Newspaper Media Framing of the Immigrant Workforce in the Context of Florida’s 2023 Immigration Law

Abstract

Background

In 2023, Florida Senate Bill (SB) 1718 was covered by national newspapers as the issue of immigration enforcement was a key issue during the presidential campaign. Examining SB 1718 through the lens of crimmigration, or how immigration law and criminal matters increasingly converge and overlap, reveals that such laws aim to criminalize undocumented immigrants. Media framing shapes public perceptions about immigrants’ perceived otherness, and these perceptions are leveraged by some politicians to strategically use the issue of immigration as a talking point or political campaign issue.

Methods

A ProQuest newspaper article search was used to identify articles with the search terms, “Florida,” “immigration,” and “law” and the date range of June 1 to August 16, 2023. A text-driven newspaper analysis of word frequencies and a thematic analysis of media framing was used to identify arguments supporting or opposing the law. The thematic analysis used a deductive approach to coding based on a prior codebook.

Results

The article search generated 36 relevant newspaper articles relevant to the Florida immigration law. The law spurred opposition from businesses in the agriculture, construction, and tourism sectors for exacerbating an already tight labor market. Political supporters of the law argued that it protected borders, created a legal workforce, and saved taxpayer money.

Conclusion

This research identifies media argument framings and compares these arguments with media coverage over a decade ago when similar laws were passed in Arizona and Georgia to critically examine the evolution of these types of laws through the lens of crimmigration.

Introduction

In the United States (US), undocumented immigration continues to be a highly politicized social issue. In recent years, several states with Republican-controlled legislatures, especially those in the US South, have passed laws focused on immigration enforcement. In 2023, Florida passed Senate Bill (SB) 1718, a law designed to increase penalties for undocumented immigrant workers and companies that hire them.

Florida is home to over 900,000 undocumented immigrants (Pew Research Center 2023), most of whom are from Mexico, Central or South America, or the Caribbean (Migration Policy Institute 2019). This population represents a significant proportion of all workers in the state’s farming, construction, hospitality, and child care industries, comprising as much as 37% of all agricultural workers and 23% of all construction workers (Pillai and Artiga 2023). In passing SB 1718, Republicans in the Florida legislature appealed to conservative voters by signaling their dissatisfaction with federal immigration policy under the former Biden administration, stoked fears about a porous US-Mexico border, and communicated that undocumented workers are not welcome residents in Florida.

The year 2023 was not the first time US states with Republican legislatures passed aggressive immigration enforcement laws. Nearly a decade earlier, states such as Georgia and Arizona also passed immigration enforcement laws, which were met with legal challenges. In this article, we consider if and how social and political contexts informing state-specific immigration enforcement legislation changed between 2012 and 2023. To do this, we conducted a content analysis of newspaper articles in 2023 and compared the findings to those from a similar study we conducted in 2012 (Luque, et al. 2013). We examined how the newspaper media discussed SB 1718 and examined whether media narratives changed since the previous wave of immigration laws passed over a decade ago. Examining SB 1718 through the lens of crimmigration, or how immigration law and criminal matters increasingly converge and overlap (Stumpf 2006), we argue that political leaders, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, championed crimmigration laws like SB 1718 even though they potentially harm their states and constituencies because they are politically expedient—particularly for politicians with ambitions for higher office.

Background

SB 1718 and Immigrant Workers in Florida

Florida is the third most populous US state and in recent years has garnered a national reputation as a leading state for political conservativism. This reputation was largely earned due to talking points advanced by Governor Ronald DeSantis, who has branded the state as a place where “woke politics go to die” (Montenaro 2023). In 2023, the Florida state legislature held a Republican super majority that DeSantis held significant political sway over. As part of his 2024 candidacy for US President, DeSantis made immigration matters part of his overall posturing to conservative voters in Florida and nationally (Sargent 2023). As such, DeSantis championed Florida SB 1718, which went into effect on July 1, 2023.

A major provision of SB 1718 stipulated that knowingly transporting an undocumented person across state lines was punishable with a third-degree felony. In addition, the law requires that private employers with 25 or more employees must use the E-Verify system for any new employees, and noncompliance carries a potential daily fine of $1,000 and can lead to revocation of the employer’s license to operate. Other provisions of the law included a third-degree felony for using false identification documents for employment purposes, prohibition of municipal identification cards, and stipulations on the unlawful use of certain out-of-state driver’s licenses. Further, the law requires hospitals that accept Medicaid to ask patients if they are US citizens on intake forms to estimate the cost of providing uncompensated care to undocumented immigrants. In addition, the Unauthorized Alien Transport Program was given an appropriation of $12 million to transport undocumented immigrants.

