Throughout most of my childhood, I was the only non-Mexican Hispanic at school and other social settings. I’m Venezuelan, but most people understandably assumed I was Mexican because Mexicans are the largest Hispanic nationality in the United States. Unfortunately, my former countrymen are doing their level best to change that. For years, notably since communist strongman Hugo Chávez took power and destroyed their economy, Venezuelans have been pouring out of the country and setting off for America. The original immigrants were educated, hard-working, prosperous people with the means to leave. The latest arrivals, though, are less educated and wealthy, often destitute, and running for their lives. And, importantly, mostly multiracial.

Pictured: the poor of Venezuela.

I can state with certitude that the Historic American Nation doesn’t need them here.

By the time the late Hugo Chávez’s regime fully consolidated totalitarian power in the early 2000s, it had dawned on many Venezuelans that he was destroying the country. They left in a mass exodus, primarily heading here, specifically to Florida. They joined Cubans—who had turned Miami into the capital of Latin America—Puerto Ricans, and other Spanish speakers from the Caribbean and South America in further diversifying the state.

Houston is another major destination [Thousands of Venezuelans are coming to Houston after record numbers cross the dangerous Darién Gap, by Elizabeth Trovall, Houston Chronicle, September 22, 2022]. The early immigrants’ unique skill sets, such as petroleum engineering, made oil cities like Houston a magnet for the educated.

But the educated oil experts aren’t the ones I’m worried about. Let’s look at some numbers and find out who, exactly, is entering the country.

Pew Research has reported that some 421,000 Venezuelans lived here as of 2017, with 52 percent of that population in Florida [Facts on Hispanics of Venezuelan origin in the United States, 2017, by Luis Noe-Bustamante, Antonio Flores, and Sono Shah, September 19, 2019].

Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection show that Venezuelans are one of the fastest-growing nationalities of illegal aliens caught or stopped at the border [Policy, by Muzaffar Chishti and Kathleen Bush-Joseph, Migration Policy Institute, October 27, 2022]. In fiscal 2022, border authorities encountered 187,716 Venezuelans, a 6,635 percent increase from fiscal 2020, when border agents encountered just 2,787. Worse still, 120,208 of them were single adults.

Few Americans are aware of this. When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sent 50 Venezuelan illegals to Martha’s Vineyard, many learned for the first time just how many Venezuelans were jumping the border. The white liberal islanders offered an amusing list of reasons why they couldn’t permit the downtrodden “migrants” to stay, despite the rarified atmosphere of multiracial, cross-borders bonhomie.

The Venezuelan illegals’ plight is sympathetic, but I strongly advise against a mass Amnesty for what are my own former countrymen. The recent waves are not only less wealthy and educated but also more violent and prone to crime (witness the case of the Venezuelan illegal-alien rapist who decapitated a California woman after not being deported).

Venezuela is thoroughly multiracial, and so it suffers from many of the maladies associated with diversity: high crime, low social trust, a stagnant economy. Caracas, the capital, is among the most violent cities on the planet, with 100 murders per 100,000 residents [Tijuana to Caracas, 5 Most Dangerous Cities in The World to Live In, by Buzz Staff, News 18, September 30, 2022].

Venezuela’s criminal underworld offers a lurid view of overly “diverse” societies, the country’s prisons being Exhibit A. Strongmen called pranes control the prisons, which have jaw-dropping levels of drug and weapons trafficking [Pran Populism: How prison thugs fanned the flames in Ciudad Bolívar, by Francisco Toro, Caracas Chronicles, December 20, 2016]. Moreover, pranes’ influence reaches beyond the prison walls. They run protection rackets and offer black market work to individuals desperately trying to get by in Venezuela’s economic hellscape.

Criminal activity of this nature is the norm; basic governing institutions are imploding. The pranes and other criminals have created a de facto parallel state where they reign supreme and seriously challenge lawful authority. They’re akin to the Mexican drug trafficking cartels that wreak havoc at the southwest border.

Things weren’t always this way. In the mid-20th century, Venezuela attracted some of the best talent from Europe, which played a substantial role in making it one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America [Venezuela Before Chávez: A Prelude to Socialist Failure, by José Niño, Mises Institute, May 5, 2017].

But in the last 50 years, particularly since the rise and fall of Chávez, poverty has significantly increased. Its ranchos—the informal housing settlements that dot countless Venezuelan cities—testify to the country’s poverty [The Best Ad in History: Capturing Caracas by Vanessa Catalano, Failed Architecture, November 11, 2015]. Sub-optimal economic policies combined with a notable demographic shift that took place in the 1980s, when the country stopped importing Europeans and started importing mixed-race South Americans.

The country’s dire economic situation has only intensified since Chávez’s successor Nicolás Maduro took power in 2013. Like Chávez, he not only pursued suicidal economic policies but also lobotomized Venezuela’s strategic sectors, such as its oil industry, by staffing them with non-white cronies [How Venezuela Ruined Its Oil Industry, by Robert Rapier, Forbes, May 7, 2017].

Conservatism Inc. pundits say institutional instability explains Latin America’s underdevelopment [Latin American democracy is crumbling under corruption, by Edward Lynch, The Hill, March 28, 2018]. That’s technically correct, particularly given the region’s struggles with corruption.

But why is Latin America so corrupt?

Again, diversity! Venezuela is predominantly mixed race; roughly two-thirds of the population is mestizo, meaning European and Amerindian, or mulatto-mestizo, meaning African, Amerindian and European ancestry. Africans are 10 percent of the population, and Europeans just 20 percent.

Granted, some Venezuelans in Florida are contributing to Republican victories there, but those are largely a self-selected minority. Getting out of Venezuela before it imploded took a significant deal of money and foresight, something the average Venezuelan doesn’t have. With illegal immigration from Venezuela expanding, it’s only a matter of time before the dregs of Venezuelan society are rolling across the border. And that means not just Venezuela’s poverty-stricken huddled masses, but its violent criminals like the pranes.

Then Conservatism Inc. will learn the hard way how countries like Venezuela grow poor in real time. It’s not just bad ideas or socialist economic policies. The people, and their pernicious ideas and behaviors, lead nations to ruin.

People are policy. Only when we jettison the banal bromides about diversity and refute its flawed and provably false assumptions, can we begin to take back our country from the multicultural occupation government that tyrannizes us.

And then we begin the hard work of rebuilding and preserving the Historic American Nation and restore order to its republic.

Pedro de Alvarado [Email him] is a Hispanic dissident who is well aware of the realities of race from his experience living throughout Latin America and in the States.

As a native of lands conquered by brave Spaniards but later subverted by centuries of multiracial trickery and despotic governance, Pedro offers clear warnings to Americans about the perils of multiracialism.