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.
3 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.
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