‘Welcome to Florida!’

Over the last several months many of these transplants learned about a program called “Welcome to Florida.” They may have heard about it at church, or on Spanish-language radio, or from a friend. Whatever the case, “Welcome to Florida” was offering free English classes and help with many of the logistics of establishing a new life on the mainland.

You might expect that this outreach was being underwritten by a progressive group, but you would be wrong. “Welcome to Florida” is a project from the Koch-funded LIBRE Institute.

It offers an array services —including English classes, resumé building, and mock interviews—all of which are part of an initial $100,000 effort in Orlando, Miami,and Tampa, where high concentrations of Puerto Ricans have arrived. And the program also includes guest speakers explaining the benefits of free market economics and limited government.

“We want to help people understand what the free market looks like, that freedom drives progress and that we’re free to do whatever God wants us to do,” says LIBRE Institute deputy Florida director David Velazquez, a former pastor who has lived in Orlando for 26 years and whose background helps forge partnerships with local churches.

It’s a smart move, politically. Thousands of Puerto Ricans settling in Florida represents a rare opportunity to mint new voters in America’s quintessential swing state. And it’s one of the rare cases where conservatives are being proactive about bringing new voters into their tent.

“In 20 years of being worried about demography threatening the party, this is one of the few smart things I’ve seen the conservative side do, so I’m delighted to hear it,” GOP consultant Mike Murphy says. And Murphy argues that Florida Republicans will find themselves in a precarious situation if Democrats continue to do better with Puerto Ricans. “LIBRE’s doing the Lord’s work and I’m glad they are.”

LIBRE Institute president Daniel Garza tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD that there is more to come: After the group completes a review of its lessons-learned from the first round of outreach, there’s going to be another six-figure investment as they refine the program.

This kind of opportunity doesn’t come around very often. “Long-term displacement or resettlement resulting from natural or human-caused disasters has little precedent in the United States and other industrialized countries,” wrote the authors of “The Location of Displaced New Orleans Residents in the Year After Hurricane Katrina,” a 2014 article published in the journal Demography. Usually natural disasters are acute disruptions that produce short-term displacements of people from a geographically limited area. But Katrina was different. “The large-scale population displacement resulting from Hurricane Katrina was largely unimagined,” the report concluded.

And in order to understand the magnitude of the Puerto Rican migration to Florida, you need to understand Katrina. Reports put the number of displaced people who left Louisiana and went to Houston, Texas after Katrina as high as 250,000. Today, some 40,000 of those people remain in Houston after more than a decade.

Governor Rick Scott says that some 280,000 Puerto Ricans came to Florida airports after Hurricane Maria. But academics dispute his number. Using hard data like school enrollments and requests for state aid, University of Florida economists said the number is closer to 50,000 people, the Orlando Sentinel reported. More reliable numbers won’t be available for months and some of these U.S. citizens will eventually return to the island, but if Katrina is any guide, many others will stay.

It isn’t often that a political party gets the opportunity to corral 50,000 new voters all at once. (Donald Trump’s margin of victory in 2016 was 113,000 votes. Obama’s margin in 2012 was 80,000 votes. You probably don’t need to be reminded about 2000.)

None of which is lost on progressive groups. In the fall of 2017, organizations that make up the constellation of national Latino progressives groups began sounding the alarm about what was happening in regards to services for recent arrivals from Puerto Rico.

The Hispanic Federation, a group that outraised most of the other groups for Puerto Rico relief efforts, called a meeting in October in New York, which led to the creation of Power For Puerto Rico, a coalition that includes longtime Latino civil rights organization Unidos.us, Make the Road, the Center for Popular Democracy, and Hedgeclippers (an organization focused on exposing the connections between Wall Street and Puerto Rico’s debt crisis).

“The coalition is being built as a resource for those who have left the island—right now the priority is a roof over their heads, a job, and putting their kids in school, and secondarily, you should have a counter to what LIBRE is doing,” said Raben Group principal Estuardo Rodriguez, who is involved in the effort. “The long game is the elections and that’s what we’ve seen LIBRE do in other communities.”

Like the LIBRE Institute, the Hispanic Federation is putting in serious work on the ground in Florida. As part of a partnership with the Department of Education, they’re helping teachers arriving from the island to improve their English and the group has also partnered with the Puerto Rican Bar Association to provide legal aid services for arriving families (this initiative also doubles as a way to provide work to licensed attorneys who left the island).

The Hispanic Federation’s Betsy Franceschini, who has worked for years to strengthen ties between Puerto Ricans on the island and those on the mainland, said the level of interest from liberal donors is high, but they need to dive in.

“Donors definitely have to spend more money,” she said. “This is the purplest of the purple states. There is a tremendous need and if we want to elect candidates that support the progressive agenda, equality and fairness that we all believe in, we have to invest in the Puerto Rican population—and funding is the bottom line.”

“I just think it’s depressing,” said a longtime Democratic operative who is part of an immigration advocacy organization, “because every year Democrats know if they’re going to win they need Latino voters, and every year they half-ass it.”

Daniel Garza, the LIBRE president, explains that the political side of what LIBRE does is part of inculcating a sense of civic responsibility in new arrivals, a way of advancing freedom and public policy. It’s also an area he says his group will continue to use to drive legislation, identify races to get involved in, and to “mobilize fellow Latinos in elections.”

The elephant in the room is Donald Trump.

Garza acknowledges that the president creates a challenge, but says it’s not insurmountable. “If there is a bad impression of Donald Trump, that’s up to Donald Trump to fix,” Garza says. “People feel what they feel for reasons that are beyond our control, but Latinos are deliberate voters, they can separate the politics of one individual over the politics of another.”

And Mike Murphy sees LIBRE as part of the solution to Trump’s challenge: “Donald Trump has created political headwinds in the Latino and Puerto Rican community so the fact that they’re engaged in ways to try to overcome that with the larger GOP is very smart,” Murphy says.

Billionaire Republican donor Mike Fernandez, the top donor to Scott’s 2014 reelection campaign—and a major Trump critic—said Garza is doing “incredibly good work” but it doesn’t preclude Puerto Ricans from making political decisions for themselves for a key reason.

“The ability to speak English actually widens the spectrum of the information and viewpoints they receive,” he said.

For her part, the progressive Hispanic Federation’s Franceschini says she hears a single message over and over again from recently arrived Puerto Ricans: “I just don’t want to be part of the party that Trump is in,”she says people tell her.

Time will tell whether or not she’s right. Meanwhile, LIBRE is betting that in the end, the appeal of conservatism will be more powerful than the repulsion of Trumpism.

“What we find is we have a message,” David Velazquez, the former pastor says. “Economic freedom, free market principles and a free society and what that looks like.”

“We’re not trying to activate them in any way,” he says, “but people can decide for themselves.” For instance, LIBRE might bring in a speaker from Venezuela to explain what government coercion looks like down there. And then “They see similarities,” Velazquez says. “And a light bulb goes on. It’s up to them what they do with that.”

Adrian Carrasquillo has covered national politics and Latino issues for years for BuzzFeed, NBC News and Fox News. He can be reached at @Carrasquillo and [email protected].