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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.
American nativism is sincere but unserious; they genuinely want to get rid of immigrants but for the most part they're unwilling to pay the fiscal or economic costs required to do so.
In that light, DeSantis' stunt makes perfect sense. For Joe Nativist, its a symbolic middle finger to immigrants and the liberals who support them without incurring any real cost.
On the contrary, being serious about it means addressing the actual cause of the problem, which is the border and the federal government's failure to enforce it, and not get diverted into futile, peacemeal enforcement against your own constituents while allowing those responsible to continue perpetuating the problem at zero personal cost.
Your analysis assumes that the base problem is actually illegal immigrants. Reds are coming around to the idea that it's not, and that the problem, fundamentally, is Blues. The problem isn't solvable because blues block and sabotage any attempted solution, because they derive significant advantages from its continuance. If that's an accurate assessment, any tactic that isn't aimed directly at blues is a waste of time.
"Do something about the blues" is even less serious than the notion that there's some cheap, easy solution if only the Democratic Party would stop getting in the way*. These sorts of stunts don't have a prayer of convincing anybody; their only utility is to grandstand to your audience about your willingness to be cruel to immigrants and give the middle finger to the Libs. More broadly, nativists have no real leverage to change anyone's mind.
The base problem is actually that the US is a great deal wealthier than Latin America and so there's enormous incentive to move from Latin America to the US. Restricting the supply of visas simply diverts demand to illicit avenues. So the question is not "do you support or oppose immigration", it is "what are you willing to do and how much are you willing to pay to reduce it?" For American liberals the answer is obviously "nothing". For conservatives the answer so far appears to be "very little". They're happy to pay for symbolic acts and entertain fantasies that Mexico is going to foot the bill, but even with both houses of Congress and a President who ran on an anti-immigration platform, they failed to manifest policy to come anywhere close to funding the necessary enforcement apparatus (what's more, they didn't even try very hard). And that's to say nothing of their lack of willingness to eat the economic costs of cracking down on illegal immigrants.
*I mean, there is a cheap, easy solution, but I doubt it will satisfy nativists.
These are assessments you are free to make and to argue for. Others, myself included, are free to disagree. In particular, if enforcement were actually hard, I would not expect blues to need to lie about it so often; see the "reins" incident, "kids in cages", and so on.
Politics of persuasion went out in 2014 at the very latest. American politics now center on deception and force. Nativists don't need to "change minds"; they need to find ways to enforce their preferences on others, and to deny others the opportunity to return the favor. That's what politics is now, for better or worse.
No. Blue tribe has shown itself willing to expend vast resources to increase illegal immigration, and to sabotage any efforts made to actually enforce the border. And sure, the Republican establishment is worse than useless 90% of the time, still meandering through various shallow grifts or in naïve appeals to a national unity that, if it ever existed, died the death without resurrection some time ago. We reds are working on that, learning to, in the local parlance, "coordinate meanness". "Stunts" like this one are a necessary and good part of that process.
In any case, if your general point is that Illegal Immigration is a fight the nativists are probably going to lose, I think on the main you're correct. There's already dozens of millions here, and their kids are into voting age. Perhaps we can get them on our side, perhaps not. Either way, the conflict with Blues, the culture war itself, is the real deal, and the answer to losing this fight is to escalate elsewhere. The individual battles are mainly useful in how they drive and shape that escalation, how and whether they cohere the tribe into a body willing to commit to the fight.
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