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Rep. Nicole Maliotakis’s Immigrant Refugee Hypocrisy [1]

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Date: 2023-10-29  

“You value the burnt amber of falling leaves

And you long to delay

As you feel their breath as they whisper

"It won`t hurt you now to betray

If you just bow down"”

-Elvis Costello, “You Bowed Down”

I reside in Staten Island, just up the block from St. John Villa Academy, a former Catholic school that New York City Mayor Eric Adam’s administration had turned into a shelter for incoming migrants (due to fire safety violations in the building the migrants have since been move to a Manhattan hotel). To say that the shelter had become a volatile issue among the local residents would be an understatement.

Opposition to anything assisting migrant refugees in my neck of the woods shouldn’t surprise anyone. The majority of congressional district ‘s territory is in located ruby red Staten Island, the only one of New York City’s five boroughs that voted for Trump 2016 and in 2020.

This episode, however, is more than another controversy about immigration. It is the point where political hypocrisy becomes personal hypocrisy.

The Honorable Nicole Maliotakis (R-NY, 11th CD) is one of the local politicians that have become prominently involved in protests against a migrant shelter. Her district covers all of Staten Island and parts of western Brooklyn.

As a member of the New York State Assembly Rep. Maliotakis was known as a moderate Republican who, while running for mayor in 2017, expressed regret for voting for Donald Trump for President, even opposing his Mexican border wall obsession.

But her subsequent actions suggest this may have been an insincere contrition. Perhaps it was cynically made to appeal to voters in a city where the former president is widely unpopular. We cannot read her mind, so her true intentions can’t be objectively known. What is knowable is that since 2017 she has embraced a starkly darker political vision, one that points to hypocrisy especially when it comes to the issue of refugee immigration.

And that is the point where this story becomes one of hypocrisy: Rep. Maliotakis’s parents may never have met if not for past tolerance towards migrant refugees.

You see, Rep. Maliotakis is the daughter of a Greek immigrant father and a Cuban refugee mother. In a 2019 interview with Newsmax, entitled, “Lesson Learned by the Daughter of a Cuban Refugee” Rep. Maliotakis said of her mother:

“As I spent Mother’s Day with my mother, I reflected on the hardships she faced as a Cuban refugee and how some in our nation are attempting to make the United States like those very nations that my mother and millions of immigrants fled. It’s why the best Mother’s Day gift is to pass on to others some of the life lessons she’s taught me. I’ll be honest; life hasn’t always been easy or joyful for her. She’s lived through hard times, but, today she and my father live a comfortable life in the city, state, and country they love. They came to the U.S. with nothing, from countries 6,000 miles apart, with no common bond except the shared immigrant experience, a desire to live the American Dream, and a limited vocabulary in a new language.”

And yet Rep. Maliotakis has been very upfront about denying other Hispanic refugees similarly seeking a more secure life in the United States, as indicated by the below uploaded posting on X.

Like many of today’s GOP Rep. Maliotakis’s political behavior increasingly shares much in common with radical anti-democracy libertarians such as Hans Hermann Hoppe and those of the Dark Enlightenment. As the New York Times reported, “Hans-Hermann Hoppe — believe that cultural homogeneity is a precondition for socio-economic order. Mr. Hoppe envisions a dissolution of the current world map of states into thousands of tiny units the size of Hong Kong, Andorra and Monaco without representative government and ruled only by private contract.”[1]

To that end, she has called for Staten Island to secede from both New York City and New York State (Hoppe advocates secession). She was an enthusiastic supporter of Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) aborted run for Speaker of the House of Representatives (Jordan has been suspected playing an active role in the January 6th Insurrection; like Jordan Maliotakis voted against certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election). She also embraced the election Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) successful bid for the same post (like Jordan, Johnson is an fervent economic libertarian and an election denier).

But returning to Rep. Maliotakis’s ethnic heritage, this question begs to be asked: Is refugee status only good for Cuban Hispanics like those near and dear to her heart but not for other Hispanics such as those from Guatemala, San Salvadorans and Venezuelans?

Just as her mother wanted to escape Castro-inspired thuggery in Cuba so do these Northern Triangle migrant refugees seek escape from intimidation and violence. A 2018 report from the Brookings Institute cuts through the current misinformation, stating in no uncertain terms:

“It is an outdated notion that people from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are primarily looking for economic opportunity in the United States and, therefore, should wait in line for a visa. For people fleeing these countries, waiting for a visa can result in death, rape, or forcible recruitment into crime.”

Nor does Rep. Maliotakis explain some relevant history, such as when the George W. Bush administration worked with Congressional Democrats and less strident Republicans in an attemp to pass immigration reform legislation. It was, however, sabotaged by a hard-right GOP element with whom she increasingly shares a MAGA-populist political philosophy.

Then there is the allegation by Jenna Budd, the former Border Patrol Agent. She alleges that her old colleagues of her would take away necessary documentation from migrants seeking refugee status and strew it across the desert. By not exploring this claim politicians such as Nicole Maliotakis are not telling the whole story of the migrant’s journey.

In the final analysis the hypocrisy and omissions of Nicole Maliotakis point to an abdication of leadership, shirking the opportunity to demonstrate through her own family history how today’s migrant refugee creates tomorrow’s good American. More than that, her behavior constitutes a bowing down to the crowd’s wrath for the newcomer. Her grave inconsistency is her failure to welcome other refugees fleeing a hostile land as her own refugee mother had been able to do. It is the old story of climbing up a ladder and then pulling it up from behind.

And that my friends, is hypocrisy.

Frank L. Cocozzelli is the author of of Commissar Conservatives: HowLaissez-faire Libertarianism Is Disturbingly Similar to Communism

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/29/2202356/-Rep-Nicole-Maliotakis-s-Immigrant-Refugee-Hypocrisy?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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