Following SB 1718’s passage, there were several arrests in two West Central Florida counties and numerous concerns about SB 1718 leading to racial profiling. The first arrest was on August 7, 2023 when a Mexican national was charged with a third-degree felony for transporting two other undocumented workers under the law’s provisions about transporting immigrants (Ortiz Blanes and Klas 2023). The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Americans for Immigrant Justice, and the American Immigration Council sued the state over the transportation provision on August 8, 2023, and this section of the law was temporarily blocked. Included in the lawsuit was a sworn statement of a 31-year-old married undocumented Mexican woman with three US citizen children and who usually traveled to Georgia and Tennessee to work in the summers (Ortiz Blanes 2023). However, the family decided that they would not travel outside of Florida in summer 2023. At the time of this writing, the state appealed the federal court decision, and the case is still pending; however, questions remain regarding how the law might affect seasonal migrant workers who leave Florida and decide to never return, consequently causing potentially damaging agricultural workforce shortages.

As one of the largest economic sectors in the state, agriculture is an important element of Florida’s overall stability. To fill agricultural jobs, Florida labor contractors regularly rely on the H-2A temporary labor certification program (seasonal agriculture) to provide a steady stream of workers. Together with California, Florida has the highest percentage of H-2A jobs in the agriculture sector (32,714 positions) of all US states, according to 2023 data (U.S. Department of Labor 2023). The H-2A program requires visas, which are costly to sponsor, and the program has been criticized for exploiting the agricultural labor workforce according to farmworkers and advocates. As such, many employers rely on undocumented immigrant labor to pick the state’s strawberries, citrus, bell peppers, tomatoes, and other agricultural products shipped across the US.

Invoking Crisis Narratives Despite the Harms of State Immigration Laws

The provisions of SB 1718 that are currently under challenge are not entirely new. A similar law passed in Arizona in 2010 that authorized local police to check immigration status of drivers, which eventually led to the recall of the bill’s sponsor and a Supreme Court challenge (Noyes 2023). Further, in 2011 Georgia passed an omnibus immigration bill that had similar transportation provisions, and was estimated to have caused over $140 million in agricultural losses due to 11,000 unfilled jobs (Forbes 2012). Further, the Georgia law had sweeping negative impacts on the overall medical safety net system in Georgia and had hidden impacts on health care providers and their professional practices (Kline 2019).

While legislators supporting laws such as SB 1718 argue that the policies would protect undocumented workers from exploitative labor practices, anthropological scholarship demonstrates immigration enforcement laws may lead to immigrants’ “super-exploitation” by amplifying undocumented workers’ vulnerability because they fear employers will report them to immigration authorities if they raise concerns about work conditions (Gomberg-Munoz and Nussbaum-Barberena 2011). Immigration enforcement laws like Florida SB 1718, therefore, perpetuate worker disempowerment by structuring a labor system in which workers endure subpar conditions and are afraid to question their employer’s labor practices. More than being a tool for economic exploitation, laws like SB 1718 also perpetuate racialized forms of immigrants’ otherness and conflate unauthorized immigration status with criminal deviance (Menjívar 2021). Such policy can potentially shape public perceptions about immigrants’ perceived otherness, and these perceptions may serve to advance some politicians’ ambitions though strategically using immigrants in the media as a talking point or political campaign issue.

Immigration matters have significant potential to sway public voter opinion. Colbern et al. (2024) argues that the media framing of immigration as a crisis, or “crisis framing” by both major political parties in the US sways public opinion, affects voting behavior, and influences public policy. They note that both political parties invoke a migration crisis framing in different ways and the only counter-frames are offered by immigrant rights organizations featured in the media (Colbern, et al. 2024). In analyses of media coverage of immigration politics, Fryberg et al. (2012) show how media frames of immigrants reflect location and political ideology, potentially biasing public opinion and influencing voting behavior. More recently, analysis of media coverage in the first Trump administration demonstrated the negative framing of sanctuary cities with crime and lawlessness (Alamillo, et al. 2019). In other words, media reporting can shape public opinion and political actions, and consequently some politicians may want to exploit such connections.

