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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.
It's not even DeSantis's problem. One thing that's often left out is that the Martha's Vineyard immigrants originated in Texas, not Florida. Florida evidently doesn't have enough of a migrant problem to make it worthwhile to find 50 illegals in Miami for his publicity stunt. If DeSantis, Ducey, and Abbot were actually trying to solve the problem and make some political hay out of the alleged indifference of northern states, they would have said "Hey, our resources for dealing with migrants are stretched to the breaking point and we're on the brink of a crisis. Would it be possible for you to accept some of them so that you can provide assistance?" If New York et al. had said no then the GOP governors would have a point. Now the Democrats can simply say that their anger isn't about the migrants themselves but about the lack of preparation they were given and the cavalier way these people are being treated. Taking families in dire situations and busing them to places that you know aren't prepared for their arrival (and going to the lengths of avoiding busy areas to drop them off on middle-of-nowhere residential streets because they're close to the houses of politicians you don't like) suggests that you're more interested in "owning the libs" than in the people actually involved.
Wait you don’t get to say that these states didn’t asks nicely. They’ve been yelling since Biden was elected to solve the issue. They already did exactly what you said they should do and asks nicely. Now their sending them out of state to escalate. Seems fair. And now they should send millions.
The trouble with this strategy is that it could backfire. For all the press this is getting, I have yet to see it brought up as a campaign issue, at least in Pennsylvania. Dr. Oz doesn't have anything on his website about it except generic Republican "secure the border" stuff. Mastriano has something about how Pennsylvania will stop receiving chartered buses with illegal immigrants, but it's unclear how this would be enforced. I haven't seen any campaign ads specifically about immigration at all, though it's possible I could be missing them. I doubt anyone would send any migrants to PA anyway, at least before the election, because the repercussions are too unpredictable. Same reason why Biden won't do anything until after the election.
But if this continues after the election, Biden has a pretty easy way out of this without making any real concession. He simply tells Abbot and the others that they've made their point and he agrees that Texas, etc. shouldn't bear this burden alone. Then DHS announces a policy of busing illegals throughout the country so that cities will receive them in proportion to their populations. This is a pyrrhic victory for Abbot and Ducey, who now have to explain to fellow GOP governors how they provoked the Biden administration into busing illegals into places like Cleveland, St. Louis, and Oklahoma City. It's especially bad for a hanger-on like DeSantis—who never really had his own crisis to worry about—who now has to deal with the prospect of migrants being bused into places like Jacksonville and Tampa.
And then there's Venezuela. I can't find good numbers, but reports suggest that a large proportion of the migrants are Venezuelan. Due to the frosty state of US–Venezuela relations, Venezuela hasn't been cooperative with returning migrants. Biden could call up the governors in question and ask them for support in negotiating a deal, making it clear that such a deal would probably require eliminating some of the sanctions. If they don't cooperate, it makes them look like what they are calling a crisis is trumped by a peripheral issue like Venezuela sanctions. If they provide support but they have to buck the GOP to do it then they're in a precarious political position. If the whole GOP gets on board then it's a clear win for Biden.
The problem with these kinds of political stunts is that they seem meant to appeal to the kind of person who wouldn't consider voting for the other party anyway. You can argue with me about how effective they would be but unless you're seriously considering voting Democrat Biden could give a shit about how it appears to you politically. Romney got raked over the coals for saying it but he was right when he said that a certain percentage of the country wouldn't vote for him no matter what and another percentage would vote for him no matter what so his goal was to appeal to those who might vote for him but might not. Some may argue that you need to turn out the base, but research suggests that this also motivates the opposing base to vote against you, so it's ultimately a wash. There's an argument to be made that when you're facing a real crisis and those in charge won't listen then you have to break out the nuclear option. The trouble is that this has to be don very carefully. The other side aren't babes in the woods and they have options as well.
The feds bussing illegals in doesn't stop you from bussing them right back out, so it's just everyone wasting money. If Biden wants to campaign on flagrant misspending done strictly to help people break the law, I encourage him -- I believe this would be a wonderful policy and I have nothing but approval for him doing it. Ideally very loudly.
Actually, it does. Texas has been keen to emphasize that the relocations are entirely voluntary. Forcible relocation would be a pretty big escalation that could expose state and local governments to legal consequences given that they're essentially kidnapping people.
Just as Texas and Arizona are already doing.
If Biden wants to campaign on abetting illegal immigration and using federal resources to traffic them around the country instead of out of it, again, I cannot possibly state how firmly I support this chain of events. I agree with you completely, it should all happen ASAP.
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