A newly implemented Florida law is taking a grave toll on the state’s agriculture industry due to the steep penalties it has imposed on farmers who hire illegal immigrants , according to a new report.
Farmers in Florida cannot staff jobs, and if nothing changes, consumers will feel the effects in stores in the coming months and years, according to a CBS News "60 Minutes" report .
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed a sweeping anti-illegal immigration bill into law in May 2023 to rein in the benefits the state has previously bestowed upon illegal immigrants.
The effort was intended to make the state less attractive to immigrants who had illegally entered the country or overstayed a visa than to immigrants on H-2B visas or with legal authority to have entered the country.
Florida had more than 89,000 H-2B visa workers last year, the highest number in any state. However, even with the new law enacted, it still cannot keep up with employers' demands.
The law requires employers with 25 or more workers to verify each new employee against the federal database, E-Verify, to ensure that every employee is legally in the country and permitted to work, invalidates out-of-state driver’s licenses that illegal immigrants have obtained elsewhere, mandates that hospitals that collect Medicaid dollars include a question on patient forms inquiring if the patient is an illegal immigrant, and more.
Under GOP state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia's legislation S.B. 1718, job applicants who use a fake identification card to get a job could face felony charges if caught, and employers will get hit with a $1,000 fine for every day that they do not run potential hires through the E-Verify system.
"We have a broken legal immigration system which is fostering the illegal immigrants coming over the border, so if we get a bunch of states together and we start cracking down on illegal immigrants in our states, maybe we will force the federal government to fix the legal immigration system," Ingoglia told the outlet.
However, multiple business owners in the agriculture industry said the law chased away their workers and made it difficult to hire new ones. According to the Florida Department of Health, roughly 150,000 to 200,000 farm workers pick crops in Florida each year, roughly half of whom are H-2B visa recipients who have legal status to work in the state for the season.
The timing of the bill’s passage and enactment marks a major achievement for DeSantis, who just launched his White House bid and billed the proposal as the nation’s strongest crackdown on illegal immigration of any state.
Rep. Darren Soto (D-FL) warned before the bill's passage last year that business owners visited him in Washington, D.C., and said they were worried because employees were quitting.
“Our restaurateurs have seen many of their workers leave when they came up to visit me just last week. Our hoteliers came to Washington last week and talked about how they’re losing employees,” Soto said, according to the Florida Phoenix. “These are Florida’s top industries: tourism and agriculture in particular. And then the construction industry. This is going to affect affordable housing in a key way, and it will also affect infrastructure.”
Democratic state Rep. Dotie Joseph predicted that the E-Verify mandate will cause food prices to increase because industries, particularly agriculture, will not be able to hire new workers unless they meet federal guidelines.
“Floridians will see higher costs for our groceries due to worker shortages, longer waits at restaurants, struggles to keep employees, less housing options as construction workforces flee Florida, and it will be harder to find people to care for our children and our aging population,” Joseph said during a conference call at the time.
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Florida made national headlines in mid-2022 when the DeSantis administration chartered a plane and flew several dozen immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
But transporting immigrants from the border to Democratic-run cities and states is not new. Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) bused nearly 120,000 migrants to six "sanctuary" cities.
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