 Come on down, Miami open for business. Bubbling of activity and excitement and optimism. Not just because of the taxes, but because of the culture of innovation. When the venture capitalist, Dylian Asparujov, suggested on Twitter last December that the tech industry should migrate from Silicon Valley to Miami, Mayor Francis Suarez responded, how can I help? He also set up a billboard in San Francisco. Thinking of moving to Miami, DM me. Suarez's bold, roll out the red carpet approach to luring away Silicon Valley's tech elite has gotten so much attention in part because of how it contrasts with that of California's ultra-left political class. Take San Diego Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, who's best known for her failed effort to stop Uber and Lyft from using contract labor in California to benefit labor unions. Gonzalez tweeted, fuck Elon Musk, back in May of 2020. Message received, replied Musk. In Miami, Mayor Suarez has embraced Musk's idea of building a $30 million tunnel for electric vehicles to ease congestion. We have a unique opportunity to create a signature project, not just for Miami, but for the world. Suarez's publicity stunts, including fashioning himself and avid Bitcoin enthusiasts, have no doubt contributed to the city's momentum. But Miami's greatest advantage isn't the VC heavyweights buying mansions on the waterfront. It's the Latino immigrants who don't garner headlines or donate much to political campaigns, but have brought with them grit and talent, largely wasted in the socialist countries from which they fled, not to mention their cultural aversion to big government liberalism and the woke ideology now prevalent in the Bay Area. Miami's ascendance in the 21st century hinges on whether it can continue to fulfill its role as the greatest city in Latin America that just happens to be located in the United States. Nearly half a million Cubans have come to settle in Miami-Dade County, and these Cubans seem to be in Dade County to stay. Suarez himself is a scion of a Cuban-American political dynasty in South Florida. His father, Javier, became Miami's first Cuban-born mayor in 1985. The Suarez clan probably wouldn't be here at all if it weren't for the communist dictator, Fidel Castro, who deserves the most credit for Miami becoming a world-class city. Viva el internacionalismo proletario! Political repression and the seizure of private property under Castro's rule drove Cubans to flee the island nation, and it was immigrants who transformed the city from a sleepy backwater into a Latin American mecca. Florida's population is climbing because of its business-friendly climate. The state is second only to New Hampshire and the Fraser Institute state ranking of economic freedom. The U.S. ranks sixth in the global rankings, which explains why Latin American migrants continue coming. Venezuela, whose citizens have escaped to Miami and massed in recent years, is dead last at 162. Miami is my home. Miami is the place where I feel happy. My friends are here. I'm married here. My parents lived here too. I went to school here. Cesar Rejales arrived in Miami from Colombia when he was 19, with $80 in his pocket. He says that his family fled Colombia in the 90s because they feared for their lives. At the end of the 90s, that was the peak of the violence with the cartels and the guerrillas. That, I would say, propel the desire for many people to just leave the country. Colombia not only lacks a strong legal system and rule of law, ranking 108th on the Fraser Institute's Freedom Index in that category. It also ranked 93rd on the quality of its currency, 109th on tariffs, and 69th on the size of its regulatory state. So, Cesar, do you think there's any sort of parallel between Latin Americans escaping their countries due to failed policies to come to Miami and people leaving Silicon Valley to come to Miami? Definitely. People is coming to Florida because here, with the decisions that we have been taking lately and at the state level, had proven better than the decisions that we took in other states. So, definitely, it's a connection there. California and the Bay Area in particular in contrast are a case study of the failure of big government liberalism. I just don't understand how you create success if you push out people that are creating high-paying jobs that happen, that model happening in Cuba, under communism, and it's just the only equality that is created is equal misery for all of its residents. That's part of our DNA, it's part of who we are. We believe in ourselves, we invest in ourselves, and we want government to take as least of our money as possible and let us be successful on our own. But Mayor Suarez is a more marketing genius than principled free marketer. And there's always a risk that over time, the city government in Miami will come to more closely resemble San Francisco's. It's becoming more and more difficult for the market to provide the kind of affordable housing that is needed. Suarez recently oversaw the borrowing of $100 million for affordable housing. San Francisco, however, borrowed $300 million. Both cities would better serve their poorest residents by slashing red tape so that the private sector could provide affordable housing more effectively. Mayor Suarez told Axios that he wants to triple the size of a city program that gives companies financial incentives to move to downtown Miami. Confusing capitalism with cronyism, Suarez told Reason that he considers government handout schemes to be a form of market competition. Unfortunately, what happens is other areas subsidize, and so we have to compete with those areas. So we want to be competitive and that's part of being in a capitalist society is competing. We want Miami to be the capital of capital from New York and from Los Angeles and Silicon Valley in San Francisco. And that confluence of capital, we've never seen merge anywhere in the history of humanity. It's not just for the good of Miami. Suarez, who's rumored to have gubernatorial ambitions, knows that billionaire VCs are likely to become future donors to his political campaigns. In January, venture capitalist and former Facebook executive, Chamath Pallejapatija, cuts Suarez a quarter million dollar check for his reelection campaign. For Miami, more important than becoming home to a confluence of capital is that it continues to be the center of a confluence of immigrants from Latin America who have a bigger role to play if the city is to succeed as a new tech hub. And this is a country of a lot of entrepreneurship. And Miami is a city that I, I mean, there are entrepreneurs from under each stone. You cross the corner, four entrepreneurship. So, small, big, those who are. Boris Elnesser Montiel is a Venezuelan immigrant with a profitable startup called Ticket Plate, which sells online passes to live concerts streaming on the internet. His wife, Veronica Ruiz del Vizo, runs her own successful digital marketing firm. How has your experience been, let's say, more or less, alone of entrepreneurship? Especially when it's supposed that the mayor is sending an entire ecosystem. I, the company, started