Florida’s economy is already paying the price
@gilbertoalvolante May 16th update. No workers in Florida.
♬ original sound – gilbertoalvolante
In a time of full employment, chasing immigrants out of your state may not be the smartest move:
The videos from Florida aren’t hard to find: Dozens of clips of empty fields, abandoned construction sites, and scores of truck drivers calling for boycotts of the state have racked up hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok and Twitter over the last month. The common thread? Fear and frustration over the state’s newest anti-immigrant law, signed a week ago by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, which mandates that businesses with 25 or more employees verify the citizenship status of workers through the federal online portal E-Verify or face stronger penalties, among other new restrictions.
The new law, which goes into effect on July 1, is the latest move by DeSantis to capitalize on immigration politics as he prepares for a likely but as-yet-unannounced 2024 presidential campaign. The law, one of the most stringent state immigration measures in the US, seems intended to contrast President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration policy as the controversial pandemic-era health rule Title 42 expired last week. But the impact of the bill, critics say, will amount to a wide-ranging and intrusive crackdown on the state’s large immigrant communities, which stand to face the brunt of the new rules.
Florida is home to about 800,000 undocumented immigrants, and many work in the kinds of businesses that would be impacted by the law, known as SB 1718. Many of those affected are also members of mixed-status families — where a son or daughter, for example, might be a US citizen while their parents are not. The bill’s impact extends beyond the workplace to health care and highways: Even family members could be targets of law enforcement under a new provision that punishes anyone who transports an undocumented person “knowingly and willfully” into Florida across state lines.
The law also requires Florida hospitals that accept Medicaid to collect the immigration status of patients and calculate and report the cost of health care for undocumented people to the state; it no longer permits undocumented people to use driver’s licenses issued from other states and prohibits state ID cards to be issued to them.
Combined, these provisions may also deal a devastating blow to Florida businesses that rely on migrant labor, as it may force workers and their families to flee Florida, Samuel Vilchez Santiago, the Florida state director of the American Business Immigration Coalition, told Vox.
“The narrative that immigrants are not welcome here is going to have a huge impact on our business community — in particular industries such as construction, hospitality, health care, and agriculture — because they rely solely or primarily on migrant labor. As fear becomes the norm in immigrant communities, a lot of these migrant workers will start leaving the state and looking somewhere else,” Vilchez Santiago said. “And there is a lot of fear in migrant communities across the state.”
The law was already causing panic across Florida before DeSantis signed it. In South Florida, reporters with a local CBS News affiliate tracked empty construction sites across Miami-Dade County and spoke with construction workers who said that many of their coworkers were not showing up to work because they feared deportation. An NBC affiliate interviewed farmworkers in South Florida considering moves out of the state because of fear of persecution.
DeSantis’s office referred Vox to comments the governor made during a press conference this week. “When we have something like an E-Verify, that’s a tool to make sure that longstanding Florida law is enforced,” DeSantis said. “You can’t build a strong economy based on illegality.”
I’ve joked about DeSantis being so extreme that he’ll be bringing back slavery before too long but if this keeps up I won’t be surprised if he actually does it. At the very least there’s a good chance he’ll jump on the other red state solutions of legalizing child and forced prison labor. He’s going to be short around 800,000 workers and I don’t see how he retreats on this one. Immigrant bashing is central to his presidential campaign.