The Immigrants Who Saved the Election

Many enemies of Western civilization and of our republic, from the radical left to the Muslim Brotherhood, use immigration to subvert us.

I wanted to reflect on some of the wonderful things that immigrants have brought to America. Many immigrants view our new home with love and gratitude. We count ourselves lucky that America made room for us, and know we owe America, whatever we can, to keep it the greatest country on Earth.

In that vein, three sets of new Pilgrims are worth noting. These are Latin-Americans, in particular Cuban-Americans, Asian-Americans, in particular Vietnamese-Americans, and Chaldean-Americans.

Cuban Americans

Nothing says Miami like this rambunctious outpouring of patriotism. When we turn down the woeful clattering of the commentariat and allow ourselves to feel the Latin rhythms, we are reminded of how normal so much of America is. This unofficial Florida anthem heralded the end of Florida’s status as a swing state. The revolution was led by Cuban-Americans. In 2020, Miami Dade County, home to the nation’s largest Cuban neighborhoods like Hialeah, shifted 22% to Trump. In 2024, it shifted another 19%, making Miami Dade the first large, urban county to be taken by a Republican presidential candidate in decades. The crest of the red tsunami, Hialeah, gave Trump a crushing 77% of its vote.

Cuban-Americans have not forgotten what socialism can do to a nation. When Castro seized power in 1959, throngs of law-abiding, middle-class Cubans headed for Florida. Many planned to return. Thousands did, in 1961, bravely fighting to recapture their homeland from the Soviet-backed butcher. President Kennedy’s promises to support them came to nothing; after receiving a sternly-worded telegram from Khrushchev, he decided to stand down the air force and let them die on the beach. Cubans never forgave the Democrats.

Nor did they forget the sad tale of Elián González, the young boy whose mother died getting him across the strait of Florida. To the horror of America’s Cubanos, the Clinton administration ordered that he be returned to his father in Cuba. Every Cuban-American of a certain age has the image of a small boy hiding in a closet being seized from his dead mother’s relatives at gunpoint seared into memory.

Little Elián was packed off back to Cuba, where he was “educated” by the regime there. He is now a Communist Party politician.

Elián González is one pilgrim who did not get to stay in the promised land. The millions who did do not take their freedom for granted. But for all that Cuban-Americans have gone through, they are not resentful people. Miami boomed through the pandemic. Its mayor seeks to make it an ever-larger business and crypto-currency hub. Hedge funds and Silicon Valley tycoons like Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel have not been blind to the comparative advantage sunny Miami has over high-tax California, New York, or Illinois. The economic explosion happening there draws the mind’s eye to the future, with Cuban-Americans at the vanguard.

Vietnamese-Americans

Cubans are not the only victims of Communism to remember how bad things can get. Nor are they the only ones who needed nothing more than the free American air to succeed. Look for the valedictorian in a high school in Los Angeles or Houston and there’s a very good chance their last name will be “Nguyen”.

Asian-Americans, like their Hispanic counterparts, have plenty of reason to be resentful of America. Let’s take the Vietnamese as an example. During the Vietnam War, South Vietnamese put their trust in the United States, and many paid a high price. When the war was lost, relatively fortunate South Vietnamese were taken in by the United States. America’s welcome to the people it let down was far from perfect: Here they are subjected to overt, systemic racial discrimination in college admissions (though that has perhaps started to change).

Still, in America, they are at least permitted to practice their, frequently Catholic, faith or to start businesses. Their enduring spirit is apparent in patriots like Andy Ngo, who, like his South Vietnamese forbears, is unafraid to be beaten and bloodied in the struggle against the American strain of the Communist virus.

Unsurprisingly, Vietnamese-Americans are among the most Republican-leaning immigrant groups. Worryingly, that may be changing as they adapt to Californian culture. While America remains the only first-world nation that still cannot call elections three weeks after the fact, it looks like the Little Saigon area of Orange County may not break for the GOP by its usual margins in its congressional vote.

But it would be a mistake to give up hope in Vietnamese-Americans. 2012 was full of articles about how Cubans were abandoning the GOP, but that abandonment turned out to be nothing more than a brief dalliance with President Obama. Vietnamese-Americans, grappling with California’s anti-business climate and a Democratic party hellbent on enshrining what we euphemistically call “affirmative action” have every reason to remember their roots. Majority Asian-American precincts in New York City shifted an astonishing 31 points towards Trump. As Vietnamese Americans in California come to realize they are the wrong kind of non-white for today’s Democrats, they may follow.

Chaldean Americans

The longstanding love Cuban and Vietnamese voters have had for conservative governance is reasonably well-known. A lesser-known group, Chaldeans, is starting to attract attention too.

Chaldeans hail from Iraq, particularly Baghdad and the Nineveh Plain. They are an ancient community claiming descent from eminent figures ranging from the patriarch Abraham to great kings like Ashurbanipal. History that distant is cloudy, so it’s difficult to say confidently just who their ancestors were, but it is clear that they long predate the Arab people who dominate their native Iraq.

Chaldeans are Catholic, and have suffered immensely at the hands of radical Islam. The vast majority have been driven from Iraq, most recently by an ISIS-led attempted genocide. Like peoples fleeing Communism, they arrived in America inoculated against certain kinds of folly.

Chaldean-Americans are concentrated in Michigan, particularly in Macomb County, where Trump grew his 2020 margin by 40,000 votes this year. This is not a coincidence, given the strong support Chaldeans gave him. These conservative, Christian voters have long disliked the socially radical wing of the Democratic Party, but Trump’s realism about Islamic extremism could not have hurt. Chaldean-Americans will not forget Trump’s approach to the organization that tried to wipe them from the face of the Earth. Instead of attempting any starry-eyed Neo-Conservative nation building, he opted for operations like dropping “the mother of all bombs” on ISIS.

Alina Habba, an American-Chaldean senior Trump advisor, pushed campaign resources into turning out the Chaldean vote. “In Michigan, in particular with the Chaldean community, my community, we can flip this state and we have to do it or we will lose our country”, she argued during a campaign event for Chaldean-Americans. Trump surrogate Vivek Ramaswamy met with community leaders in Michigan, tweeting: “They’re a strong group of Iraqi Catholics who are an intensely entrepreneurial & wildly successful embodiment of the American Dream.”

We don’t yet know what percentage of the roughly 200,000-strong Chaldean population of Michigan won. But there is no question as to its significance. Trump won the state by only 80,000 votes.

We love uber prominent American immigrants like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, but it is good to shine a light on the overlooked immigrants who also saved the election.

America is not a racist country, and will never be a racist country.