Florida’s Ron DeSantis Makes E-Verify Mandatory for Public Employers

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed a statewide mandatory E-Verify law this week that will ban public employers from hiring illegal aliens over American citizens and legal immigrants.

DeSantis had lobbied since November 2019 for the state House and Senate to pass mandatory E-Verify for all employers — public and private — with no exemptions for industries. Florida Republican lawmakers, though, quickly gutted the plan, giving exemptions to the tourism and agriculture industries.

Eventually, the legislation was watered down to only apply to public employers, being state agencies and private businesses that are contracted to do work for those agents. The law, which went into effect this week, prevents illegal aliens from being hired by those employers over Americans.

DeSantis’s original mandatory E-Verify plan, applying to all employers, had huge support across racial, class, and party lines.

A St. Pete Polls survey in February revealed that about 60 percent of Florida voters supported the policy, including more than 56 percent of Hispanic Americans, 77 percent of Republicans, and 60 percent of swing voters.

In states that have implemented mandatory E-Verify, the program has resulted in fewer jobless Americans, the most recent study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has found.

Mass immigration has direct impacts on the nation’s working and middle class, who are forced to compete for U.S. jobs with millions of newly arrived illegal and legal immigrants every year. Annually, the current immigration system gives green cards to about 1.2 million mostly low-skilled foreign nationals and work visas to another 1.4 million foreign nationals.

Though the big business lobby and corporate interests claim that the labor pool must be expanded to provide them with a never-ending flow of foreign workers, more than 35.1 million Americans today remain unemployed, underemployed, or out of the labor force, though all want full-time employment.

In a state like Florida, where immigrants make up about 25.4 percent of the labor force, American workers have their weekly wages reduced by perhaps 12.5 percent.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.