A business-tied advocacy group, the ACLU, and various progressive advocacy groups have launched a lawsuit campaign against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ss popular, wage-boosting curbs on illegal migration.
DeSantis’s law against illegal migration “goes far beyond the federal scheme, penalizing a wide array of conduct that Congress chose not to prohibit [and] impedes the federal immigration scheme by preventing immigrants from entering Florida,” says the lawsuit by the establishment coalition, which includes the ACLU, the progressive-run Farmworker Association of Florida, and the American Immigration Council.
The council is a spinoff of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. In 2021, it merged with the “New American Economy” advocacy group that was created by two pro-migration media billionaires — Rupert Murdoch who owns Fox, and Michael Bloomberg who owns Bloomberg News.
The council’s merged board includes advocates who work closely with companies that profit from the inflow of migrant consumers and workers, and it tries to shift public opinion to shore up the declining public support for migration. It also earns money by importing J-1 white-collar workers for jobs at various companies.
DeSantis’s new law curbs the transport of migrants into Florida and requires many employers to use the federal E-Verify system to exclude illegal migrants from jobs.
The lawsuit is aimed at the transport curbs, saying DeSantis’s law “unconstitutionally criminalizes the act of transporting a broad category of immigrants into Florida.”
Many business groups have denounced DeSantis’s law because it reduces the number of illegals who will work for cheap. For example, the Wall Street Journal reported on July 3:
In downtown Miami, construction cranes are ubiquitous, rising above the fast-growing skyline. At site after site, the story was the same. Workers have fled. Many others are waiting to see what happens.
Outside one construction site, a worker said that he had lost about half his crew. They went to Indiana, he said, where jobs are paying $38 an hour instead of $25, and where they won’t have to look over their shoulders.
The alliance between the cheap-labor business groups and the pro-migration progressives is intended to slow the exit of migrants — regardless of the pocketbook damage to ordinary Americans.
“It is seldom that labor and business are on the same page — but on this one, I think, we have some common ground,” said Jeannie Economos, a manager at the Farmworker Association of Florida, which is the leading plaintiff in the lawsuit.
Correspondingly, DeSantis’s push to expel illegals from Florida is good for ordinary Americans, partly because it reduces the cost of housing and forces U.S. employers to raise wages in Florida.
“Some [employers] have raised wages” for Americans, Economos admitted to Breitbart News.
“Armando Oyola, the owner of Aegis Construction Services, has lost four of roughly 50 workers already due to the bill,” SarasotaMagazine.com reported on June 14:
“A documented worker that’s good will make between $20 to $30 an hour,” he adds. “An undocumented [worker] gets roughly $150 a day for 10-hour days.” But with fewer workers to choose from, Oyola sees raises on the horizon. “Guys who were making $20 are going to want double to compensate for the market,” he says. “Eventually, they’ll get those raises, and it will trickle down to the homebuyer.”
USA Today reported on June 21:
The owner of a Naples construction company, Valdez, who is also from Mexico, stayed home in solidarity with his Hispanic workers who boycotted Florida’s new immigration law.
Since DeSantis signed the immigration bill, Valdez has lost 15 of his best [illegal migrant] workers, who have moved to other states like Illinois and North Carolina.
He used to pay painters $18-$20 an hour. Now, he’s paying $30-$35, which ended up increasing the costs for his work. “I have to adapt,” he said.’
The real-world response matches the predictions of a 2020 report funded by FWD.us, which is an advocacy group for wealthy West Coast investors, including Mark Zuckerberg.
If “existing undocumented workers were to exit the Florida economy in the number anticipated were E-Verify were [sic] to be adopted, the adequate numbers of native workers would not be available at current wage rates,” said the draft report funded by FWD.us.
The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website in early 2021. But copies exist at the other sites.
Most reporters are framing the Florida dispute as a battle for “migrant rights” — not as a pocketbook fight between employers and employees. In large part, this media skew reflects the economic interest of the investors who fund or own U.S. media companies, and their ability to hire compliant reporters.
But some media outlets are following the money.
Under DeSantis’s law, employers will “have to pay higher wages to documented workers or citizen workers than they would to someone who’s here illegally and was happy to work for these lesser wages,” Sean Snaith, the director of the Institute for Economic Forecast at the University of Central Florida, told ClickOrlando.com.
Extraction Migration
The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans because the population replacement allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans and from the growing chaos and poverty of American society.