The state of Florida, in the southern United States, approved on May 10 a law with harsh measures against irregular immigration, promoted by the Republican governor Ron DeSantis, whose candidacy for the White House in 2024 seems imminent.
The signature of Governor Ron DeSantis to definitively approve the law against irregular immigration is not a surprise, since it was he himself who promoted it: “Nobody You have the right to migrate to this country. No foreigner. We determine as Americans what kind of migration benefits this country. And when we allow migration, it’s not for the benefit of foreigners, but for the benefit of Americans,” DeSantis said.
“He is an anti-immigrant leader”
The text will enter into force on July 1 and contemplates, among other things, forcing hospitals to collect data on the immigration status of their patients, making the transport of people in an irregular immigration situation a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison from another state to Florida, and require companies with more than 25 employees to use E-Verify, a federal system for checking the immigration status of people they want to hire.
“It’s also a huge expense, I think it’s $12 million, to move immigrants to other states. In other words, it is basically forced deportation. This started as a joke last year, when she deported a group of people to Martha’s Vineyard. A horrible joke. And it has become official Florida policy. In that sense, he is an anti-immigrant leader,” José Gabilondo, an expert law professor at the University of Florida, told RFI.
North and south
DeSantis signed the text during an event in Jacksonville, in the northeast of the state, under the slogan “Biden’s border crisis”, the Democratic president whom he accuses of not addressing illegal immigration, responsible according to him for crime.
“Before DeSantis, there have always been two Floridas. To the south you have a more international part, with progressive elements, very Latin, from various countries. And to the north what you have is a state that could be part of Georgia, or the more conventional, white south. And the Florida legislature always tends to favor the northern part,” says Gabilondo.
DeSantis, 44, a rising figure on the American right, has promoted a very conservative agenda in recent months on issues related to education, immigration or the right to abortion.
Goal 2024
“What happens now is that that dynamic becomes a political battleground in terms of the 2024 elections. Aside from the terrible things these laws do, they have a lot of symbolic value because he is implicitly favoring a vision of racial purity, a very primitive nationalism”, emphasizes Gabilondo.
“He truly is a very disciplined man. In other words, Trump was, we said, a clown, he lacked discipline, but DeSantis was not. So far they dispute [para saber] who is going to be the candidate of the Republican Party, but he is one of the most likely”, concludes the specialist.
Some 660,000 foreigners resided in Florida in an irregular situation in 2018, according to the latest estimate published by the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2021.
