SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – At La Casita Blanca, a family-owned restaurant which prides itself on its reputation as a community dining room, owner Jesus Perez has watched his popular eatery serve as a reluctantly final destination

for longtime patrons. It is, Perez says, where locals consume "the last meal" before leaving the fiscally troubled island for the United States. "I see the sadness in their faces" as they prepare to move – generally to Florida – to escape the economic meltdown in Puerto Rico, Velez says. But the 30-year-old says he can't blame them. "The middle class is getting choked," Velez says.

Unemployment is more than 11 percent. Everyone here complains about the high cost of utilities and taxes (sales tax alone is 11.5 percent, raised this summer to bring in revenue to the cash-strapped government). The island is $73 billion in debt, a bill the government says it simply cannot pay. A health care crisis is building, and is expected to become critical as the island's Medicaid grant is exhausted.

The meltdown has led Puerto Ricans to flee the island in droves, moving to the U.S. and presenting the mainland with a new political landscape and looming fiscal pressures. The trend has been building for years, with more people leaving the island for the U.S. from 2010-2013 than in the '80s and '90s combined. But the current economic crisis has accelerated the outmigration, with experts estimating that 500-1,000 Puerto Rican families a week are moving to central Florida for greener economic pastures. There are now more island retirees moving to the mainland than the reverse, says Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat and champion of Puerto Rican issues. "No one conceptually thinks of a tropical island in the Caribbean as a place to leave, and retire somewhere else, but that's what people are doing," Gutierrez says, shaking his head.

The migration north may be what forces Congress and presidential candidates to finally pay attention to Puerto Rico's problems, advocates say. Puerto Ricans tend to vote Democratic (and have high turnout), but state Republican operatives say they are ready to battle for the votes in central Florida's "I-4 corridor," a key region in the swing state. As U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans can register immediately to vote in Florida, and as the 2000 presidential campaign showed, it doesn't take too many Sunshine State votes to decide not just the state's delegate assignment, but the winner of the presidency.

"The fiscal crisis on the island … is going to have a huge impact on Florida" in the presidential campaign next year, says Vivian Rodriguez, president of the Democratic Hispanic Caucus of Florida. "And once they migrate to this area, they usually vote Democratic." President Barack Obama won 71 percent of the Latino vote nationwide

in 2012, according to a Pew Research Center survey, and improved his advantage among Florida Hispanics, from 57 percent in 2008 to 60 percent in 2012. That increase is due to the growing dominance of Puerto Ricans in a Hispanic community once largely defined by GOP-leaning Cuban-Americans, the Pew report said.

And the migration is likely to accelerate in 2017, when the island's federal Medicaid grant is expected to be depleted, spurring low-income residents to come to the states to take advantage of the health care program for the poor, says former Puerto Rican Gov. Aníbal Acevedo Vilá.

Republicans are seeking to woo the new Latino residents with an argument of fiscal responsibility and austerity that resonates with those who fled the economic morass of Puerto Rico, says Wadi Gaitan, spokesman for the Republican Party of Florida.

"When folks come here, they don't have an allegiance to party," Gaitan says. "They recognize that a big part of the economic crisis in Puerto Rico is due to a government that is not accountable, that isn't efficient and that has overspent. They come to the U.S. with a hope for greater opportunity, and they don't want the same government they have seen in Puerto Rico."

The GOP, having narrowly lost Florida in the 2012 presidential election in part because of a lack of Hispanic support, has been laying the groundwork with the expanding Puerto Rican community for the last several years, connecting with the new migrants at community and church events, and using an aggressive social media presence in Spanish as well as English. The effort has already paid off, Gaitan says: two Puerto Rican Republicans ousted Democratic incumbents in the state legislature last year.

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And while Latino voters are an increasingly important voter group in presidential elections, especially in swing states like Florida, Nevada, Colorado and North Carolina, the group is not politically monolithic. Cuban-Americans, for example, have historically voted Republican (though less so, in recent elections), backing candidates with hardline stances against the Castro regime. Newer immigrants are eager to gain legal status for their relatives seeking to come to the U.S., while those Hispanics whose families have been here for generations may want new arrivals to stand in line.

