Florida has a very complex relationship with immigration.
On one hand, the Sunshine State is well-known for its abundance of immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. When Gov. Ron DeSantis was reelected by 19 percent in 2022, he received a great deal of Latino support. Florida Republicans have a long history of courting conservative Cuban-American voters, and Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign ran plenty of Spanish-language ads in South Florida.
On the other hand, DeSantis is a supporter of President Trump’s mass deportations — many of which are occurring in Florida.
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Defenders of immigrants’ rights are pointing out that the deportations are causing a lot of Florida businesses to lose hard-working employees. DeSantis, according to The Guardian’s Richard Luscombe, is offering a solution: making it easier to hire more minors. But Luscombe stresses that the Florida governor’s proposal is raising child labor concerns.
At a recent immigration forum in Sarasota, Florida with Trump’s “immigration czar,” Tom Homan, the 46-year-old DeSantis discussed a GOP-sponsored Florida State Senate bill on employment and told attendees, “What’s wrong with expecting our young people to be working part-time now? That’s how it used to be when I was growing up…. Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when teenagers used to work at these resorts? College students should be (doing) all this stuff.”
But Alexis Tsoukalas, senior policy analyst at the Florida Policy Institute (FPI), is worried about teenage workers possibly being exploited.
Luscombe quotes Tsoukalas as saying, “It’s essentially treating teens who have developing bodies and minds like adults, and this will allow employers to schedule them for unlimited hours, overnight and without breaks, and this is during the school year. It’s important to remind people that teens can work. They can get that experience and some extra money if they need it. But there have to be protections in place to protect our most vulnerable, and if we pass this, that’s absolutely not going to happen.”
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Read The Guardian’s full article at this link.
