Florida recently passed a rather strict immigration law. And because of this law they got pased a few days ago, houses aren’t being built, Fields aren’t being worked, and hotel rooms aren’t being cleaned.
I’ve been seeing a lot of tiktok videos talking about all this but I haven’t seen anything on the news.
Can any Floridians on this board confirm?
The law doesn’t go into effect until July. And, to be clear, it’s not an immigration law, which states don’t have jurisdiction over. It’s instead a business regulation.
As I sit in Florida, it’s too damn hot and humid. I can already tell that the gross summer season is on its way.
But there’s no widespread shortage of labor. It’s all speculation at this point.
The funny thing is it’s been admitted for 50 years now that the vast majority of immigration is economic, not refugee. And as long as the laws requireing businesses to hire only documented immigrants are totally unenforced, ICE will have an impossible job.
So for decades the social side of the Rs pushed the idea of adding teeth to the I-9 enforcement program so businesses could not get away with hiring undocumented people. But of course the R business lobby was having none of that. And the small government lobby didn’t want to staff or pay for the I-9 investigation force.
Meanwhile the Ds said we’d be fine with strong I-9 enforcement, as long as there was a path for the currently undocumented workers to be made legal immediately when the enforcement kicked in. And for legal immigration caps to be raised to meet the demand for workers that obviously exists.
All this was standard party positions 30 years ago.
DeSantis seems to have finally got around to trying, at the state level, to do what the Feds never could. Of course he’s only implementing the hate-filled part, not the logical parts.
DeSantis is really insanely reflexively anti-business. Florida runs on the real estate industry. As somebody who lives here and had worked with many many contractors both large & small while I was a condo Prez I also know the whole darn R/E industry runs on illegal labor. As does much of the hotel & restaurant industry.
If DeSantis wanted to crash Florida’s economy, he probably could not have picked a better way. Which makes me think he’s really aiming for performance art here. He can shout at his presidential campaign rallies that
I the Great DeSantis tried to stop the flow of brown people. But the evil FL legislature and courts would not go along. Vote for me and I’ll disband obstructionist Legislatures and courts everywhere!!
But since the legislature passed it, I think he’s fully expecting this to be injunctioned and never take effect. Then again, kinda like a previous politician who was surprised he’d won something he thought was just performance art, maybe DeSantis was surprised this came through and is now scrambling to figure out how to deal with the inevitable consequences.
I think DeSantis is scrambling, I honestly don’t think he actually thought any of his actions through.
I sort of wish Disney would shut down the park for 30 days … it would be worth the income hit to just put all the employees on 30 days paid leave and show the asshat and his worshipers exactly what would happen if Disney shut doors permanently and moved to I don’t know, Georgia - they could plunk it down near Benning South [did they rename the town too? Fort Moore South, in that case] or if they want to keep it near a deep water port, Charlestown SC has a nice port and they could plunk a theme park down next to the city just fine.
I’m not a fan of this Desantis right wing ass but how is clamping down on illegal aliens a bad thing?
I’m skeptical of the whole “If we don’t let undocumented workers into the country the entire economy will crash” stuff because every single time a state passes a more stringent immigration law like this people predict this and apparently it never comes to pass, such as in Arizona about two decades ago.
Is this an actual meaningful law or just showboating for a presidential campaign? How many zeroes are on the new appropriation for the extra enforcement (this would be a very labor-intensive thing to inspect), and how does it heighten the employer’s obligations above the current I-9 requirement? Or is it just so Ron Desantis can go to rural Iowa and tell people that he created a brand new ten thousand dollar fine for illegal immigration, knowing that nobody will actually care if anyone had ever paid it?
It took a while but what I was referring to finally made its way to the news cycle.
I’ve been seeing a lot of videos of empty construction sites and empty farms.
How about scrapping a billion dollar plan to relocate theme park R&D?