Methods

To examine how the media reported SB 1718, two article co-authors conducted a text-driven newspaper content analysis of word frequencies and a thematic analysis of media framing (Krippendorff 2005). The search dates ranged from June 1 to August 16, 2023. The reason for choosing this period was based on the increased volume of media coverage one month before the law went into effect and one month and a half after the law went into effect, since the law officially went into effect on July 1, 2023. The search terms included were a Boolean search of “Florida” AND “immigration” AND “law.” The databases used for the search were ProQuest – US Major Dailies (114 Results Newspapers, and 105 Results Websites) and ProQuest – Tallahassee Democrat (34 Results). The coding procedures consisted of coding the “article slant” of editorials (either positive or negative slant toward the bill) and conducting a thematic analysis (arguments for or against the bill) based on a prior content analysis of newspaper articles examining the 2011 Georgia immigration law (Luque, et al. 2013). This iterative codebook development was supplemented by an initial codebook from that previous study using MAXQDA 2020, a qualitative software (Marburg, Germany). Additional codes were added following careful reading of the newspaper articles. The following procedures were also used in MAXQDA. First, word frequencies were calculated, and the software dictionary was used to eliminate common prepositions and articles. Next, the authors used auto coding to create codes for each of the most common keywords identified. This step was followed by using the MAXQDA code relations browser to examine code co-occurrence. This allowed the matrix file to be exported to UCINET 6.0 to analyze the co-occurrence of words at the paragraph level using multi-dimensional scaling (MDS). The MDS output produces coordinates which can be plotted two-dimensionally to examine how closely words are found together across all the newspaper articles based on a correlation matrix. This procedure produces word clusters.

In MAXQDA, the codebook consisted of two parent thematic codes: codes supporting the law and codes opposing the law from our previous study (Luque, et al. 2013). The parent code of codes supporting the law included six codes and the parent code of codes opposing the law included 20 codes. We added the code Having a Legal Workforce to the codebook for codes supporting the law since this was not a code used in the analysis of the previous Georgia bill. The codes Right to Medical Care and Driver’s Licenses were not codes used in the analysis of the Georgia bill because these were provisions specific to the Florida bill. In addition, a few other codes were created to capture the content of the arguments against the Florida bill including Construction Job Losses, Immigration Status Challenges, Racism and Discrimination, and Waste of Taxpayer Dollars - referring to the projected costs to the state of Florida in defending the law in court as well as the fact that there were other fiscal priorities deserving attention such as the rising cost of home insurance.

The first author (JL) coded all the articles with the thematic codes. Next, the second coder/third author (OM) reviewed all the coded segments of the newspaper articles using the same codebook and reviewed the first author’s codes. The second coder confirmed that each code was coded correctly by the first coder, and in cases where there were questions, the two coders met to agree on the correct coding of the text segment as well as if additional codes were necessary. Therefore, using this method was our reliability check. Next the two coders reviewed all the coded segments to change or adjust the coded segments as necessary. The coders then compared the coded segments in the case of any disagreement or questions to produce the final file for thematic analysis and to generate the tables of coded segments. The coders also worked on refining the codebook to ensure that the codebook captured the important argument codes in the articles.

Results

Content Analysis

Figure 1 shows the results of the lexical search for the 20 most common words – excluding the stop list of articles, prepositions and pronouns – in the selected newspaper articles using the search terms: “Florida immigration law.” Common words in addition to the three search terms included: “DeSantis,” “immigration,” “border,” “immigrants,” “migrants,” “workers,” “undocumented,” and “construction.” Figure 2 maps the proximity of these 20 words in sections of the selected newspaper articles. The words in the middle of the figure were frequently found close together in sections of text and included “Florida,” “immigration,” “law,” “DeSantis,” “immigration,” “immigrants,” “undocumented” and “people.” Because of the centrality of DeSantis among the words, newspaper articles about the Florida bill frequently mentioned DeSantis because he launched his presidential campaign on a platform of strict immigration enforcement. The word “border” frequently occurred close to the name “Trump,” and were more in the periphery of the figure, so the articles would discuss the Florida bill, and later make some reference to the importance of the issue of the border for the Trump campaign. The words “construction” and “workers” were frequently found close together as indicative of a sector of the economy that would be impacted by the bill.

Figure 1.

Word Frequencies of Lexical Codes in Newspaper Articles

Figure 2.

Multi-dimensional scaling representation of word frequencies of newspaper article sample

Thematic Analysis

There was a total of 36 newspaper articles that were relevant to the Florida immigration law published in the following newspapers: Chicago Tribune (1); Los Angeles Times (4); New York Times (5); Tallahassee Democrat (18); Wall Street Journal (4); and Washington Post (4). In the overall sample of newspaper articles, there were 25 news articles and 11 opinion editorials. Of the 11 editorials, two were supporting the law (both written by the same Governor DeSantis podcast host and published in the Wall Street Journal), and nine were opposing the law. Table 1 lists the code names and frequency of coded segments for the overall sample. There was a total number of 90 coded segments under the parent code for supporting the law compared to 319 coded segments under the parent code for opposing the law. The following sections will present the main codes under each of the opposite themes and summarize relevant material presented in the articles.

Table 1:

Codes Supporting and Opposing the Law with Coding Frequencies

Code Categories and Code Names	Frequency
Codes Supporting the Law
Cost to Taxpayers	6
Having a Legal Workforce	23
Living in the US Illegally	11
Need for Federal Immigration Reform	32
Protect Our Borders	15
Protect Workers from Abuse	3
Total Code Frequencies for Supporting	90
Codes Opposing the Law
Agricultural Job Losses	21
Burden on Businesses	38
Community Support of Immigrants	10
Construction Job Losses	29
Drivers Licenses Issues	27
Effect on International Relations	3
Groups Opposing the Law	32
Guest Worker Program H-2A	8
Human Rights Issues	19
Immigration Status Challenges	6
Importance of Agricultural Industry	8
Judges Blocking Part of the Law	4
Lawsuits and the US Constitution	13
Negative Effects on Tourism Industry	14
Racism and Discrimination	15
Right to Medical Care	30
Rights to Education	2
Threat to Families	29
Underreporting of Crimes	1
Waste of Taxpayer Dollars	10
Total Code Frequencies for Opposing	319

Coded Segments Supporting the Law

Many arguments supporting Florida SB 1718 should be interpreted in the context of Governor DeSantis running a political campaign for President of the United States. The political rhetoric of the current Republican party takes the lead from former President Donald Trump who emphasized that he had very strong border policies with Mexico and focused on a wall-building effort at the US-Mexico border. The codes in the newspaper articles with the most coded segments supporting the Florida immigration law were found with the codes: Need for Federal Immigration Reform, Having a Legal Workforce, and Protect Our Borders.

Need for Federal Immigration Reform.

Some of the articles focused on DeSantis’ immigration policies that he was espousing on the presidential campaign trail. For example, DeSantis emphasized he would empower state and local officials to enforce immigration laws and deport people, combat the Mexican drug cartels, use military force at the border, withhold federal grants to municipalities that declare themselves sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants, and end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants. One of the articles in the New York Times pointed out however that detaining all migrants who crossed the border without authorization would demand the creation of a new prison system for this purpose. Some of the DeSantis national policy proposals were countered by objective reporting that birthright citizenship is detailed in the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. When DeSantis signed SB 1718 into law he attacked the immigration policies of President Joseph Biden, and DeSantis was quoted as saying, “We have to stop this nonsense, this is not good for our country, and this is no way to run a government” (Goñi-Lessan and Kennedy 2023). Indeed, DeSantis has long made immigration a key campaign issue, including when he first ran for Governor of Florida when he featured a television ad of playing with his son constructing a toy brick US-Mexico border wall.

Having a Legal Workforce

The main argument supporting the law was the claim that having a legal workforce in the state of Florida was a better policy moving forward than relying on unauthorized workers. In addition, there was the economic argument that it is not possible to build a strong economy based on an unauthorized workforce. In a New York Times article, Randy Fine, a state representative and DeSantis ally, said “no business should be dependent on illegal immigration and that the state shouldn’t have to shoulder the cost of providing health care and education for unauthorized immigrants” (Noyes 2023). Another argument in favor of the law claims that the agriculture, construction, and tourism industries in the state have unfairly profited from the use of immigrant labor and the law is an attempt to fix that problem. One caveat to the law that was highlighted by lawmakers feeling pushback from businesses after the bill was passed was the fact that for those workers who already had jobs, they would not need to worry about the new law since E-Verify was only for new hires.

Protect Our Borders

The articles focused on border issues were largely directed to media coverage of DeSantis on the presidential campaign trail. DeSantis advocated the use of lethal force against border crossers who were carrying drugs for example. In a show of force, in May 2023 DeSantis sent over 1,000 Florida law enforcement members and national guard troops to the Texas-Mexico border. While touting the new immigration bill, DeSantis highlighted the fact his administration cracked down on migrant vessel landings using state resources in support of federal efforts to detain Haitian and Cuban nationals.

Coded Segments Opposing the Law

The codes opposing the laws covered groups opposing the law in the form of protests and work stoppages, groups challenging the laws on constitutional grounds, and opposition from industry groups in the areas most affected which included agriculture, construction, and tourism. There was also community opposition because of the expected impact on immigrant families in terms of not having any form of identification or driver’s licenses, as well as fear of discrimination in healthcare and work settings. The codes in the newspaper articles with the most coded segments supporting the Florida immigration law were identified under the codes: Burden on Businesses, Groups Opposing the Law, Right to Medical Care, Construction Job Losses, Threat to Families, Driver’s Licenses, and Agricultural Job Losses.

Burden on Businesses

A Washington Post article described the immigration law as “draconian” and stated that the aftermath was leading to migrants leaving the state, causing panic for businesses relying on this labor force and causing many Republican lawmakers to justify the passage of the law as a “scare tactic” and purely political move with lax enforcement mechanisms that should not worry business owners (Sargent 2023). However, there were multiple anecdotes that the pending passage of the law was already leading to immigrant workers leaving the state. Another Washington Post article pointed out that one-quarter of Florida’s workforce are immigrants and that businesses were concerned about the scapegoating of immigrants for political reasons and the effect the law would have on their workforce (Rampell 2023). Since the law invalidated some out-of-state driver’s licenses, immigrants with these licenses were reportedly leaving Florida. A large construction company said they had lost a substantial amount of their hourly workers due to the new law. Another key consideration was the low unemployment rate of under 3% and the ongoing post-pandemic labor shortage in many low-wage business sectors, so business owners explained the new law only made the problem worse. There was fear of economic losses in two large business sectors. For agriculture, there was fear among business owners that crops would be unpicked and in construction, that jobs would be unfilled causing building delays.

Groups Opposing the Law

In addition to business owners, many other groups joined in opposing the law. The Florida Fellowship of Hispanic Councils and Evangelical Institutions, a network of over 2,500 churches, lobbied against the bill (Sacchetti 2023). A pastor in a rural farming community in central Florida stated that their church lost over 95% of their congregation in recent months and one of the bill’s provisions – which was removed by amendment – would have made it a crime to transport any undocumented immigrants in a vehicle. This would cause a major problem for a common congregational activity to provide rides to church. Across Florida, there were demonstrations against the bill, primarily in rural agricultural communities, but also in major cities in partnership with the Farmworker Association of Florida, immigrant rights groups, and Latino organizations. On June 1, 2023 there was a statewide protest with the theme “A Day without Immigrants” where many businesses were shuttered in protest of the bill and urging the U.S. Congress to take legislative action (Berman, et al. 2023). In July 2023, the Florida Farmworker Association backed by the ACLU and other national groups sued the state over the law on the legal grounds that the state overstepped into immigration law which is the purview of the federal government under the US Constitution. An editorial written by a representative of ACLU Florida observed, “anti-immigrant policies aren’t new in Florida. For years, local policies and entanglements with federal immigration enforcement have targeted immigrants, or those perceived to be immigrants, and have led to detention and family separation” (Caldera 2023).

Right to Medical Care

The context of these coding segments was the provision of SB 1718 that Medicaid-funded hospitals must ask patients their immigration status on medical intake forms and report the cost of treating undocumented immigrants to the state. In addition, the law requires hospitals to collect information and send a quarterly report to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) on health care costs. Immigrant advocacy groups such as the Florida Immigrant Coalition in Florida argued that this provision would hurt immigrants’ health status as they would be hesitant to engage with healthcare because of the fear of not answering such questions or of being reported to law enforcement. Reportedly, one provider cancelled an appointment with presumedly undocumented patients because of confusion about the law (Rampell 2023). In one article, a hospital spokesperson explained that the law is about data enforcement and that hospitals cannot discriminate about who receives health care and that patients do not have to answer the question on the form (Goñi-Lessan 2023a). One hospital system reported they included a disclaimer that the answers to immigration related questions did not require patients to produce any documents or papers to verify the question answers (Goñi-Lessan 2023b).

Construction Job Losses

Under the construction job losses code there were several articles which discussed construction project delays because of workers leaving Florida for other states. On one job site in Miami, construction workers reportedly left for Indiana where the hourly wage was $38 per hour instead of $25 per hour, and they would not have to worry about the threat of a workplace raid. According to several articles, there were estimates of losing one-quarter to one-half of the construction workforce. The results of these job losses included not only project delays but also increased costs because of the need to pay more for a shrinking workforce such as roofers, masons, and painters, as well as increased housing construction costs overall (Noyes 2023). The common theme was the ongoing labor shortage in construction, and the new law was making a bad situation worse for the industry. These articles emphasized existing research in Central Florida underscoring how immigration enforcement policy can have a chilling effect on construction workers (Kline 2021). To make up for worker shortfalls from the domestic workforce, the industry uses the H-2B visa program, but this program had a limited number of positions that could not fill the void.

Threat to Families

Sometimes lost in the discussion of state immigration laws is the fact that legislation affects real people’s lives. Many of the articles reported on interviews with immigrants and how the law had affected them and their families. Some families are “mixed status,” meaning some family members may have legal status in the US and others do not. Reporting indicated that mixed status families were leaving Florida because they feared the risk for some members of their household. In one case a nursery worker who had lived and worked in Miami for over a decade moved to North Carolina so his wife could access health care for her diabetes and because of his fear of being deported under the new law (Acosta 2023). Even many asylum seekers with temporary legal status, some of whom had come from Venezuela, reported they would be leaving Florida for other states so they can more quickly receive work permits (Castillo 2023). One Mexican immigrant family from the Florida Panhandle that was well established with property ownership and a large extended family had mixed status, and they discussed leaving the state. They also had stopped crossing the border into Georgia to attend church in a neighboring town (Goñi-Lessan and Kennedy 2023).

Driver’s Licenses

Because the new law invalidated many out-of-state driver’s licenses that undocumented immigrants needed to drive legally, many immigrants decided to leave the state for this reason (Rampell 2023). In addition, local governments are now prohibited from creating identification cards for undocumented immigrants. Such community ID cards are used by immigrants to pick up children from school, open bank accounts, enter gated communities for work purposes, and access health care, so the effects of this provision of the law are widespread (Morse 2023). Critics of the law believed this provision would cause undue harm to immigrants and subject them to racial profiling from law enforcement (Kennedy and Goñi-Lessan 2023). The law also made it a felony to use any false identity documents to seek employment. While there are 19 states that issue “driver privilege cards,” only five states are listed in the law under the prohibited category (Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Vermont); however, some of the reporting also indicated that the law invalidates all out-of-state driver’s licenses issued to undocumented persons (Cerabino 2023).

Agricultural Job Losses

According to a Tallahassee Democrat article, Florida’s food and agriculture businesses paid $53.8 billion in taxes, so decreased economic output will lead to substantial state revenue losses (Goñi-Lessan and Kennedy 2023). The real and perceived effect of the law was keenly expressed by farm owners and packing house operators. For example, in a Wall Street Journal article, a farm owner reported that half of his workers had left his operation, and they were hoping that the law would not be enforced (Acosta 2023). In Homestead, Florida, a major producer of tomatoes, oranges and avocados, a grower reported that half of the crop harvesters were undocumented workers and posed the question, “Who is going to harvest?” (WSJ Editorial Board 2023). Florida farmers were reported to be furious as previous bills exempted agriculture from E-Verify, but SB 1718 did not include the exemption (Seminara 2023). A New York Times article estimated that 770,000 undocumented immigrants work in Florida in agriculture, construction, and tourism and that these industries will be negatively affected due to workers leaving Florida for work in other states (Noyes 2023).

Additional Sources

To further explore thematic findings from the media analysis, several websites were searched to find additional information about advocacy organizations and SB 1718. There was a letter published online by the organization Florida Health Justice which had the signatures of 75 physicians in opposition to the bill (Florida Health Justice 2023). In a letter dated August 8, 2023, the Florida SB 1718 was characterized as “racial discrimination in the enjoyment of the right to health.” In the letter, a physician from Immokalee, a city with a high number of migrant workers, stated that migrants were even more afraid to seek medical care as result of the law. The letter goes on to describe the quarterly reports from hospitals now required to collect the immigration status of patients to report to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) will “stoke fear in hospital administrators and healthcare providers.”

On May 11, 2023, the Farmworker Association of Florida (FWAF) issued a statement about SB 1718 (The Farmworker Association of Florida 2024). The statement characterized the bill as “one of the cruelest immigration bills ever passed in the state of Florida.” The statement asked the rhetorical question of who would harvest crops, work in construction or tourism, nursing home care, or other professions, if not for the immigrants in the workforce. The FWAF has responded to the passage of SB 1718 by sending outreach staff together with legal aid resources to farmworker areas around the state of Florida to answer questions and counter misinformation. Because of reports of farmworkers leaving Florida out of fear of the immigration law, as well as having to change jobs from agriculture to construction or other industries to work for firms with employee sizes of less than 25 workers to skirt the law, farmworker advocacy organizations like FWAF have a critical role to play to help workers find legal representation if necessary and find alternative employment opportunities. In addition, FWAF is a plaintiff in a lawsuit along with other legal advocacy groups challenging Section 10 of SB 1718 concerning the provision of making it a third-degree felony to transport and adult undocumented immigrant in Florida, and a second-degree felony if that person is a minor.

Discussion

Scholarship of media framings of immigration in Western societies has shown how the media frequently portray immigrants using a threat narrative, blaming immigrants for rising crime rates, taking advantage of social services not meant for them, or taking jobs away leading to a lack of employment opportunities for lawful residents (Liu 2021). Media framings of immigration bills are drawn on partisan lines, as was evident in Arizona with SB 1070 in 2010, when liberal opponents cited the potential for civil rights violations while conservative supporters invoked issues such as border security and the rule of law (Fryberg, et al. 2012). Findings from this study further show how discussions of immigrants from policy makers shape immigrants’ perceptions of the state.

From the perspective of undocumented workers featured in the newspaper articles, Florida’s passage of an aggressive immigration enforcement law signaled that the state was no longer a welcome place for immigrant workers. As part of SB 1718, immigrants would no longer be able to use their out-of-state driver’s licenses to drive legally and were prohibited from using any local identification card which they might need to seek healthcare or pick up a child from school. In addition, the provision of having to answer the question about immigration status at hospitals fostered mistrust between immigrants and healthcare staff, thus leading to avoidance of medical visits and potentially increasing costs for emergency room care because of neglected preventive healthcare practices. For immigrants with chronic conditions in Florida, some felt it was safer to move to another state to seek healthcare than to remain. A doctor advocating for health equity decried the law for its effect to increase discriminatory practices in healthcare settings. Such impacts echo similar findings from studies examining the sweeping harms of immigration enforcement laws, which demonstrated how immigration enforcement efforts increased immigrants’ avoidance of some health services and affected clinical operations (Kline 2021).

In one case, in rural Jefferson County (in the Big Bend area of Florida), there was a document from the state attorney’s office which stipulated that if a defendant had an extensive criminal history and was Hispanic, the defendant should be charged with stronger penalties (Caldera 2023). The state attorney backtracked after this document was leaked to the press and suggested it should have been written as “undocumented” rather than “Hispanic.” Either way, such prosecutorial decisions based on race or documentation status are often considered unconstitutional and reflect an undercurrent of racism and nativism that have a long history in the US South. Such moments emphasize an ongoing conflation of Hispanic identity, undocumented status, and purported criminality, providing a very real example of how a person’s legal status becomes a proxy for race and promotes a stereotype of Hispanics as a group characterized by illegality (Vaquera, et al. 2022). Parallels can be drawn from media coverage of immigrants in Canada, where news reporting disproportionately focuses on undocumented migration, despite the fact that most immigrants arrive through legal avenues (Lawlor and Tolley 2017).

Several of the articles we reviewed focused on the economic impacts of SB 1718. The requirement in the bill of implementing E-Verify for all businesses with 25 or more employees posed a dilemma for various business sectors with many employers used to hiring undocumented workers such as agricultural labor subcontractors. As was gathered in the reporting on the Florida Farmworker Association, some growers decided to simply fire returning workers and decrease crop production rather than risk fines and possible license suspension as stipulated by the law. One common theme among employers from the business sector was that state policy makers should instead pass legislation to loosen immigration requirements so that the industry could hire needed workers, and Congress should pass legislation to create a faster process for immigrant workers to obtain US citizenship. Unfortunately for immigrants, national immigration policy emphasizes Hispanic immigrant undeservingness in terms of an easy path to citizenship, which is difficult for those even based on family reunification; moreover, media portrayals of immigrants who run afoul of the law paints them as criminals for their lack of documentation status (Valle 2022).

The economic tensions created by SB 1718 mirror the context from a similar immigration law, Georgia HB 87, which passed in 2011. The Georgia law included provisions targeting employers, and it faced challenges and criticisms for its impact on businesses and the potential for discrimination in hiring practices. HB 87 caused dire financial shortfalls in the agriculture sector due to labor shortages, and there was even a failed attempt to pressure prisoners and probationers to work in agriculture. The economic disruptions cited in the newspaper articles about the Florida law related to labor shortfalls in the agricultural, construction, and tourism business sectors, and this critique was like the rhetoric about the Georgia law. Similar to the prior analysis of the Georgia HB 87 law, in the sample of Florida articles, economic arguments were the most common appeals against SB 1718 (Luque, et al. 2013). This economic impact should be documented to measure the damage that such policies cause when the immigrant workforce is targeted and further disenfranchised through additional provisions of the law like asking to report immigration status at a hospital intake or the inability to obtain an identification card from a municipality.

Our search also demonstrated that the word “border” figured prominently in the rhetoric on immigration and that one political party was not policing the border sufficiently, even though Florida does not share a border with Mexico. Despite the lack of shared international borders, the trope of a border invasion by “illegal immigrants” persists, which can lead to racial profiling, discriminatory practices, and immigrant stress (Sanchez, et al. 2022). The “border’ rhetoric perhaps draws attention to purported failures of the federal government to act on immigration matters. While immigration enforcement is a federal matter, several states have attempted to implement their own policies, which inevitably face court challenges under the Supremacy clause (Article VI) of the US Constitution. This clause establishes federal law as the law of the US, and state laws that conflict with federal immigration law can be preempted. Indeed, several other states (e.g., Arizona, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas) have passed their own immigration-related laws mostly focusing on enforcement and employment verification. Many of the state immigration bills were modeled after Arizona’s SB 1070 of 2010, called by its critics the “show me your papers” law. In 2012, the Supreme Court decided that three out of four provisions that were blocked by lower courts were preempted by federal law (National Immigration Law Center 2023). Many of these states faced court challenges like Georgia because of certain provisions in their own immigration legislation and many provisions did not stand up to court challenges since they led to civil rights abuses for immigrants and citizens and sought to impose immigration policy, which is under federal authority. Nevertheless, state politicians like Governor DeSantis may champion laws that violate the establishment clause for political gains.

When SB 1718 was introduced, Governor DeSantis was a candidate in the Republican presidential primary. Consequently, his name featured prominently in the lexical search on the Florida immigration law, and he made a high-profile trip the Texas-Mexico border to highlight the border as a hot button political issue of his campaign (The Hill 2024). Governor DeSantis’s support of SB 1718 despite its harms underscores the political expedience of being aligned with crimmigration policy. As undocumented immigrants continue to be conflated with criminality and so-called “illegality” (De Genova 2002), and are simultaneously racialized and assumed to be Hispanic or Latino (Menjívar 2021) politicians who champion crimmigration laws can show their political bona fides by performing a tough stance of crime while simultaneously playing to some voters’ racial biases. In addition, both the former wave of crimmigration laws passed over a decade ago and those passed more recently hinge on notions of urgent need for federal immigration reform that has failed to occur, requiring states to act instead.

As existing research on immigration enforcement politics has shown, immigrants have long been used as scapegoats for politicians, and the convenience of such scapegoating in part explains a lack of comprehensive action related to immigration policy in the US (Golash-Boza 2009). As this analysis shows, Florida’s SB 1718 perpetuates the longstanding convenience of politicians using immigrants for their own political gains. As Governor DeSantis began his presidential campaign, he did so by leveraging his time as governor to showcase what he would bring to the presidency. Immigration was part of DeSantis’s political performance for President of the United States, as underscored by his promise to “make America Florida,” or support Florida-like policies at the federal level (NBC News 2023), and a refusal to support bipartisan federal immigration reform efforts if elected President (The Hill 2024).

Conclusion

This newspaper content analysis exposes the complexities surrounding SB 1718, a contentious immigration law in Florida. Notably, there was strong opposition from the Hispanic community and their allies about the negative impacts of the law, presenting the only counter-frame to the crisis frame invoked by politicians. Concerns revolved around the law’s severe penalties and the repercussions of maintaining an unauthorized immigrant workforce in low-wage sectors. The law’s implementation of E-Verify for larger businesses creates a dilemma, with expected job losses in the agriculture, construction, and tourism business sectors, and consequently lower economic output (e.g., decreased crop production). Business leaders advocate for flexible immigration policies to allow immigrants to work and swifter pathways to US citizenship, reflecting the intricate relationship between immigration laws and economic interests.

Undocumented workers in Florida, who are predominantly Hispanic, face a disheartening message—Florida might no longer be a welcoming place. This hostile environment for immigrants hampers their access to healthcare, prompts healthcare avoidance, and accentuates mistrust, raising healthcare costs. This aspect of the law is different from the previous Georgia law, and in Florida, undocumented immigrants are blamed for rising healthcare costs, despite the fact they constitute a very small percentage of Florida’s population (approximately 4.1%) (Pew Research Center 2023). The narrative revealed in the articles underlines civil rights concerns, legal system discrimination, public safety, and potential racial profiling by law enforcement, regardless of legal status, given the prevalence of mixed status families in Florida. As one of the latest examples of a state-focused crimmigration law, Florida’s SB 1718 provides a snapshot into how state-level immigration laws continue to be potentially harmful to the constituents whose representatives support them. This is in part due to the political expediency of supporting such laws, and due to the laws using crime and punishment as a vernacular for communicating immigrants’ lack of societal belonging (Stumpf 2010).

Additionally, the effect of the Florida immigration law draws parallels to the economic disruptions in Georgia due to subsequent labor shortages and emphasizes the necessity of documenting the economic and social impacts of such policies. Unfortunately, in Florida, there are policy proposals to loosen child labor protections to address the low unemployment issue. The analysis illuminates the complexity of state immigration policies conflicting with federal law, leading to legal battles, and suggests alternative policy approaches such as guest worker programs for states reliant on immigrant labor. In essence, it underscores the need for a comprehensive approach to address the intricate issues at the intersection of immigration policy and community well-being.