When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announces this week his intention to seek the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, immigrants will once again be the scapegoat of choice for conservative politicians. This, in their eagerness to feed their extremism and that of their base without offering real solutions to our broken immigration system.
On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump descended the stairs of Trump Tower in New York to make his candidacy official, calling Mexican migrants “criminals” and “rapists.”
It is obvious that the discourse of both Republicans is linked by the same thread that is increasingly strengthened by the conservative forces of the extreme right, and that it is nothing other than the use of racism and xenophobia for merely political-electoral purposes. So much so, that when they are in power they even make it public policy, with a rubric and media protocol involved.
Indeed, now DeSantis is throwing himself into the ring supported by none other than Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter prone to misinformation and conspiracy theories, and with an anti-immigrant law under his arm that goes into effect on July 1, and that already it is raising all sorts of concerns, from its economic impact to humanitarian to civil rights.
The former will be able to be accurately measured as soon as the new regulations come into force, although the news media have already been reporting on the abandonment of Florida fields and construction, especially where the workforce is basically migrants. Discrimination and harassment, on the other hand, will also be a constant, especially by those who have sided with one of the most anti-immigrant laws in the history of the United States.
And while the lead DeSantis had over Trump in favoring Republican voters has faded, the reality remains the same. The two figures who have stood out so far in the electoral path of the Republican Party are proven anti-immigrants. One, Trump, used the presidency and the advice of extremist advisers like Stephen Miller to lead one of the harshest and cruelest crusades against migrants, including separating babies from their mothers, many of whom have never even been reunited.
The other, DeSantis, a pupil of Trump who has fallen from his grace, is another anti-immigrant who has unleashed a culture war in a multicultural state like Florida, poking his nose even in the textbooks that must be assigned in schools, in reproductive rights of women and the rights of the LGBTQ+ community.
In other words, both Trump and DeSantis have stood out as the clearest examples of that deep division between the idea of the United States as an inclusive, multicultural, and tolerant nation, and a racist, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant country. The two have not hesitated to bet on the detachment, both state and national, of the United States as the axis of freedoms, and they have wanted to take it to the prelude to intolerance, as well as other characters who once leaned towards Nazi-fascism. in other latitudes, leading their societies and the world towards a blind alley.
In addition, apart from his corporate war against Disney that is already costing the state millions of dollars, DeSantis set out to repeat in Florida what other red states such as Arizona in 2010 and Alabama in 2011 did, without success, more than a decade ago: try to become the epicenter of the war against undocumented migration.
What Arizona and Alabama immediately learned is that there is a huge gap between rhetoric and reality, and that no matter how much in their myopia they want to make believe that they can get rid of the undocumented with a finger, it is their states that suffer serious consequences. , particularly in the economy.
In Alabama, for example, HB 56 was enacted curiously almost 12 years ago, on June 9, 2011. One of the immediate effects was the departure of undocumented immigrants from jobs they held, especially in agriculture. America’s Voice en Español reported firsthand the despair of farmers seeing their crops rotting due to a lack of labor that then-Republican Governor Robert J. Bentley demonized thanks to a measure largely written by one of the most anti-immigrant figures in the country, Kris Kobach, then Secretary of State for Kansas and current attorney for the same state.
We saw firsthand how the businesses where these migrants bought their food, clothes, cut their hair, or took their cars to be washed or fixed, lost thousands of customers overnight.
We also saw the direct impact on citizen children of undocumented parents. Fearing arrest and deportation, some stopped sending their citizen children to school, or even to the doctor, even if they were sick, raising concern among health sectors.
This is a scenario of terror that is expected to occur again, now in Florida, once again affecting the most vulnerable populations in the country, among which of course are undocumented migrants and their families in the first place, whom this type of of laws are treated with contempt, despite the economic benefit that their labor represents in strengthening the finances of the states where they live and work hard.
Not seeing that now is like falling for that old adage of declining societies: those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it.
In other words, when an anti-immigrant law is enacted, as DeSantis has just done —solely in order to demonstrate to the base of his also anti-immigrant political rival, Trump, that he can be as cruel or more cruel than his leader—, reality does not take long. in giving its historical lessons, the ones that a stubborn and foolish Republican Party seems not to have wanted to learn.