Will Hispanic conservatives transform US politics?

If you had to take a guess on which American political party would produce the first Mexican-born Congresswoman, which one would it be? The Democrats? Or the party of Donald Trump? As though to prove that nothing in American politics today is predictable, it is indeed the latter. Two weeks ago Mayra Flores flipped a Democrat-friendly Texas Congressional seat in a special election and became both the first Republican Latina representative from the state of Texas and the first Mexican-born member of the House. She even thanked Trump for her victory.

Everything about her win bucks the expectations of the country that now exist outside its borders. For instance, consider the campaign against her. For the foreign press, the Democrat party is presumed to be the party of anti-racism, right? The party that wouldn’t fall into any nativist traps and start talking about ‘us and them’? Well, here is what Flores’s Democrat opponent in the upcoming November elections said about her last week. In an interview, Vicente Gonzalez attacked Flores for being a ‘pawn’ of the Republican party. ‘I wasn’t born in Mexico,’ he said. ‘I was born in South Texas, the son of a Korean war veteran. I didn’t come here through chain migration. I didn’t come through asylum, or amnesty, or whatever,’ he continued.

The message from Gonzalez is clear. He is the real American. Flores, by contrast, is a foreign interloper: one of these terrible migrants we hear so much about. It is a curious line of attack for a Democrat to take. Not least under a government which is allowing almost a quarter of a million illegal migrants to cross the southern border every month. What exactly is the Democrats’ thinking here?

Whatever it is, Flores and a new generation of Republican politicians like her keep showing up the deepest presumptions of the Democrat party.