Members of Republican Bernie Moreno’s U.S. Senate campaign posted a statement on X last week saying the current administration’s policies have caused migrants to “destroy” communities in Ohio.
But the campaign did not respond when asked to name one Ohio city that has been hit tough by migration, where the migrants who wreaked havoc came from and how the communities were harmed. The statement also ignores the fact that Moreno, a Cleveland businessman, is a migrant himself.
Moreno is the Republican Party candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Sherrod Brown since 2007, a race that is one of the most closely watched in the country this cycle.
Like his fellow Republicans, Moreno has tried to stir concerns about migrants after a surge at the southern border that since it died down — at least temporarily. Many have also argued that undocumented migrants commit more crimes than native-born people, although research suggests that in fact it is the other way around. And border cities like El Paso and McAllen have much lower crime rate than the average American city.
Some of the rhetoric seemed at least racist. When former President Donald Trump repeatedly said last year that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” he seemed to be echoing the words of Adolf Hitler, who used several versions of the poison and blood metaphor in his racist considerations.
Moreno, for his part, has not been shy about using harsh rhetoric on immigration, repeatedly referring to what is happening at the southern border as an “invasion,” even though El Paso has already fallen victim racist massacre by a man who said he tried to stop the invasion, and experts fear it’s only a matter of time before it happens again.
Playing on fears of illegal immigrants, Moreno’s campaign said in an ad: “Brown and Biden won’t keep your family safe.”
Moreno’s campaign on Wednesday I took it to X to say, “San Francisco liberal @KamalaHarris AND @SherrodBrown devastated Ohio communities by flooding our state with a wave of migrants.”
However, his staff did not answer questions about which communities in Ohio were devastated and how.
But what made this post particularly intriguing was the fact that Moreno is a migrant himself, having been born in Colombia in 1967. His family emigrated to Florida in 1971.
Moreno said last year: “We came here with nothing — we came here legally — but we came here, nine of us, to a two-room apartment.”
It was part of the image he tried to create as an immigrant who had come to the United States the “proper” way, in contrast to the needy Colombians who had survived the trek through Darien Gap, They crossed the US-Mexico border and entered it without documents.
But the description of Moreno’s family as indigent is misleading. In Colombia, his people were wealthy and politically connected, and while the family lived in challenging circumstances for their first years in the States, things quickly improved.
His father, Bernardo Moreno Sr., was a surgeon who trained at the University of Pennsylvania and later served as Colombia’s equivalent of health secretary, the New York Times reported. He initially worked for a low salary in Florida as a surgical assistant, but by 1973 he had full surgical licenses.
Additionally, one of Bernie Moreno’s brothers served as Colombia’s ambassador to the United States, and another founded an international construction empire.
