🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
Once again, Ron DeSantis and the Florida legislature lead the way in addressing a major challenge in Joe Biden's America: illegal immigration. On July 1, a new state law, SB 1718, will go into effect, that punishes organizations and individuals who facilitate and enable illegal immigration, including employers, smugglers, NGOs, and hospitals—while still escorting illegal immigrants to sanctuary zones across the country.
Rather than focus on the immigrants themselves—who are more a symptom than a cause of bad policy—SB 1718 will target the root of the problem: employers addicted to cheap labor and nonprofits needing to justify their existence by finding more victims.
Naturally, these two groups have protested the new law since its passage early last month. Employers have complained that Florida already has low unemployment and that businesses will lose many of their workers. Evidently, more than a few of them depend on illegal immigrant labor. According to the Florida Policy institute, some industries would "lose 10 percent of their workforce and the wages they contribute along with them," amounting to a $12.6 billion loss for the state's GDP. Last week, a Republican state representative who voted for the law said he regretted his vote, "lamenting the potential loss of farm laborers for his constituents just days after voting for it."
To reinforce this argument, social media users have made videos showing abandoned construction sites and farms. Narrators of the videos say these quiet job sites are the result of the passage of SB 1718 and the threat of their bosses using E-Verify. Unsurprisingly, the claims in these videos have not been officially corroborated.
While such objections may appeal to libertarian-minded conservatives, leftist open-border activists predictably accuse the law of being xenophobic and racist. For them, all immigration, "documented" or not, is a sacred right that American citizens must support and subsidize. Whether an immigrant has patiently waited years to go through the process of being approved for a visa or joins a caravan led by coyotes who use random children as human passports, he is entitled to the same protections and privileges. And if anyone dares to notice the difference between the two and take action against illegal trafficking, it must be for bigoted reasons.
Thus far, leftist activists have resorted to fruitless boycotts, strikes, and awareness campaigns to make their case. Journalists have posted videos of truckers discouraging fellow Latinos from entering Florida. A TikTok influencer from California even tried to organize a nationwide boycott of Florida products. The utter lack of news coverage of this event after the fact, however, shows just how ineffective it was at changing the hearts and minds of normal Floridians.
More than anything, the lackluster response to SB 1718 suggests that times have changed. The old arguments that importing impoverished low-skilled laborers is somehow morally just and good for business simply don't hold up anymore. If employers in manufacturing or agriculture struggle to find enough workers, they can raise their wages. If some activists think U.S. immigration should be based on Emma Lazarus's poem "The New Colossus," and bring in all the world's "huddled masses yearning to breathe free," then they should propose practical policies that would somehow meet this utopian criteria.
For too long, American taxpayers have shouldered the burden of illegal immigration. As policy scholar Michael Lind argues, a massive influx of unskilled workers depresses wages and necessitates the expansion of welfare programs to support a growing class of underpaid laborers. As he puts it, this arrangement "privatizes the benefits of cheap labor and socializes the costs."
Moreover, enabling illegal immigration increases poverty and associated decay in American cities. Not only does it allow businesses to avoid investing in "labor-saving technology," which would help workers become more productive, it "increase[s] the number of low-rent apartments, discount stores, coin-operated laundries...payday lenders" and other salient marks of today's slums. True, this activity technically raises GDP, but it ultimately lowers the standard of living for the majority of Americans.
Quite understandably, most Americans (including legal immigrants) want to curb illegal immigration. They would prefer to have higher wages, lower taxes, and fewer slums, even if it marginally raises the cost of certain products. These preferences—not racism—are what lie at the heart of their concerns about illegal immigration.
For their part, Democratic and Republican politicians have mostly performed the bidding of their donors by parroting weak arguments that only polarize Americans against one another. Consequently, while conservatives and progressives fight over securing the border and enforcing immigration laws, greedy employers, drug cartels, and human traffickers continue to profit off vulnerable human beings looking for a better life.
Although many in the media and online predict doom for Florida's new law, there's more reason to think that it will increase the prosperity and safety of working- and middle-class Floridians. Hopefully, other Republican state lawmakers will take note. The GOP is a party of the working class now, and tackling illegal immigration is merely the first of many steps to restore power and dignity to American worker and reverse the general decline of American democracy.
Auguste Meyrat is a high school English teacher in North Texas. He is the founding editor of The Everyman, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and a regular contributor to The American Mind, Crisis Magazine, the American Conservative,and the Acton Institute.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