with capital, family and friends, very small. We made the profitable company very fast. We have grown very fast without any kind of support, no mentoring, no accessories. Obviously, the support of my wife, of people known, who know about business. But I know that the United States has an ecosystem that would allow me, or would allow me, to climb much faster and not pursue it. Though Elnesser doesn't have relationships with any of the VCs Mayor Suarez has his sights on, he's well connected within Venezuela, which is an important factor in his success. His website was coded back in Venezuela and Elnesser's customer support team is located there. He estimates that for the cost of one staffer in Miami, he can hire six in Venezuela. The people who work with me, from the programmers, to the people who pay attention to the user, earn a lot more than any other person with a similar job in the country where they are. So, not only do they have the Latin American spark to solve, to work incessantly, to work with quality, but they also have important knowledge and raise the level of that human talent in Latin America. Ruiz del Vizo says that for Miami to become more of a tech and business hub, it needs to develop networks that better serve immigrant entrepreneurs. The potential within Miami exists because the largest minority in the United States are Latinos and Hispanics. And Miami is the place for Hispanic Latinos. But that's not enough. I feel that this talent is very much taken advantage of. I feel that you have a lot of people in Miami that if you had access to those tools, you would be seeing a lot of companies and spectacular entrepreneurship in the United States and Latin America. El Nacer and Ruiz del Vizo didn't come here primarily to grow their businesses. They left Venezuela for the same reason that Cesar Garajales' family fled Colombia for stability and the rule of law. The real current of chavismo, where the dictatorship was approaching, the restrictions, limitations, for me, who were entrepreneurs, it was very difficult to be able to project with the volatility of the market. And also with the uncertainty of things like water, light, the internet. I am a Cuban daughter and we have lived in the family two migratory and important displacement processes. The first was my grandparents, the parents of my dad, who moved with their small children from Cuba to Venezuela. They built everything from scratch. And then in the first years of Chávez, my family suffered the intervention of properties, they had important confrontations with the government of Chávez, and my dad decides to come to the United States. I think there's a lot of people in Miami that are from a variety of different backgrounds, but a lot of them are from current communist countries, whether they've been in Sweden, Nicaraguan, Cuban, or have been affected by it. So yeah, I think without a doubt that there's a pervasive sort of pro-capitalistic bent and mentality here. And that's part of what has appealed to VCs like PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Keith Raboy, conservative non-conformists who had enough of San Francisco's anti-business animus and woke monoculture. I don't see the woke thing ever taking hold of Miami. If you go out and you see people, you know, half naked and having fun, like you're kind of confronted with physical reality in a way that will never, woke ideas will never translate here. It's not even anti-woke, there's just no concept of it. Alex Perez is a Miami native, a fiction writer and a cultural commentator who writes about how the outlook of the American cognacente doesn't translate for Miami Latinos, especially when it comes to race and politics. All over, there isn't, with the Hispanic people, there isn't an affinity with wokeness. It's not like, if you were to interview my uncle and tell him what that is, he'd be like, this guy's pulling my leg. I mean, if I call my dad, later next, he'd try to fight me. We'd be like, what, asshole? I mean, so that's basically the way I see it. Like, and whenever I write these pieces, people are like, no, he's lying. I'm like, no, it's just, I mean, I tell people that I'm a writer, I'm a cultural critic and they're like, man, what a sad man. What is that a cultural critic? And people think that's like, speaking ill of Miami. It's like, no, it's just not things that are really relevant here. One critic of cancel culture who recently bought a home in Miami is Barstool founder Dave Portnoy. You'd have to be a moron to pay New York taxes, he told the Miami Herald. But Portnoy isn't moving his company quite yet because he doesn't think his employees could handle it. I don't know if some of us have the willpower, Portnoy told the Herald. I don't know what half the people in Miami do. It seems like few have to be at work the next day after a night out. We do. We're still normal guys built for cubes, working from nine to five. And if you've been up till five a.m., that's hard to do. That's probably true. I mean, Miami is fast paced but also very slow paced. Like, people are fast paced to go out. But then, I say, you gotta meet somebody, they might not, you know, show up or... They go to a restaurant, they might speak Spanish. And that'll be fun. Maybe from, oh, look, somebody speaks Spanish, that's funny, how cute. And then, let's see, six months in. Do you think, for example, there might be a culture clash between Silicon Valley culture, you know, very, I don't know, maybe nerdy, engineer culture versus that Miami party culture? What I'm really curious about, Mayor Sauer's pitch is that it'll probably work for the first four, five, six months. We're in March, April. The weather's great. Summer's not here yet. The Americans are coming yet. But I'll be curious in four, five or six months how the tech bros that are coming into town are gonna deal with the culture. Because it's fun for three or four days a weekend. But there is a wonky-ish, nerdish element to that culture that I'm not sure will translate to Miami. I think some will love it, but I think those are the people that maybe were from Miami in a spiritual way. Miami will only become a new and improved Silicon Valley if it can recreate the tech industry without the left-wing Nimbism that made it impossible for anyone except the ultra-wealthy to find a place to live in San Francisco or the wokeism that's infected the ranks of Google and other tech giants. Miami's best defense is the cultural predisposition of immigrants from countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Colombia who understand best of all the corrosive impact of big government. We have to create ambience for the businesses but it doesn't mean intervention. It doesn't mean using the taxpayers money for corporate welfare. So that's a fine line of saying the businesses and big companies, you know what? Relocate to my state. We have a good economic rules here. That's a fine line between saying that and one another saying come here because we're gonna build X location for you to open your business. That's corporate welfare that's using taxpayers money and I don't think that's fair.