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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.
Why are the immigrants here? Is it because people will hire them in each locality, or is it because they've been allowed into the country in the first place? If one believes it is the latter, why should one go after the people hiring them, rather than the people allowing them in? If you go after the employers, you're having to fight your own constituents, and no amount of enforcement will solve the basic problem of illegals flooding into the country, plus creating additional problems by impoverishing an underclass you still are stuck living with. Why should anyone do things this way?
Compare to illegal narcotics sales. Last I heard, it was commonly accepted that simply going after street-level dealers and buyers was more or less pointless; the whole strategy we've all settled on is to go after the supply, and the higher up the chain the better. Some level of enforcement against the street-level sellers and buyers is needed to keep a lid on things, but all actual progress occurs when you break up the distribution networks and the bosses who run them.
Why would different logic apply here?
I'd argue your example, shows why fixing the demand is actually the only real solution. If there is demand for narcotics, someone will provide it. If there is demand for illegal low paid labor, someone will find a way to provide that too.
Enforcement cannot solve either problem. You have to fundamentally change the demand (or accept the demand as not that bad and legalize it, but we'll take that off the table for now).
No matter how many suppliers you arrest, there will be more. That applies to suppliers of illegal drugs or illegal workers. I would argue that the only effective solution to fix the demand problem. Going after cartels has notably entirely failed to fix the issue. Smugglers will always find a way. The War on Drugs has cost billions upon billions and I could still buy pretty much anything I want on street corners. The War on Drugs is a failure, a War on Illegal Immigration would fail just as hard.
The demand is why there is an issue at all. That is the thing that must be removed. The problem for drugs is that this basically cannot be done. I think you could do it for immigration, but it would involve heavily clamping down on businesses, particularly farms et al.
The war on drugs is a failure because its being waged on a scale that's way too large using means that are completely ineffective. And that's only if we are assuming that the 'War on Drugs' existed as advertised.
A very simple contradictory example to the frame you're proposing is to look at 'legal' drug manufacturing processes and recognize how easily they can manufacture 'demand'. Case in point being the opioid epidemic. With that understood we can also recognize how easily the US government could end that entire manufacture and distribution process via nothing more than legislation and a few dozen FBI raids.
Opioid based pain killers don't need to exist on the scale they do. The demand wasn't for them specifically just like the demand for any drug isn't drug specific. People wanted pain relief and escapism. People wanted a good time. You can give most people all of that without completely destroying their lives. The path of least resistance towards peoples wants and needs isn't always the best. And I think it would behoove everyone to recognize that and aim to increase the resistance on some paths to prohibit as many people as possible from taking them. That goes for cheap drugs as well as cheap labour.
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