'Let's Welcome the Browns Into the GOP'

After

Mitt Romney

misplaced the 2012 presidential election, the long run regarded dire for the GOP. In March 2013 the Republican National Committee described the peril in a report that the media invariably characterised as an “autopsy.” Mr. Romney had acquired solely 27% of the Hispanic vote, down from 44% for

George W. Bush

eight years earlier. The Hispanic share of the voters was rising: from 8% in 2004 to 10% in 2012 and a projected 29% in 2050. “America is changing demographically,” the report warned, “and unless Republicans are able to grow our appeal . . . the changes tilt the playing field even more in the Democratic direction.”

The report faulted Mr. Romney on each rhetoric and coverage: “If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence.” (The reference was to a main debate by which Mr. Romney had declared that “self-deportation is the answer.” Nobody paid consideration when he added that “we’re not going to round people up.”) The report asserted that Republicans “must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”

Donald Trump

had related concepts. Mr. Romney “had a crazy policy of self-deportation, which was maniacal,” the long run president advised Newsmax in November 2012. “It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote.” The Democrats, he added, had no coverage for coping with unlawful immigration, “but what they did have going for them is they weren’t mean-spirited about it.”

It’s an understatement to say that Mr. Trump’s strategy in his marketing campaign was completely different. Whether or not it was advantageous, it actually wasn’t catastrophic for him or his new social gathering. He not solely gained the 2016 election however improved barely on Mr. Romney’s efficiency with Latinos, receiving 29% of their votes nationwide, in response to exit polls. And at the same time as he misplaced in 2020, Mr. Trump’s share of the Latino vote ticked as much as 32%.

The extra dramatic shifts had been regional—particularly in South Florida and South Texas—and down the poll. In Miami-Dade, the Sunshine State’s largest county and greater than two-thirds Hispanic, Mr. Trump’s share of the vote improved from 34% in 2016 to 46% in 2020, serving to him widen his statewide victory margin from 1.2 proportion factors to three.3. Two Cuban-American Republican challengers beat incumbent House Democrats in Democratic-leaning swing districts. One of them, Rep.

María Elvira Salazar,

gained at the same time as

Joe Biden

carried her district with 51% of the vote.

The 2012 post-mortem asserted that “if we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans, we have to engage them and show our sincerity.” Ms. Salazar makes the identical level with gusto. “Let’s welcome the browns into the GOP, because the browns have the same values that are entrenched into the Republican Party,” she says in an interview at her South Miami house, which doubles as a district workplace. “The GOP has not really been able to understand that the browns are GOPs in another language.”

To make sure, Cuban-Americans have lengthy tended to vote Republican, and “Hispanic” (or “brown,” as Ms. Salazar prefers) is a catchall time period that covers anybody with heritage from practically two dozen Spanish-speaking nations and territories. But after I begin to make the latter level, Ms. Salazar cuts me off. “That’s fine, but don’t let them confuse you with that,” she says. “We all have the same language and the same culture. We are mostly conservative, hardworking, God-fearing, law-abiding, [in favor of] paying low taxes and small government. From Tierra del Fuego in Argentina to Mexico, those are general and overreaching values for the Hispanics. So you can put us all in the same pot.”

She could also be on to one thing. On June 14, voters in South Texas despatched Mexican-born Republican

Mayra Flores

to Congress in a particular election to succeed Rep.

Filemon Vela,

a five-term Democrat who resigned in March to change into a lobbyist. Ms. Flores’s district, which is sort of 85% Hispanic, had been closely Democratic however trending Republican: Whereas Mr. Obama carried it in 2012 with 61% of the vote and Mrs. Clinton in 2016 with 59%, Joe Biden acquired solely 51% in 2020.

Rep. Flores faces an uphill battle for re-election; she is operating in a redrawn, extra Democratic district towards one other incumbent, Democratic Rep.

Vicente Gonzalez.

But after her victory within the particular election, the University of Virginia Center for Politics modified its outlook for the race from “likely” to “leans” Democratic, and for Mr. Gonzalez’s outdated district, now extra Republican, from leans to possible Republican. In the third South Texas district, average Democrat

Henry Cuellar

is looking for a tenth time period; the UVA middle charges that race as a toss-up.

Redistricting made Ms. Salazar’s district barely extra Republican however nonetheless carefully divided; the identical is true of her GOP freshman neighbor, Rep.

Carlos Gimenez.

UVA reckons each seats as possible Republican, however Ms. Salazar chooses her phrases rigorously when requested about Mr. Trump: “I think that Trump is a very unique, transformational president. Very different, but I believe in the American electoral system. He was elected. So I have no qualms, just like Biden was elected.” (Ms. Salazar and Mr. Gimenez voted towards Mr. Trump’s 2021 impeachment however had been amongst 35 House Republicans to assist an unbiased fee on the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, a proposal that didn’t survive a Senate filibuster.)

