September/October 2023 - 4

EDITOR'S LETTER
Florida's SB 1718
New immigration tests ag employers
T
o its opponents, Florida's Senate Bill 1718 joins Arizona's SB 1070
and Georgia's House Bill 87 as notoriously anti-immigrant. Among
Florida specialty crop growers, SB 1718
is anti-business.
SB 1718, which went into effect July 1, was
preceded by weeks of dire predictions of
ag labor being even harder to come by with
E-Verify mandates for private employers with
25 or more employees. Although it applies only
to new hires, the law specifies employers are
forbidden to employ anyone who they know is
not authorized to work in the U.S., regardless
of when they first worked for the employer.
This applies to employers even if they're
paying labor contractors to supply workers,
and technically not hiring the workers
themselves. The E-Verify mandate isn't
unique to Florida, however, with 22 states requiring at least some
employers in various industries to use E-Verify.
The law is supposed to punish employers who don't use E-Verify to
check documents, but we'll see how that turns out. A CATO Institute
analysis of E-Verify in 2015 found that employer compliance rates in
Arkansas and Arizona, which mandates all new hires must be verified,
were dismal and employers were " widely " ignoring the law. At the time
of the CATO report, some states weren't enforcing E-Verify; only three
businesses in Arizona had been charged with ignoring the law as of 2015,
seven years after the law was passed.
According to some of the Republican lawmakers in Florida who
voted for SB 1718, that's the game plan in Florida as well. A June 7
NPR article quotes Republican Rick Roth, who is trying to allay fears
of migrants leaving the state en masse. Roth, primary owner of Roth
Farms Inc., a vegetable, sugarcane and rice farming operation and
Rays Heritage LCC, a packinghouse and sales operation, told migrants
at a June 5 meeting that SB 1718 is " 100% supposed to scare you " but is
full of loopholes.
" I'm a farmer and the farmers are mad as hell, " Roth said, according
to NPR. " We are losing employees that are already starting to move to
Georgia and other states. "
He later told NPR that SB 1718 is " very dangerous for agriculture " and
although farmers " desperately need more legal workers " the law will
make it worse. Again, Roth voted in favor of the bill.
SB 1718's future is uncertain; a group of civil rights groups are suing
the state on behalf of a farmworkers organization. A similar suit blocked
provisions of Alabama and Georgia's immigration laws in 2012. E-Verify is
likely to remain intact, however, as it has in Georgia and Arizona.
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September/October 2023

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