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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.
Actually enforcing these laws is a third rail. Largely because I think it obviously goes way beyond the question of immigration.
What we're really talking about is giving labor laws/labor-related white collar crime laws serious teeth. And I do believe that this is something that's going to be seen as a bridge too far for many people, left and right. The one thing that comes to mind, well there's two things. The first is Wage Theft, which some people say is a huge issue (and I say if it's not a huge issue it's a substantial one). And the second is Fraud/Misrepresentation. That brings me back to the Wells-Fargo scheme as the poster child for corporate malfeasance. I do think in this case investors should have been zero'd out and managers sent to prison. But people say...what about the pensions that have investments about them. And I mean, on one hand I can understand it, but on the other hand lots of people have to live off base governmental support alone. It sucks, but that's life.
But these things are the reason why I strongly believe you'll never see any sort of strong enforcement of these laws.
I'm just going to add in my take on this subject as a whole. This is what conflict between external players and internal players is going to increasingly look like in the future. I.E. people with skin in the game are going to demand that people who don't have skin in the game but take strong stances on things actually have skin in the game as well. They're going to show how the external players react when they become internal players. Now, I think there's a lot of room to criticize the details pretty much whenever this is done. That said, I don't think we shouldn't lose sight of this as well. There is a message here, I think. And note: I personally don't see this as an anti-left thing, I see this more as revealing differences between the up and the down, between the universalists and the hierarchists.
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