Ms. Salazar has an immigration plan, which she launched in February because the Dignidad (Dignity) Act. It offers for strengthening border enforcement however departs from the prevailing definition of “comprehensive” reform by declining to supply a direct “path to citizenship” for aliens residing within the U.S. illegally.

Ronald Reagan

“was the last guy who gave some path to citizenship,” she says, referring to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Nearly three million unlawful aliens utilized for everlasting residency, and 90% had been authorized, making them eligible for citizenship. “You know how many people took up that opportunity?” Ms. Salazar asks. “Seventy percent did not.”

Most immigrants, she says, could be happy with the flexibility to stay and work legally within the U.S. and to journey house and return freely. Instead of a inexperienced card, her invoice would give them a “dignity visa” permitting them to do all that. For the privilege they’d pay $1,000 a yr for a decade and verify in biennially with the Department of Homeland Security, they usually’d be ineligible for welfare or entitlement advantages. After 10 years in this system, they may apply for everlasting residency beneath the “redemption program.”

She says the Dignity Act “includes probably the most strenuous and the harshest” border-security measures of any immigration invoice. “Because I’m a brown girl from the ’hood, I can tell my people: No, you’re not coming illegally anymore,” she says. “It’s over, and if you’re going to come in and you’re going to claim asylum, good. We’re going to put you at a processing center for up to 180 days, and we’re going to offer you—it’s going to be good insulation. You’re going to have breakfast, lunch and dinner. We’re going to give you mental health and healthcare. But you’re going to stay there until we figure out if you can come in or not. And if not, then you have to go back.”

At the second there isn’t a lot urge for food amongst Republicans for immigration reform. Ms. Salazar’s invoice has solely six co-sponsors (down from seven owing to the loss of life of Alaska’s Rep. Don Young). In March she appeared on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the place the host berated her for supporting navy assist to Ukraine and demanded: “Why not treat our own border with the same seriousness?” It was a loaded query, however you’ll be able to guess {that a} phase of Republican lawmakers and voters settle for its defective premises.

Ms. Salazar was born in Miami in 1961, the yr after her mother and father fled communist Cuba. She spent 35 years as a Spanish-language tv journalist, beginning at an area station in 1983 and later transferring to Telemundo and Mega TV. “I interviewed the two most important dictators of the 20th century in Latin America,” she says—Cuba’s

Fidel Castro

in 1995 and Chile’s Gen.

Augusto Pinochet

in 2003. “I think I’ve been the only one.”

What had been her impressions? “Well, Fidel is Satan, and you felt it,” she says. “You feel the energy, the darkness. You feel whatever you want to call it—aura, vibe, I don’t know, energy, chemistry. Whatever you want to call it, but you do feel it, that you’re in front of a very evil, dark force. And well, he’s shown it with his actions.”

She criticizes Pinochet’s actions too: “You cannot put thousands of people in a stadium and shoot at them.” But she says he conveyed no diabolical vibe and he or she believes “he was convinced that what he did was what he needed to do” to “rid Chile of the communist forces.”

Ms. Salazar entered politics in 2018, when she misplaced her first congressional race to

Donna Shalala,

Bill Clinton’s

well being secretary. In October 2020, throughout their rematch marketing campaign, Ms. Salazar tweeted a five-second clip of the incumbent saying in an interview: “I’m a pragmatic socialist.” Ms. Shalala tweeted again: “I am a pragmatic capitalist, and it is ridiculous to claim otherwise. I simply misspoke during one recent interview and meant to say ‘pragmatic capitalist,’ which is how I have described myself time and time again.” It was a pricey error in a district that features Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood.

Ms. Salazar cites her circle of relatives’s expertise with socialism as a driving pressure behind her resolution to enter politics. “Look what happened in Cuba,” she says. “My parents—I remember when I was a little girl, they said, ‘You know, this politics business, that’s BS. That’s for people that are not honorable.’ Oh really? Look what happened to you. You gave the country away to the unhonorable people.”

In her view, the U.S. faces a comparable risk from what she calls “the neo-Marxists within the Democratic Party.” She hastens so as to add that she considers Mr. Biden not a neo-Marxist however somebody who “is surrounded by advisers and nonelected officials who are giving him very bad advice.” Neo-Marxists “are what I call the useful fools, and Fidel used to use that phrase a lot,” Ms. Salazar says. “They really think that government is the answer, that government is god, that the American exceptionality is a lie.”

She continues: “We’ve failed as a civil society in understanding that media and academia have been penetrated by the neo-Marxists. They have been penetrating for the last 30 years.”

Ms. Salazar labored within the media for many of that point. Did she encounter neo-Marxists? “Not on Spanish television,” she says. “The personnel that work in Spanish television—maybe we all have backgrounds where we have points of reference.” By distinction, “these white liberals from the Northeast, that have never been to Honduras or Nicaragua or Cuba, don’t know or they don’t have a point of reference.”

If she’s proper about that, it could assist clarify why Hispanic Americans haven’t adopted the political script written for them by the media and the Democrats—and, in 2013, by the Republicans.

Mr. Taranto is the Journal’s editorial options editor.