Representative Maria Elvira Salazar Sends a Message to Trump on His Immigration Crackdown
I have written a series of posts on Trump's unconstitutional crackdown on immigrants. I have also argued for an open borders immigration policy as rooted in America's Lockean liberal tradition. And I have suggested that Trump's brutal detention and deportation of immigrants would provoke a backlash even among his MAGA voters because most Americans realize that America's success depends on being open to immigrants.
We're now seeing clear evidence for this because Trump's Republican candidates are losing the support of their voters because they feel betrayed by Trump's immigration crackdown. Today the most dramatic evidence is a political ad just released by Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, who is running for reelection as a Republican in Florida's 27th Congressional District, which is in South Florida in Miami-Dade County. She won reelection in 2024 by 20 percentage points. Trump carried her district two years ago with 57 percent of the vote. And Trump has given her his endorsement. So you might think she should be confident of reelection. But actually polls suggest that she is in a neck-and-neck race with her opponent Democrat Eliott Rodriguez.
Apparently, she has decided that she has lost voter support because of Trump's unpopular immigration policies. So in this new political ad, she sends a warning directly to Trump:
Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far. In July, 50 percent of the 50,000 people who were detained had no criminal record. Be careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy. The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.
This might provoke Trump into withdrawing his endorsement of her. But that might be what she wants because in this election a Trump endorsement could become a curse.
In recent months, Salazar has proposed legislation in Congress that would give illegal immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for at least five years with no criminal background a path to legal status and work permits. More than a dozen Republican congressmen have supported her proposal.
Salazar is implicitly pointing to the incoherence of the MAGA movement as a political coalition of both liberal and illiberal elements. We saw the triumph of the American liberal tradition in Trump's election and in his Second Inaugural Address. The American illiberal tradition defends the national cultural homogeneity of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America against subversion by both internal and external enemies. (Consider the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, for example.) But Trump's electoral victory in 2024 depended on a pluralistic coalition of voters who were racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse. As opposed to a WASPish illiberal America, it was a culturally heterogeneous liberal America that voted for Trump. As Trump's presidency has given into his illiberal propensities, he has alienated those MAGA voters.
Many scholars--like historian Stephen Hahn, for example--have argued that the success of the MAGA movement would show the triumph of Illiberal America over Liberal America. On the contrary, the disintegration of the MAGA movement that we are seeing now shows that Liberal America will always prevail.
6 comments:
You cling to your vision of the unqualified good of Lockean Liberalism with a faith I suspect would surprise Locke himself. Locke wasn’t just a political liberal, he was an empiricist. Looking at the effects of mass migration into Europe and in particular his own Great Britain,do you believe he would have modified his position on immigration ? After all economics is only one aspect of life. What about cultural and racial continuity? Are these taboo topics regardless of immigrations effects on social cohesion? It does no good to say these SHOULDN’T matter, if in fact they DO matter to a significant number of people. We’re not dealing in Political Philosophy or Ethics here. We’re not concerned with theoretical politics/ethics,but rather with practical statesmanship. The public good, not someone’s opinion about what the public should think is good. What about social peace and order? If group conflict is always just an incident away is that worth the economic benefits? How similar was the immigration Locke had in mind with the actual immigration to the West since the end of WWII ? A trickle of Christian Europeans in Locke’s day is very different than what we’re seeing today. It certainly required fewer adjustments and accommodations by the natives to integrate them into society. Has immigration had the effects he thought it would? Have there been any bad effects? If so; Have the good effects been worth the bad effects? Could the good effects have been realized without the bad and without restrictions on immigration? How? Could the good effects have been realized without immigration? Say by natural population growth and education? Or would that have produced its own and worse side effects,more drastic than say, no curry for Piers Morgan? These are questions any devotee of Locke must be prepared to answer.
I have written a series of posts on the assimilation of immigrants--most recently 6/25/26. The most effective form of assimilation is intermarriage across ethnic, racial, and religious boundaries--for example, J D Vance's family.
In November of 2025, I wrote some long posts on the history of migration with interbreeding, which is the ultimate form of assimilation in human evolutionary history.
