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To reinforce your point, apparently over 10% of Cuba has crossed the border into America in the last couple of years. At those sorts of numbers, virtually every Cuban is going to have a family member who they can call to tell them exactly what the process was like.
I wonder what the effects of this must be on Cuban society. This is a major depopulation event for them now, and you would expect it to be mostly younger working-age people leaving.
It's very amusing in some respects how strategic rivals in geopolitics have come to view population movement. Back in the Cold War, control of the population was an ideological imperative, and Soviet-block governments often took great difficulty to prevent free movement of populations out of or even within the country. Now, some of those successor states- or in the case of Cuba and Nicaragua, the same elites, deliberately expel population for domestic security measures, and with a level of 'if the westerners don't like it, it must be bad for them and good for me.' Which is just such a paradigm shift in the last half century or so.
And it's not without its consequences either. As more and more of the latin american populations go abroad and especially to the US, various forms of US influence increase, as the US diaspora becomes significant financial and even political influence vector. The current President of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, is an US citizen (dual US and Ecuadorian, born in Miami but raised in Ecuador), which is wild not only for the fact that a Yankee capitalist was elected president of an Andean Ridge country where Chavismo was part of the leftest wave earlier in the century, but also in terms of population.
Because of how much migration has occurred from various sending countries, small countries in particular can have, well, surprisingly high ratios of their nominal census population present in the US. For example, there are an estimate .95 million of so Ecuadorian diaspora in the US out of a census population of 18 million, which is to say over 5%. There are something like 100,000 Guyanese who have arrived in the US/naturalized, when Guayana is a country of only about 800,000, or nearly 12%. The Cuban diaspora is nearly 2.7 million, to a Cuban island population of about 11.2 million, which is approaching 25% of the islanders.
Well, not quite- many of these population figures include naturalized US citizens, and they don't factor in the diasporas in other countries (far more Venezuelans stay in South American than come to the US, for example)- but it's hard to emphasize just how weird this is in a historical context, especially in a region historically sensitive to external influences. A historical justification for intervention and even annexation during the age of colonialism has long been having the presence of associated communities on the other side of the border, be it ethnic enclaves or cultural kin or even just linguistic relatives, and how this creates a basis of intervention. It's not even just an archaic practice- see the Russian justifications in Ukraine, or PRC claims on ethnic community grounds, or various brushfire wars in Africa, or the Armenia/Azerjiban ethnic enclaves, or the Arab-Israeli conflict over palestinians. Demographic ties matter, and matter a lot.
And if the American government wanted to, it has access to a whole host of justifications along similar lines.
Not that it will- not anytime in the near-term future at least- but in other times and other places, other empires would use having control of 5-10% of the population of country as grounds to control the remainder.
Yeah, the numbers are similar for Dominicans, which is the group I'm most personally familiar with. 2.5 million in the US, 11 million in the home country. Many of my Dominican relatives move back and forth between the two countries and hold dual citizenship. Most of their biggest national heroes play baseball for American teams.
I haven't directly posed the question, but I suspect most Dominicans would eagerly welcome annexation by the US. There's a ready made example of what a situation like that would look like in practice over in Puerto Rico, and Dominicans are extremely cynical about their own governance and institutions. The US dollar is seen as much more solid and reliable than their own peso, US politics is seen as much less corrupt, etc.
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I don't know the demographic breakdown, but many coming to New England are in their 50s.
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Cuba has had below replacement fertility for a while now, right? Like there's not just endless amounts of young Cubans, so it's actually even worse.
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