Mass Migration Is Blowback To U.S. Meddling

Jesse Ventura’s decision to go to Cuba and speak directly with people our government had isolated was more than a stunt — it was a model of independent statecraft: go where the pain is, listen first, and prioritize people over PR. I learned that principled defiance — not reflexive alignment with Washington’s friends or enemies — can open pragmatic channels that save lives. Ventura’s Cuba visit showed that governors and state leaders can use soft power and moral clarity to shift conversations and forge humanitarian outcomes.

I say this bluntly because I was taught to: mass migration is not a mysterious “crisis” that appears out of nowhere — it’s a predictable symptom of a broken foreign policy. As a former pupil of Jesse Ventura and a border-state Arizona governor candidate, I’ve seen both the human cost at our border and the geopolitical roots of displacement. When a superpower uses sanctions, covert pressure, regime-change politics, or one-size-fits-all intervention, people flee. They flee hunger, violence, collapsed services, and the grim calculus of survival. The flows we see at our border are, in too many cases, blowback — a direct consequence of decades of U.S. meddling in the hemisphere.

Millions have left Venezuela since 2014 — an exodus driven by collapsing public services, hyperinflation, and political repression. UN partners estimate millions displaced across the region, many lacking food, medicine, and formal work. These are not abstract numbers — they are families pushed to choose between staying to suffer and taking deadly journeys to survive. 

Independent observers and UN experts have documented that coercive measures and economic sanctions have aggravated Venezuela’s economic collapse and had severe humanitarian consequences for civilians. U.N. fact-finding and other reports call for a reassessment of policies that impose broad penalties on entire populations while aiming at political outcomes. Sanctions and isolation can weaken institutions that deliver health, food, and basic services — and when basic services collapse, migration surges.

First: go where the pain is, listen, and act. Arizona will push state-level diplomacy and humanitarian channels — backing escorted humanitarian corridors, coordinating with UN and trusted NGOs to get food, medicine, and medical teams to civilians, and demanding that aid not be blocked. The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza — massive displacement, collapsing services, and widespread hunger — makes this urgent. 

Second: convene the allies that actually help people. I’ll use Arizona’s platform to bring mayors, governors, faith leaders, and diaspora organizers together to build practical plans for shelter, medical evacuation, and long-term recovery — not press releases. State-level coalitions can move resources and pressure federal actors to act.

Third: separate politics from human life. We’ll fund and monitor targeted aid programs that reach families, support legal aid for refugees, and back accountability for policies that produce forced displacement. Ventura taught me that principled defiance — showing up, speaking plainly, and prioritizing people over political theater — saves lives. That’s exactly what I’ll do for Palestine.