Going full papers please.
Around 772,000 Florida workers, students, and community members are undocumented. And Governor Ron DeSantis wants to make it a felony for anyone to have them in their home or even give them a ride.
Senate Bill 1718, part of Desantis’s broad repressive legislative agenda this year, targets not just undocumented people but also anyone associated with them. The bill, which is likely to pass the Republican-controlled state legislature, criminalizes anyone who transports an undocumented person “into or within this state.” In other words, anyone—co-worker, friend, neighbor, classmate—giving a simple ride to someone they know or care about who is undocumented would be guilty of a third-degree felony.
The bill also criminalizes anyone who “conceals, harbors, or shields” (or “attempts” to do so) an undocumented person in “any place within this state.” Nearly 4 percent of Floridians are undocumented. The bill text, reading like an edict issued in Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Shadow Children series, foments fear about these hundreds of thousands of people. It isn’t hard to imagine law enforcement agencies conflating a house party or simple afternoon cup of tea with a secret migrant-harboring operation.
DeSantis may end up crashing and burning in the primaries. But we are in a new reality. Before - there were people like Pat Buchanan saying this kind of stuff. But he only ran for president to get a wider platform for his ideas and to try to normalize them.
And now in 2023 - they are normalized.
I wonder if eventually the GOP justices will legislate from the bench and make this a federal reality. Also I can imagine Biden during the debates...
"My opponent wants people to hunt the undocumented for sport. This is grotesque. We are a nation of laws. A permit should be necessary..."
I mean, this time ten years ago, Democrats were favored to retake the state and the biggest point of debate was whether health care reform was working. Today, we're in a knock-down drag-out fight over which country we need to do a full scale invasion of next.
This isn't an immigration thing, strictly speaking. Back when Clinton took California promising to close the border and Bush 43 was courting the hispanic vote with his Work Visas platform, we had just as many white nationalist psychos demanding blood and soil. They were just more evenly split between the parties.
Now we've simply galvenized the opinion into a single caucus while installing a ratchet at the Executive Level that only lets Presidents increase the annual amount of killing.
That is a state in a real Death Spiral. Between DeSantis, bank failures, and the next few hurricane seasons, I genuinely wonder how its going to stave off a hard economic collapse. When that happens, I'd be far more worried about emigration, if I were running the state.