On May 10th of this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law Senate Bill 1718 that makes E-Verify mandatory for employers that have 25 or more workers, provides for harsher penalties for employing the undocumented, enhances sanctions for human smuggling, invalidates ID cards for immigrants provided by other states and mandates a record of every health service to this community among others.
Although Governor DeSantis is using this and other restrictive measures as part of a political platform to back his run for the presidency, the new Florida legislation is typical of many red states and their leadership that see images of immigrants on our southern border as a politically winning issue.
The vicious cycle where state immigration laws are passed, result in the field workers leaving, the crops are not picked and the farmer loses the harvest, a lesson not learned by the political establishment.
It appears that the farm workers involved in this lesson are thrown into a general theme of border security along with the mass of people that want to come to the United States for a variety of reasons.
Back in 2011, the beautiful fields of Chandler Mountain in northern Alabama had a similar issue happen to them. Brian Cash, a farmer that had 125 acres of tomatoes also had a stable seasonal work force of mostly immigrants that came to prepare and harvest his crop every season, that is, until the State of Alabama passed laws similar to those of Florida this year.
The day the Alabama new law was announced, Cash had 64 farm workers in the field. The next day he had only 11 and the day after that, none.
Cash and the other farmers tried to get others to help with the harvest with little results because of the hard work involved. In the end, the tomatoes rotted in the fields and the investment in the crop was lost.
The situation in Florida and in the country stands to become worse. Florida is the starting point for the migrant stream of workers that go north up the coast and into the Midwest to harvest the food that goes on the grocery shelves of America. All of this is supposedly done to make a political point and a campaign issue.
I had an opportunity to see two of the morning information sessions that Mexican President Lopez Obrador holds everyday in Mexico City. In the second of these, an American reporter was allowed to ask questions and began by inquiring as to the President’s immigration policy views.
Lopez Obrador was quick to answer that we should be about ameliorating the causes that make people decide to make the great sacrifice of leaving home and going to a foreign land. Not satisfied, the reporter asked about the great number that are already in Mexico and those on the border and in the United States itself.
President Lopez Obrador talked about human rights and respect for human dignity regardless of whether we accept or reject their application to enter the country. That kind of treatment tends to go away when immigrants are used as pawns to advance an ideology as well as submit to the temptation of seeing them as less than human.
The irony is that we are very short of real workers at a time when immigrants are the best available option for the market. That has been the case since we became a country of immigrants and thrived on their labor and industry.
The views expressed by David Conde are not necessarily the views of La Voz Bilingüe. Comments and responses may be directed to News@lavozcolorado.com.
