“The American Dream is the dream of the Americas,” declared Bernie Moreno to the assembled at Trump Doral – a sprawling golf resort just outside of Miami. The Ohio senator was there to collect the “Light of Congress” award, bestowed on him by Florida International University’s Adam Smith Center. “We have a window of opportunity right now to transform the Western Hemisphere into a Hemisphere of total prosperity and security,” said Moreno, to an audience which included Dominican President Luis Abinader and FIFA’s Gianni Infantino. The room rose for this native son of Colombia.

Bernie Moreno was born in Bogotá in 1967 and was five when his family moved to Fort Lauderdale. He went on to build a car dealership empire in Ohio. It is a familiar immigrant story, but the Morenos were not a familiar immigrant family. His father, Bernardo Sr., trained as a surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania, went home, became a medical school dean, founded Bogotá’s San Ignacio Hospital and ran the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare. It was Moreno’s mother, who described herself as coming from “outsized privilege,” who insisted on leaving so her children would not grow up entitled. Theirs was a rare case of a family driven abroad by wealth rather than poverty.

Moreno belongs to a new generation of Republican Latino legislators who take a hawkish line on Latin America’s left-wing governments

Moreno belongs to a new generation of Republican Latino legislators who take a hawkish line on Latin America’s left-wing governments

After a false start in 2022, he won Donald Trump’s endorsement in 2024, beat Sherrod Brown and became Ohio’s first Hispanic senator and one of the first two Colombian-Americans in the chamber. Since then he has introduced a bill to end dual citizenship and has called birthright citizenship into question. The press finds him easy to caricature as the immigrant pulling up the ladder behind him. This is wrongheaded. Theodore Roosevelt insisted there was no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism, and he was right. Full assimilation means putting one’s adopted country first, and that is what Moreno believes he is doing.

Why do we know so little about the RAF Fairford affair?

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The rise of the Orienfluencers

He is also a pugnacious economic nationalist. His idea to let buyers deduct interest on loans for American-made cars was folded into last year’s........

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