COMMENTARY If, by Donald Trump's reckoning, Latino immigrants are "poisoning America's blood," Miami is the country's mother lode of polluted plasma — no matter how much its Latinos worship Trump.
My wife and I picked up our two children at Miami International Airport the other night — and while we’re happy they're home for Christmas, this year we’re also greatly relieved to have them back safely in the "poisoned blood" capital of America.
You didn’t know Miami is America’s poisoned blood mecca? Yes, we call ourselves the Magic City. But according to our once and future president, Donald Trump, our handle should be Polluted Plasma City. Trump — who it turns out does quote literature, in this case Hitler’s Mein Kampf — now tells us immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country.” In Trump-speak, of course, “immigrants” means Latinos.
And few if any American metropolises are as "poisoned" by Latino blood as Miami is.
Or are you so busy trying to find affordable housing that you didn’t notice more than two-thirds of Miami-Dade County’s population is comprised of folks walking around with that "tainted" body fluid?
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That’s why it’s such a comfort to have my kids here for the holidays. You see, while the hemoglobin coursing through my veins is the pristine, British Isles stuff — like our aspiring Führer’s — the blood of my children is half Venezuelan. Now that Venezuelans are the largest migrant group coming illegally over the U.S. southern border, that makes my progeny accessories to the anti-Aryan contamination of America.
In Miami, my daughter and son are protected among other poisoned-blood fugitives at Christmastime. Here they’re not likely to be singled out on the street for trying to force good, clean Americans to acknowledge all those Latino Christmas traditions immigrants smuggle in, along with the fentanyl Trump assures us they’re pushing over the Rio Grande.
I’m talking about hallacas and gaita and la caja china and posadas and los reyes magos — and the subversive Navidad notion that an impoverished family’s search for shelter and escape from persecution are an allegory for today’s Latin American and Caribbean refugees. In other words, the sort of woke dreck that hurts white elementary-school students’ feelings.
To Latinos who think they're the "good," pure-blood immigrants, my Christmas message is: Don’t kid yourself — Trump’s talking about you, too.
But the problem is, I’m not so sure even Miami is a poisoned-blood sanctuary anymore. Especially not after Trump’s rally last month in Hialeah — the most Latino pocket of mostly Latino Miami. Thousands of folks there rapturously worshiped America’s most notorious treason defendant, even when he promised that if elected president again he’ll round up every undocumented immigrant and toss them in massive camps for deportation.
That astonishing scene was indicative of three realities.
The first is that a sizable portion of America’s Latinos, especially in South Florida, do actually admire the caudillo, or authoritarian strongman whom, paradoxically, they claim their families came here from Latin America to escape.
Last Latinos in the boat
The second is what Florida International University Latino politics expert Eduardo Gamarra calls the “last-one-in-the-boat” theory.
Many if not most erstwhile immigrants in Hialeah — or Doral or Weston or Kendall or all the other South Florida Latino enclaves Trump has won over — are scandalized by any association between them and the ragged migrants overwhelming the border today. The immigrants established here now — the last Latinos in the boat, as the theory goes — are often the first to pull up the ship’s ladder, usually as a way of reassuring themselves that they were the “good” immigrants and the ones coming after are the bad ones.
The ones that will poison their adopted country’s blood.
The third is that Trump feels an audience for this because, frankly, America’s southern border is in fact under siege. And the Biden Administration, the Democratic Party and liberal pro-immigration advocates have allowed him — and other nativist right-wingers like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Governor Greg Abbott — to shriek about the immigration and border crisis not as a humanitarian emergency but as a national security vampire.
The last Latinos in the boat want to look like patriots — and right now they believe that means standing at Trump’s side waving torches and pitchforks at blood-sucking Dracula.
Still, there’s a difference as wide as the border itself between the reasonable call for tighter immigration control and the rabid demonization of innocent, desperate human beings as racially inferior blood.
To Miami’s last Latinos in the boat, my Christmas message is: Don’t kid yourself — Trump’s talking about you, too.
And my children.