If Lockean Liberalism (LL) is the social and political order most in harmony with human nature wouldn’t it emerge in all societies ? If our species is around a quarter of a million years old, why did LL take so long to come into existence? Why is history littered with civilizations and cultures which were authoritarian, unequal, intolerant, tribal, collectivist,and which possessed no concept of human rights? Why are so few societies on earth today Lockean Liberal States? Either LL is not the political order most in harmony with human nature, or someone or something is preventing societies from realizing LL, and has been for millennia. If that something is human nature, then your argument is wrong. Doesn’t it make more sense to believe that LL emerged in a particular society under a particular set of circumstances and that its continuation in a society and its replication in other societies depends on how similar their circumstances are to the original? If this is the case then LL , like any other social and political organization is a product of a certain set of “ingredients” , which can no more be changed without changing the result, than one can expect to change the ingredients for one’s favorite cake and still get the same cake. What are these “ingredients “? At least one would seem to be a certain degree of homogeneity. I suspect Locke would agree. You quote Locke in your June 25 ‘26 essay as follows, “they are then in interest as much our own people as any. The only odds is their language, which will be cured too in their children, and they be as perfect Englishmen as those that have been here ever since William the Conqueror's days and came over with him. For 'tis hardly to be doubted but that most of even our ancestors were foreigners” (1997, 325). Locke seems to recognize that differences, “odds” as he terms them, could be a potential source of division, and an impediment to assimilation and unity.The immigrants he’s speaking of here differ only in language, and he expected that would “be cured too in their children”. In one of your response to my post above you say, “The most effective form of assimilation is intermarriage across ethnic, racial, and religious boundaries--for example, J D Vance's family. “. So you believe differences between groups can undermine social cohesion as well, if these differences aren’t ended by assimilation. You seem confident that they will be through “intermarriage“ between members of these groups; given enough time. You accuse Nicholas Wade of providing to little evidence to support his statement; “Social cohesion is inevitably weakened by any influx of people who don't share the socially bonding attributes of the residents, such as language, religion, and ethnicity. And the weakening of social cohesion is deeply feared, even if at a level that many people cannot articulate, because it undermines the strength of a society and hence the chances of its members' survival (173).” You pointed out he cited only one study by Robert Putnam and imply that even Putnam didn’t necessarily conclude that assimilation would be forestalled indefinitely.
CONTINUED FROM ABOVE:: However , neither Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Middle East nor Muslims and Hindus in India, living near by one another for over a millennia, haven all been assimilated to one or another’s religion. Nor have they formed a new syncretic faith and common identity to which most people belong without socially significant differences. So Indian Muslims and Hindus don’t stand in the same relationship to each other as German-American Lutherans and Irish-American Catholics do to one another. Communal violence among the latter two is almost unthinkable. So how much evidence do you need to see to conclude assimilation isn’t inevitable, may not occur at all, and if it does it may not be LL that informs the social/political order that is produced. In other words no guarantees as to who will assimilate whom, or what social order will be the end result. In short it seems assimilation under certain conditions doesn’t occur naturally nor does LL emerge naturally. In fact the evidence suggests that diversity is fatal to LL, perhaps because it undermines the trust between individuals and groups which is necessary for LL to arise. The trust which allows one group or coalition to turn the power of the government over to their opponents, with the expectation that they won’t be oppressed, their vital interests won’t be threatened, and that they can continue to pursue a return to power in the future.
CONTINUED FROM ABOVE:: Members of the dominant group in a society are usually willing to assimilate minorities as long as it makes no change(s) to essential traits in their own group or society. Modern immigrants to societies that are LL are coming in such numbers that they establish enclaves that basically are islands of their own ethnicity and culture. If through birth rate and immigration the newcomers outpace the native population, it’s possible that it is the natives which will be assimilated, and LL be replaced with some other social order. This need not happen all at once. Gradual adjustments over time, all defended at the moment in LL’s terms, can slowly transform the society. Look at the supposedly Liberal Democracies in Europe punishing people for “hate” speech when they voice an opinion that someone somewhere MIGHT find offensive or who MIGHT be made angry towards a certain segment of the population, and MIGHT turn that feeling into action. Thus are old and cherished rights slowly taken away. In fact, it would appear that in order to accommodate diversity, which has become an end in itself, Lockean Liberals must suppress at least some of the rights of some people in certain groups, at this time usually Christian, Native ,or White,in order to accommodate others,and thus move away from the principles of LL,while at the same time insisting their actions are consistent with liberal and democratic values. Which view and which group is silenced depends not on a logical consistency, but rather on the whims, prejudices,and policies pursued by politicians and administrators. Thus internal “mutations” ( adaptations, accommodations) in a society in response to a particular change in that society alters that society’s “ phenotype”. In time, LL can be easily replaced by something very different. If social/ political orders are selected for in a manner similar to natural selection, then LL might be doomed .
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