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Do Desantis fans actually want illegal immigrants to leave their state?
Desantis could get most illegal immigrants to leave Florida if he really wanted to. Illegal immigrants generally need to work. If an area made it so they could not find work, most illegal immigrants would leave that area. You can make it hard to find work for illegal immigrants by passing severe and immediate penalties for employers that employ illegal immigrants, and boosting the agencies investigating such crimes. For maximal effect, the severe penalities would include jailtime.
If he wanted to, Desantis could sign such a bill in no time at all. Instead he's flying illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard.
To be fair, he did sign a law 2 years ago that made e-verify mandatory. That was the headline at least. More specifically, it made e-verify mandatory for public employers and their contractors. Private employers are required to keep I9 documentation for some years if they don't use e-verify. And if you get caught 3 times in 36 months, the employer can lose their licensure. Florida otherwise appears to treat the 1st instance of employing an illegal immigrant as a non-criminal offense, and the 2nd instance as a misdemeanor. In conjunction with loose enforcement activities, this is not how you strenuously deter employers from hiring illegal immigrants. Anyone who cares a out getting rid of the illegal immigrants in their state should be able to see that.
Of course, strongly penalizing the people who employ illegal immigrants would annoy those people. And at least a substantial portion of those people who would be annoyed are Desantis supporters.
So I see why Desantis likes putting illegal immigrants on a plane: it doesn't offend his employer constituency, and it appeals to the anti-illegal-immigrant constituency.
What I don't get why a ordinary joe (or a mottizen) who is concerned about illegal immigration would treat this as anything other than a stunt designed to distract them from Desantis prioritizing business interests over actually dealing with the problem.
Can we at least agree, though, that the practical implications of enforcing this law would impose substantial costs on the state?
Prosecuting hundreds or thousands of businesses and migrants and the judicial resources this would encompass alone could total in the 10s of millions of dollars, if not 100's. And since you're suggesting jail sentences to maximize efficacy, that's further resources expended in doling out such punishments.
And all the while the actual source of the waves of immigrants has not been stifled. Thus this proposed law has no guarantee of actually solving the issue in the long term. Just millions of dollars spent on enforcing these laws, year after year, indefinitely. Perhaps not an optimal use of resources.
I think the central argument by the Governors dealing with this situation is that the scope of the problem is far beyond the capacity of these states to address. South America has a population of 422 million people. Another 184 million in Central America. Thus, there could theoretically be 5 million immigrants crossing into the U.S. every year for 120 years, just counting current population, before it stops. I'm not sure how a handful of states are equipped to handle the potential influx vs. their population this would represent.
The Federal Government is supposedly charged with controlling the flow of immigrants into the nation, so by all rights the Federal Government is at fault for this current state of affairs.
Calling attention to this and forcing them to notice and address it is pretty much the only way this situation gets 'better.'
It also imposes a cost on the very people whose opposition is causing the problem and who also have the power to start fixing it.
Isn't that the point of most activism? Make your opponents uncomfortable enough to agree to address the concerns you are expressing?
In 2020 I sat and watched mass protest movements, civil disobedience, and other aggressive efforts to get cities to comply with the 'defund the police' mandate, as ill-defined as that was. I watched many cities, in response to the discomfort this caused, try to cooperate and compromise with this mandate.
This was hailed as important social change.
Ironically, Florida and Texas were both some of the least impacted by the Riots of 2020.
So I am really, REALLY not having any sympathy for those who are discomfited by a busload of migrants showing up in their community unannounced. If they actually agree that this is a problem to address, there's a clear path to trying to make the rate of illegal immigration decrease to 'manageable' levels.
Not entirely clear to me. You could mix substantial financial penalties into the mix to recoup the addition court costs and enforcement activities.
I also do not recall the expense associated with "the wall" being a significant concern for the anti-illegal immigration side.
Again, I do not recall the anti illegal immigration side being overly concerned with optimization of resources, so I find this supicious.
If you seriously disagree with the thesis "if you harshly penalize employers for employing illegal immigrants, they will stop coming and the ones here will leave" please just say so. That position seems untenable to me, and you seem to be enjoying it without having to actually associate yourself with it.
I dont have sympathy for them either.
But the other side's unworthiness isn't an explanation for why the anti illegal imigration crowd lets their politicians off the hook.
There is simply no way to make law-enforcement and courts revenue-neutral institution, since these penalties are only paid by those who are actually caught and convicted, and imprisoned.
If you can find me any instance where prosecution of particular crimes creates a revenue windfall for the state I'd love to see it.
Point being, Floridians may be willing to spend the money, but as a purely practical matter, choose not to unless it is likely to actually solve the problem.
Do you disagree with the assessment that building a big ol' wall would offer a lasting solution to the problem it is stated to solve?
Similar tactics have worked in other countries.
Do you see why imposing a solution that actually solves the stated problem might be strictly superior to one that only mitigates the problem for the time being?
That is, if you were offered the option to spend $5 million once to cure cancer, or spend $500,000 per year to treat cancer patients and reduce the death rate, which should you pick?
Explain how else the anti-illegal immigration can get their policies even considered by the side that pays almost no cost for illegal immigration and thus has no incentive to resolve it?
I believe it will mitigate illegal immigration and employment of illegal immigrants to approximately the same extent it mitigates the distribution and consumption of illegal drugs.
Florida arrests approximately 120,000 people per year for drug offenses.
And clearly, drugs still come into Florida, people still use them, and continue to get arrested for them, year after year after year.
Explain why your proposed solution will not be subject to the same outcome. Illegal immigrants continue to come into Florida, people continue to hire them, so the result is just thousands of arrests per year, every year, forever.
You seem to be assuming 1) the wall will not have ongoing costs but will be perfectly effective, and 2) the expense of actually enforcing the law will not decrease after some employers are destroyed and some companies are bankrupted. Those don't like reasonable assumptions to me.
I think legal business owners, small and otherwise, are generally more rational that drug dealers. If the punishment vs payoff curve is correctly designed, they will respond more like rational actors. Do you disagree?
They will not come if they can't find work.
Sure.
I also think it is functionally impossible to "correctly design" a payoff curve.
This is something that is beyond the capabilities of modern political science, despite what experts and pundits may believe. Too many variables, and there is substantial incentive to cheat or otherwise thwart the law.
Politically speaking, the incentive to insert carveouts, exceptions, and other incentives is also massive.
The nice thing about a big, dumb wall is that the engineering aspect is well understood. You just build it.
All I'm saying is that as a proposed solution I think the wall is much more likely to achieve the stated goals, at a lower cost (including ongoing cost) and isn't dependent as much on the 'rational' behavior of employers and immigrants.
Hence, why this solution has been used by many countries to much success.
You can certainly convince me that the tradeoffs or second order effects aren't worth it!
I mean, if you're already arguing that employers will be destroyed and companies bankrupted, you're saying that a substantial economic cost is a good thing?
So are we agreeing that another benefit of a wall is that it doesn't require destroying employers and bankrupting companies to build it?
They will not come if a fifty-foot-tall barrier physically obstructs their route.
Unless the barrier proves trivial to breach or surmount. Or they enter on a legitimate visa and never leave.
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And then our agricultural system falls apart, wohoo
I believe the solution to that was to add a big beautiful door to allow the ones you need to come through.
The big, beautiful door was to be for legal immigrants, who will have been vetted and are not cartel members, who will swear allegiance to the USA. Sounds exactly like “the ones we need”.
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