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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.
I'm a moderate DeSantis fan who has since 2016 believed something along the line of "Trumpism deserves a better Trump". Trump, to me, seems like an incompetent narcissist who unintentionally ruptured America's bipartisan foreign policy consensus. He put ideas on the ballot that have a good deal of popular support, but because of campaign finance and the pecularities of the Democrat/Republican voting coalitions, never got any representation. Anti-interventionism, protectionism, immigration control, and nativism, to name a few.
Trump was able to do this with the power of the meme. CNN put him on TV over and over again because he was entertaining and ostensibly too much of a moron to be dangerous. But once Americans were exposed to this meme, it caused a preference cascade that took the establishment completely by surprise.
I think it's fine that DeSantis isn't solving the root of the problem. He is releasing a meme into the news cycle, which exposes (or manufactures?) the image of coastal elites who hang "No human is illegal" signs in their million dollar summer homes, but then call the national guard to deport fifty illegals who show up. Memes like this are incredibly powerful, and in my opinion, are the only way my side could possibly win.
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That's really interesting. I don't know very much about the economy at all, but I feel like my instinct is somewhat opposite. The fact that we exported all of the manufacturing to China drastically drove down prices, probably because Chinese people were willing to work for a lot less money. This has enabled an age of technological marvels that non-blue collar workers have been able to take advantage of and bring in tons of money.
I can see where you're coming from, however, that large swaths of the country are in despair. I wonder if there's a better solution, though, instead of trying to turn back time. As noted above, I feel like the exporting of manufacturing was probably a good thing and advanced technology. I would think that a good strategy could involve both of the following:
Major educational reach out to the middle of the country to get them interested at a young age in advancing and profitable scientific fields. This could take the form of either public sector (more public school funding for STEM classes or something) or even private sector funding (big tech companies getting involved in outreach both for publicity and to plant seeds which will become the next generation of great minds that come to work for them)
Greater focus on creating automation and tooling that blue collar workers could use. I'm not fully sure what this would be, but maybe there would be a way to take processes that are not fully automate-able but also can't be easily exported to China, due to language differences, geographic boundaries, location-specific need, or even cultural differences, and create tooling to allow American blue collar workers to do it.
I know the 2nd point is vague, but I feel like as technology progresses, we're not optimally progressing technology and optimally allocating the economy if we just insist that we need to make jobs for people. I feel that jobs should be created based on a need for product, services, and technology advancement, not just a need for someone to have a salary.
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