Bernie Moreno says migrants “destroyed” Ohio cities but won’t clarify which cities or how

The U.S. Senate campaign of Republican Bernie Moreno took to X last week to claim that because of the current administration’s policies, migrants have “destroyed” Ohio communities.

However, the campaign didn’t answer when asked to identify a single Ohio city that had been harmed by migration, where the migrants doing the destruction came from, and how the communities had been harmed. The statement also ignores the fact that Moreno, a Cleveland businessman, is himself a migrant.

Moreno is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat that has been occupied by Democrat Sherrod Brown since 2007. The race is one of the most closely watched in the country this cycle.

As his fellow Republicans have, Moreno has tried to stoke fears of migrants following a surge at the southern border, which has since subsided — at least temporarily. Many have also claimed that undocumented migrants commit more crime than the native-born, although research indicates that the opposite is actually the case. And border cities such as El Paso and McAllen have significantly lower crime rates than the average American city.

Some of the rhetoric has at least seemed to be racist. When former President Donald last year repeatedly said undocumented immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country,” he seemed to echo Adolf Hitler, who used several versions of the poison-blood metaphor in his racist musings.

For his part, Moreno hasn’t been shy about using harsh rhetoric about immigration. He has repeatedly referred to what’s happening at the southern border as an “invasion” despite the fact that El Paso has already been the victim of a racist massacre by a man who said he was trying to stop an invasion, and experts worry that it’s only a matter of time before it happens again.

Playing on fears of undocumented migrants, the Moreno campaign said in an ad, “Brown and Biden won’t keep your family safe.” 

On Wednesday, the Moreno campaign took to X to say, “San Francisco liberal @KamalaHarris and @SherrodBrown destroyed Ohio communities by flooding our state with migrants.”

However, his campaign didn’t respond when asked which Ohio communities had been destroyed and how.

But what made the post especially head-scratching is the fact that Moreno is himself a migrant, being born in Colombia in 1967. His family migrated to Florida in 1971.

Moreno last year said, “We came here with absolutely nothing — we came here legally — but we came here, nine of us in a two-bedroom apartment.” 

It was part of the image he’s tried to cultivate of an immigrant who came to the United States the “right” way as opposed to impoverished Colombians who’ve survived the trek through the Darien Gap, made their way the U.S.-Mexico border and entered without documents.

However, Moreno’s depiction of his family as a poor one is misleading. In Columbia, his people were wealthy and politically connected, and while the family lived in straitened circumstances the first years they were in the states, things quickly got better. 

His father, Bernardo Moreno Sr., was a surgeon who was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and later served as the Colombian equivalent of the secretary of health, the New York Times reported. He initially worked at low pay in Florida as a surgical assistant, but by 1973, he had full privileges as a surgeon.

In addition, one of Bernie Moreno’s brothers served as the Colombian ambassador to the United States and another founded a multinational construction empire.

This story was originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal