The Venezuelan Regime and Hispanic Immigration

It looks increasingly likely that Venezuela will soon be rid of its Communist yoke. For conservatives, libertarians, and anti-Communists of all stripes, this represents some of the best news of the last quarter-century.

It is also of great relevance to American immigration patriots — as despotic governments are the greatest cause of international migration today. Since the Marxist takeover of Venezuela in 1999, about ten percent of the whole country has left — around three million people. When polled in 2015, thirty percent of those Venezuelans still in Venezuela said they wanted to permanently leave.

There are today about 418,000 Venezuelans in the United States, almost all which arrived in the last two decades — yet another source of mass Hispanic immigration. While they are certainly whiter than Mexicans and Central Americans, they are still not very white by American standards:

A 2011 census (page 15) broke the country down racially like this: 51.6 percent moreno “dark,” (effectively: mestizos) 43.6 percent white, 2.9 percent black, 1.2 percent “other,” and 0.7 percent mixed black. In a separate question, the Amerindian population was put at 2.6 percent (page 28) — presumably encompassing a majority of the other and mixed black responses from the first breakdown, and a small part of the “dark” as well. My instincts tell me that of the whites, perhaps a quarter are pure or nearly pure, and the rest are “high yellow” castizos (castizos being white and Amerindian mixes, but majority white); the “darks” I would estimate are about half castizo and half mestizo. [Chile’s Immigration Crossroads, by Benjamin Villaroel, The Occidental Quarterly, forthcoming.]

That would be to say that Venezuelans are not even as white as Cubans, whose own census put their white population in 2012 at 64.1 percent, and who in Latin America are considered to be quite white.

In Chile, a whitish country where my father is from and where I now reside, Venezuelans are a much better ethno-linguistic fit than in America, although not a perfect one. Regardless, government estimates put the number of Venezuelans in Chile today at 288,233 — nothing to sniff at in a country of less than twenty million people.

On Saturday the 23^rd, I attended a rally in Santiago in support of the rising dissidents in Venezuela. A few hundred people attended, mostly right-wing Chilean politicos and Venezuelan refugees. Whatever one might generally think of mass immigration, it is impossible not to pity those fleeing Marxist tyranny, with all its shortages, starvations, and violent repressions.

Here in Chile, my hope for the newly arrived Venezuelans is that if they stay, they become a right-wing minority, much like the Cubans in Florida, who could be quite useful in offsetting the Left, and their new-found noble savages: Haitian immigrants.

But I digress. If you want less immigration, and you want more Hispanic immigrants in the United States to go home, then start chanting “President Juan Guaido!”