that country and endured life under its brutal, corrupt, and immiserating vision of socialism is not exactly itching to vote for the party of Bernie Sanders. Democrats belatedly recognized this in the run-up to the 2020 election.
According to a poll conducted in August by the University of North Florida for El Diario, Venezuelans considered Trump and the GOP better allies than Biden and the Democrats in the cause for Venezuelan democracy. The vast majority opposed negotiations and supported the “military option” that Trump put on the table to deal with Maduro. The result? Two-thirds of Floridian Venezuelans said they would vote for Donald Trump in the November election.
That was part of a report about “Magazuelans” from the North American Congress on Latin America.
Decisions about whether to grant temporary legal status and work visas ought to be based upon the law. But if there are domestic political considerations at work behind the scenes, the Biden administration may well be misjudging things. For a long time, the conventional wisdom was that recent immigrants from Central and South America would vote for Democrats once they became citizens, an assumption that has proven wrong, particularly when those immigrants have bad memories of a socialist regime in their old country.