According to Peru’s official election results page, the battle for a second-place spot for the May runoff shows that free-market Lourdes Flores is beginnning to sharply gain on disastrous ex-President Alan Garcia. If she can completely overtake Garcia, she will be the one to face Ollanta Humala in May, and may well win.

As Peruvian expat votes roll in, there’s now less than a 100,000-vote difference between Garcia and Flores. Garcia’s lead above Flores is just 93,818 votes. A few days ago, it was over 200,000 votes. The expats seem to be making a difference. Lobo en Peru has some fascinating additional details: that Garcia is urging everyone to be calm and saying his numbers will improve by today – that is true. That Humala swears he isn’t an admirer of Hugo Chavez – sounds like second-round campaigning to me. That almost all of the boondock votes are in so it’s almost all expat votes left to be counted. In New Zealand, most of the Peruvian expats – 76% – have gone for Flores. UPDATE: Alvicho at Off Topic has a bit more here.

Meanwhile, overall, there’s still around 9% of the vote to be tallied. Will this trend in the end result in victory? To be honest, I don’t know. I am scared she may still lose by about 100 votes. But an important point is being made anyway:

Take a Peruvian out of the country, let him see the wide world, let him learn what his true economic interests are – and he’s far less likely to vote for a messiah-populist like Ollanta Humala or Alan Garcia.

Even if a person is an illegal alien dishwasher in New York or a maid in Buenos Aires, the net result is positive. Illegal aliens may well be the ones who rescue Peru.

An arresting thought if there ever was one. And given that it’s in the U.S. interest to have a friendly, free-market president in a beautiful neighboring country in our hemisphere, maybe we ought to rethink shutting the door on so much immigration, legal and illegal. These illegal aliens are showing us that they aren’t the commies out there voting these anti-U.S. badguys in.

They are like us.