Come on down, Miami open for business.
Bubbling of activity, and excitement, and optimism.
And not just because of the taxes, but because of the culture of innovation.
When the Venture Capitalist Delian Asparouhov
suggested on Twitter last December
that the tech industry should migrate
from Silicon Valley to Miami,
Mayor Francis Forest 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 elites
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 dollar 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 an avid Bitcoin enthusiast,
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 a 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.
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
in the Fraser Institute's state ranking of economic view.
The U.S. ranked sixth in the global rankings,
which explains why Latin American migrants continue to come.
Venezuela, whose citizens have escaped to Miami en mass
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 married here.
My parents live here too. I went to school here.
Caesar Grajales arrived in Miami from Columbia
when he was 19 with 80 dollars in his pocket.
He says that his family fled Columbia in the nineties,
because they feared for their lives.
At the end of the nineties,
that was the peak of the violence,
with the cartels and guerrillas that propel
the desire for many people to just leave the country.
Columbia 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 ranks 93rd on the quality of its currency,
109th on tariffs,
and 69th on the size of its regulatory states.
So do you think there's any sort of parallel between Latin-Americans escaping their countries
through to failed policies to come to Miami,
and people leaving Silicon Valley to come to Miami?
Definitely, people are coming to Florida because
here, with the decisions that we have been taking lately, and at the state level,
have proven better than the decisions that we took in other states.
So definitely there is a connection there.
California, and the Bay Area in particular, in contrast are 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 model happened in Cuba, under communism,
and 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 more a marketing genius than principled free marketeer,
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 billion dollars for affordable housing.
San Francisco, however, borrowed 300 billion.
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 become 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, and San Francisco.
And that confluence— 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 Palihapitiya
cut 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.
Boris Elneser Montiel is a Venezuela immigrant
with a profitable startup called, Ticket Plate,
which sells online passes to live concerts streaming on the internet.
His wife Veronica Ruíz del Vizo, runs her own successful digital marketing firm.
Though he doesn't have relationships with any
of the VCs major 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 Elneser's customer support team is located there.
He estimates that for the cost
of one staffer in Miami, he can hire six in Venezuela.
Ruíz del Vizo says that for Miami to become more
of a tech and business hub, it needs to develop networks
that better serve immigrants and entrepreneurs.
Elesner and Ruíz del Vizo didn't come here primarily to grow their businesses.
They left Venezuela for the same reason that Cesar Grajales’
family fled Columbia: for stability and the rule of law.
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 Venezuela, Nicaraguan, Cuban
or have been affected by it.
So yeah, I think
without a doubt that there's a pervasive sort
of a pro capitalistic bent and mentality here.
And that's part of what has appealed
to VCs like PayPal, co-founder Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois, conservative nonconformists
who had enough of San Francisco's anti-business animus
and woke monoculture.
I don't see the woke thing ever taking hold on Miami.
If you go out and you see people
half naked and having fun, you're kind of confronted
with physical reality in a way that we'll never—
woke ideas won't ever translate here, it's not even translatable.
That'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 cognoscenti 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 going to my uncle
and tell him what that is he'd be like, this guy's pulling my leg.
If I call my dad LatinX he'd try to fight me and be like, what? Que eso?
So I specifically, the way I see it, like when I write these pieces people are like, nah, he's lying.
I'm like, no, it's just, I tell people that I'm a writer, 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 of ill of Miami, I said, no.
Like 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,"
Portland told the Herald,
"I don't know what half the people in Miami do."
"It seems like if you 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 5:00 AM, 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, you know, to go out.
But then you got to meet somebody,
they might not show up or, you go to a restaurant
they might speak Spanish and that'll be fun,
maybe from a month, 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, I don't know maybe nerdy engineer culture
versus that Miami party culture?
What I'm really curious about Mayor Suarez's pitch is that
it'll probably work the first four or five, six months.
We're in March, April, weather is great. Summer's not here yet, hurricane's aren't coming yet.
But I'd be curious, in four or five or six months, how the tech bros
that are coming into town are going to deal with the culture.
Because it's fun for three or four days, a weekend,
but there is a a wonky-ish nerdish element
to that culture that I'm not sure can 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 nimbyism 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 a cultural predisposition of immigrants from countries
like Cuba, Venezuela, and Columbia,
who understand best of all the corrosive impact of big government.
We have to create ambiance for the businesses
but it doesn't mean intervention, doesn't mean using the taxpayer's money for corporate welfare.
So that's a fine line of saying to the businesses and big companies, you know what?
Relocate to my state.
We have good economic rules here.
That's a fine line between saying that,
and then another saying, come here
because we're going to 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.