It’s two o’clock in the afternoon in the fields of Homestead, a South Florida nursery and orchard. The thermometer reads 34 degrees and a team of four undocumented seasonal workers has been planting beans since dawn. One of them says his name is Wilmer and he is 28 years old. He also relates that they came “on foot” from Guatemala “through the Arizona desert” and live as nomads “from one state to another,” at the mercy of the harvest.
They are among the few workers seen today in the fields of this agricultural area, gateway to the west of the Everglades’ exceptional wetlands and a transit area to the Southern Keys. They’ve never been so empty, and it’s not because of the extreme heat; The reason for this is a new law by Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. Alongside his harassment of abortion rights, his prosecution of transgender people, and the war on the progressive agenda embodied in his elusive pet phrase “woke,” DeSantis has voiced his anti-immigration strong hand in a cover letter to earn nomination as the Republican Party’s nominee in next year’s election. If he gets to the White House, he has promised to secure the border, complete the wall with Mexico and stop “the invasion.” He plans to declare a “national emergency,” militarize the hottest spots of the divide, and end the “asylum fallacy.”
He currently has his lab based in Florida, a state with 772,000 undocumented immigrants, according to calculations by the Institute for Migration Policy (a number that ranges from 10.5 to 12 million statewide). Among other things, Regulation SB-1718 revokes undocumented drivers’ licenses, which is quite a penalty in this part of the country; Requires hospitals that accept Medicaid (the closest thing to Social Security) to inquire about the legal status of patients before providing assistance; makes the transport of immigrants a criminal offense punishable by up to 15 years; It requires employers with more than 25 workers to use an application to certify their workers’ situation and provides a $12 million item to deport those who arrive at the border to other, more permissive states, which it calls “protected areas.”
“The effect was immediately visible. From one day to the next we noticed people migrating to other places,” said Puerto Rican pastor and community leader Benjamín Pérez at the wheel of his black truck in Homestead this Friday. Pérez, who describes himself as a “conservative,” traveled to Washington and Tallahassee during the bill’s drafting to reassure members of both houses of parliament that “a food crisis is a national crisis.” “Who is going to pick the fruit now?” he wonders. “The fields of tomatoes, mangoes, passion fruit, the nurseries… There will be nobody to work them.”
A group of undocumented Guatemalan seasonal workers plant beans in Homestead on Friday.
A walk through the center of this city 50 kilometers from Miami, with a growing population of 90,000 residents, reveals a deeper impact. At the hair salon, appointments fell drastically. The travel agency initially did well, selling many bus tickets to outbound travelers, but it was “a week without a single customer” in the office. And at La Michoacana, an ice cream parlor and social gathering place, “it’s been a month since then,” says Saúl Ávila, the manager.
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In all these places, Pérez repeats the same message with a request to spread it: “On the day that 1718 came into force, we met with the chief of police and other local authorities; They told us that they were not here to ask for papers. So don’t be afraid and don’t stop going to the hospital or reporting hit and run to the officers for fear of being arrested. Raids on immigrants are not your business, they are ICE’s [siglas en inglés de la agencia de inmigración]and they don’t deliver”.
Panic of being arrested
Most find it difficult to believe. “People are panicking,” explains farmer and activist Antonia Catalán in the Redland countryside, where her daughter Gabriela Ibarra and son-in-law run a tree nursery, the most common business in the area, supplying horticultural companies and big stores across the country. Catalan is a reference for undocumented people from tens of kilometers away. She, a Mexican woman who arrived with her nine-month-old daughter at the time of Ronald Reagan’s immigration reform in the 1980s, is not intimidated by the sanctions imposed by the new law. He picks up immigrants in his car when they ask for help organizing, or accompanies them to the hospital when they need help.
To show that fear has taken root in the community, he makes two hands-free calls. The first question was answered by an elderly man who ran an agribusiness that has lost most of its employees in recent weeks to fleeing to other states. “Now we’re only eight, if nothing changes, I’ll have to close forever in August,” says the man and asks that his name not be published. The second is attended by an undocumented woman who has a 12-year-old son who suffers from chronic heart disease. Recently he went to a Miami hospital and they asked him for the US-born boy’s documents. She lost it the day her wallet was stolen, and now she’s afraid to ask for it again for fear of the consequences.
Gabriela Ibarra, sitting next to her mother, whom she refers to as “Mrs. Antonia,” interprets that the law “has created tremendous racism against people like us; Now they look at us badly and think that if we were undocumented immigrants we would get them into trouble.” Ibarra is also involved in activism, in initiatives like Qué calor! (sic), who wants to push through a law obliging employers to give farmers “water, shade and rest” (“we are humans, not slaves,” he says), and is dragging his two daughters into the protests. The little girl, 12-year-old Kathy Camacho, is sad these days after losing several school friends whose parents left Florida under the new law.
Samuel Vílchez Santiago, state director of the American Business Immigration Coalition, says 47% of Florida farm jobs are held by undocumented workers, the sector hardest hit by the new regime. This is already having an impact on “tourism and construction,” an industry that’s booming in crane-filled places like downtown Miami. “We have one of the unemployment rates [2,6%] lowest value in decades; Out of 100 available positions, only 63 find an applicant. This law will not help to improve that, but will exacerbate other problems such as the highest inflation in the country or the housing crisis.”
Albino Huapilla-Perez Jr., a 16-year-old student whose parents pick tomatoes, carries a “We Feed You” tote bag while protesting the new anti-immigration law in Immokalee on July 1. Rebecca Blackwell (AP)
The consequences of this “labor shortage” are unpredictable, according to Andrew Selee, president of the Washington-based bipartisan Migration Policy Institute. “Given that other states are scrambling to attract workers, it seems Florida prefers to scare them. A reform like that of DeSantis would have to be accompanied by a strengthening of the H2-A visa system [que permite el ingreso temporal por unos meses a trabajadores del campo, que después regresan a sus países]but I’m afraid it’s more of a political decision. These mostly have a symbolic dimension, but in this case their economic implications cannot be neglected. It seems to me that she is acting on a calculus and trying to send a message to the electorate across the country. I expect it will be popular with a segment of its Florida constituency, but I don’t think it will be popular with businesspeople who are already suffering from labor shortages,” he says.
The Hispanic Response
There’s no certainty as to how the move has affected DeSantis’ campaign as it heads into the primary, which is not yet at its prime. They separate him by more than 30 points from Donald Trump, the party’s top candidate, and analysts cite some of his most extremist policies on issues like abortion or education to explain why his image in the polls isn’t improving. In last November’s election, in which he was running for re-election as governor, he received 58% Hispanic support. And that had already made anti-immigrant decisions, such as paying public money for a planeload of Venezuelans from one of the Texas border crossings to the Democratic stronghold of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to protest the Joe Biden administration’s policies on the border. (Priest Pérez interprets this Latin support with a proverb: “There is no worse wedge than that of the tree itself”).
Immigration reform, of course, will not weaken support for Colombian Carolina Castillo, who was a Democrat for 28 years and in May became perhaps Florida’s most famous Republican convert. Castillo explained this week that, in his opinion, DeSantis had no choice, “given the historic catastrophe that Biden created at the border, with millions of people entering illegally, not to mention drugs and terrorists.” “I had to prevent that from becoming New York, San Francisco or Philadelphia, crime-ridden cities.” He attributes the migration of immigrants after the law passed to “socialist organizations like the Florida Immigrant Coalition scaring them to leave the country” while the new norm “is not intended for those who have settled in Florida for years, but for those who are newly arriving.” “It’s like sabotage,” he concludes.
Patricia Andrade, at the storage company on Friday, where she takes care of her compatriots in Doral, Florida. Iker Seisdedos Garcia
Patricia Andrade, founder of Raíces Venezolanas in 2016, an organization that helps her recently arrived compatriots seeking asylum, explains that she understands DeSantis “wanted to tank the state so Florida wouldn’t become Texas.” “I hope that the reform will at least help stop the companies that hired irregulars and paid cash to do inhuman work,” he said last Friday in the hallways of one such storage rental company in Doral (better known as Doralzuela, given the growing population of Venezuelans; already 545,000 across the state).
Andrade, who says he’s visited almost all the critical points on the border with Mexico, has rented ten rooms in this building, carefully organized: children’s clothes in one, toys in another, dishes or jewelry a little further away… There, on Fridays, migrants can pick up what they need to start their new lives for free while they wait for the 150 days to pass to get a work permit. It is the first period after the issuance of the paper that allows them to remain in the country and subpoena them to appear before an immigration judge, sometimes years later.
Juan Carlos Calderón, assistant pastor at Centro de Esperanza in Hallandale Beach, was one of more than 1,000 evangelical pastors who signed a letter last month asking the governor not to approve SB-1718. He defines himself as conservative, but is very critical of the norm. He believes it will incite fear and racism. “You don’t solve a national problem with a state law that unbalances the distribution of immigrants across the country,” he claims. “We ask [al gobernador] to introduce at least one exception so that we can work with undocumented people. Imagine if we had to ask parishioners for identification in order to give them Mass. Or that we can’t take care of a recently arrived immigrant after a terrible journey. Mercy must be above the law. where is the love of god
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