Just in time for the Iowa caucuses, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ latest statewide grand jury proposes more attempts by Florida and other states to discourage illegal immigration and punish those who allegedly encourage it.
The 146-page report reads more like a document for a faltering presidential campaign than a serious effort to resolve a system that almost everyone agrees is truly broken and needs fixing.
The report is largely a convenient list of steps DeSantis and the Legislature might initiate before the Jan. 15 Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 23 to make it look like they’re addressing the issue. But it proposes almost nothing that a president or Congress might do to bring about comprehensive, humane, effective nationwide reform that even the grand jury concedes America needs.
It was also a missed opportunity to remind Florida Sen. Marco Rubio of the excellent bipartisan plan he and seven other senators proposed a decade ago, before the Republican Party’s huge anti-immigrant faction forced a retreat.
To the contrary, the grand jury or, more likely the prosecutors advising it, wrote off the possibility of meaningful federal reform.
“The driving forces are largely federal policies,” it said, “and political incentives do not prioritize solving the problem.”
But isolated state actions would only move this major problem from one state to another.
Another clue to the political nature of the document is that it did not indict anyone for anything or even criticize anyone or anything by name. That’s what grand juries are supposed to do, but that could have delayed making the report public, and those caucuses and primaries are getting closer.
For possible indictments, the report recommends convening yet another grand jury to investigate unnamed non-governmental organizations involved with immigration.
Political propaganda, not justice
Its allegation that “some of our fellow state residents” are “almost certainly” abetting immigration crimes is the language of political propaganda, not criminal justice. It falls far short of the legal proof that might be expected from having heard, as it claims, more than 100 witnesses. The phrase “almost certainly” is speculation, not proof of actual crimes.
Moreover, much of the document relies on news reports and other public sources. DeSantis could have appointed an advisory panel to get the same results without misusing the statewide grand jury system.
The Florida Supreme Court’s consent to this fiasco was a disgraceful abuse of the statewide grand jury law and a glaring condescension to partisan politics. Even worse may come of another grand jury the court gave DeSantis at his request last December to look for supposed crimes in the manufacture and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.
Whatever one’s politics, there’s no responsible denying that more immigrants are seeking asylum than can be reasonably managed by too few immigration judges. The federal officials who admit unaccompanied minors have been grossly negligent in following up on what happens to them.
It was the New York Times that reported on migrant children who should have been in school being trafficked to nightly labor, cleaning meat packing plants and other dangerous work.
Modeled after Oklahoma
The only significant new recommendation in the Florida report is to impose a “modest” fee on all wire money transactions from Florida to other countries. The grand jury said it strains credulity to suppose that all of an estimated 17 million annual transfers from Florida are legitimate. Indeed, some appear to be laundered drug profits. But a fee would be another cost of business to drug criminals and would be state-sanctioned exploitation of hard-working people who send money back home.
The proposal is modeled on an Oklahoma law that targets illegal immigrants by allowing state residents to claim the fee as a credit on their state income taxes by using valid Social Security or employer ID numbers which undocumented immigrants don’t have.
The trouble with the Oklahoma model is that with no state income tax, Florida has no mechanism to rebate the proposed fee to anyone. It would need to establish a dedicated bureaucracy — and at what cost, the grand jury didn’t say.
Farming and tourism, two pillars of the Florida economy, are heavily dependent on undocumented workers who are already vulnerable to exploitation because of their illegal status.
There’s a certain logic in the grand jury recommendation that all employers and labor contractors, not just firms with 25 workers or more, should have to comply with a state requirement to verify employment eligibility. Whether the Legislature would dare to impose that on the hiring of household domestic workers, nannies and gardeners is the question.
The problems of illegal immigration and the lack of legal workers won’t be alleviated by building more border barriers or state crackdowns. Immigration sorely needs a comprehensive reform that would include more and better administrators, judges and social workers; a workable and efficient guest worker system that would allow people to come when they’re needed and go home when they need to; and a path to citizenship for the more than 10 million undocumented workers who have become essential to the U.S. economy.
The grand jury report pays passing mention to those issues but fails to address them other than to rebut, and unconvincingly, widespread reports that essential workers are fleeing Florida because of the new state law meant to punish companies and people who employ or assist undocumented migrants.
Making those laws even tougher, as DeSantis’ grand jury urges, is in no sense a road map to a sane, sensible, humane and enforceable immigration policy. But it sure will sound impressive in a speech in a cornfield in Iowa.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at .