Candidates wooing the Latino vote have tended to focus heavily on immigration reform, but that issue is of little practical concern to Florida's two biggest Hispanics communities. Puerto Ricans are not foreigners, and Cuban immigrants have special status that allows them to get a green card after one year if they make it onto U.S. soil (though the policy may change with the advancement of normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba). That, political operatives say, makes the Puerto Rican vote gettable for either party.

For Puerto Ricans, there are two issues: the availability of good, middle-class jobs for them in Florida, and attention to the severe fiscal and healthcare problems still facing the migrants' families and friends on the island, says Carlos Guillermo Smith, former chair of the Orange County Democratic Party and a current candidate for the Florida state House. Puerto Ricans might be making a long-term move to the U.S., but they are still troubled by what they see as the unequal way the U.S. has dealt with its island territory. "These issues matter to them," Smith says.

It's a crisis that has been building for some time – the fault, locals and experts say, of both mishandling of finances at the local level and the burdens imposed by Puerto Rico's limbo-like status as a U.S. territory. Puerto Ricans pay Social Security and Medicare taxes (though not U.S. income taxes), but get reduced benefits for the health care programs. Lower reimbursements to hospitals and doctors have forced facilities to close and doctors to leave – not only hurting the population, but causing health industry-related job losses, Gutierrez says.

Further, the Caribbean island is hamstrung by several peculiar fiscal demands: all goods from outside must arrive on U.S.-flagged ships, a unique requirement that drives up consumer costs. The U.S. phased out a tax incentive program for U.S. manufacturers, resulting in a departure of mainland capital and the jobs associated with it. And unlike U.S. municipalities, Puerto Rico cannot claim Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection, giving the island government the disastrous choice of refusing to pay government pensions or defaulting on its payments to bond holders.

"I think the government of Puerto Rico has been doing everything [it can] with the tools we have, but I'm convinced that in this crisis, there is some shared responsibility," Acevedo Vilá says. "We have a structural problem, and we need to establish a new economic relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States." Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection – which would require congressional approval and which Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley, and GOP contender Jeb Bush have endorsed – would be a way out of the immediate crisis, Acevedo Vilá says, but it would not solve the island's long-term troubles. Puerto Rico needs to rebuild its natural manufacturing base – and it's hard to do that when the island can't import things freely, he says, adding, "if we don't have those tools, we don't have a way out."

Puerto Ricans accept some blame, too, for their dire straits. The government workforce is too big, says Luis Herrero, a 59-year-old San Juan economic expert, and the government has failed to make structural changes to deal with the increasing debt. "We're doing long-term borrowing for short-term expenditures," he complains. Meanwhile, Herrero and other residents say, low wages discourage people from working, since government benefits are generous enough to make working unappealing. "There's not a will to change. There's a resistance to change," he says.

The frustration on the island towards the U.S. is deep – starting with a sense that most mainlanders don't have any idea of Puerto Rico's history (it was under Spanish rule then ceded to the U.S. in 1898 after the Spanish-American War) or its fiscal relationship with the US. "They don't know who we are, what we do, or that we are citizens of the United States," says Oliria Ratcliffe, 65, of San Juan.

But Puerto Ricans struggle, too, with their identity. Instead of being polarized by a Democratic-Republican divide, Puerto Ricans are split over what they want to be. Polls typically show about five percent want independence, with the rest divided fairly evenly between statehood and the status quo as a commonwealth. "Deep inside, I want us to be an independent nation," says Lizzie Paz, 54, of San Juan. But she acknowledges that Puerto Rico, its history steeped in colonialism, has no template for such a plan. "You cannot look to something you don't know," she says.

Candidates, meanwhile, are paying a bit more attention to the island, which gets a say in the primaries. Clinton, Bush and Marco Rubio have all visited the island, although locals complain they mainly came to raise money – and were disappointed by Rubio's refusal to endorse Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection.