Exclusive: DeSantis Rebukes Mexican President’s Support for Illegal Migration

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is rebuking Mexican President López Obrador for interfering in Florida politics.

“President López Obrador should be cracking down on the cartels running his country and fueling our deadly opioid epidemic instead of worrying about what we are doing in Florida,” DeSantis said in an exclusive statement to Breitbart News.

The rebuke came after President Obrador slammed DeSantis for his sweeping reforms of migration-related laws in Florida.

“I found out that the Florida governor — imagine, Florida, which is full of migrants! — is taking repressive, inhumane measures against [illegal] migrants in Florida because he wants to be a [presidential] candidate,” Obrador told a Mexican audience on Monday.

“This is immoral — this is politicking,” said Obrador, who is working with President Joe Biden to schedule the transfer of many more illegal migrants into the United States.

In a statement to Breitbart News, DeSantis shut down Obrador’s demand for more migration:

While President Biden may take his cues from leftist foreign leaders, Floridians won’t let their immigration laws be dictated by Mexico City. I’ll never back down from using the full weight of my office to protect the people of Florida by enforcing our immigration laws, and look forward to signing the strongest legislation against illegal immigration in Florida history.

DeSantis’ rebuke was delivered as he prepares to sign a law that makes it difficult for employers to favor and hire wage-cutting illegal migrants over ordinary American job-seekers.

The pending legislation, known as SB 1718, will likely be signed by DeSantis on Wednesday after being labeled as the “Toughest Immigration Crackdown in the Nation” by the New York Times.

According to DeSantis’ office, the legislation:

Requires private employers with 25 or more employees to use the E-Verify system to verify the employment eligibility of newly hired employees, fines employers who fail to use E-Verify $1,000 per day, and suspends the licenses of such private employers until they come back into compliance.

Suspends licenses of any employer who knowingly employs illegal aliens, and makes using a fake ID to gain employment a felony.

Enhances penalties for human smuggling, including making knowingly transporting five or more illegal aliens or a single illegal alien minor a second-degree felony subject to a $10,000 fine and up to 15 years in prison.

Bans local governments and NGOs from issuing identification documents to illegal aliens and invalidates all out-of-state driver licenses issued exclusively to illegal aliens.

Requires hospitals to collect and report healthcare costs for illegal aliens.

Many Florida employers already employ illegal migrants, in part, because the workers are cheaper, more compliant, and grateful for the work. One far-left activist in Orlando, Fla., taunted DeSantis with a May 7 image apparently showing many illegal migrant workers at a construction site that would otherwise be run by better-paid Americans:

Florida implemented E-Verify as part of its anti-immigrant bill passed this session and its already causing construction sites to stop. It's estimated that Florida has 1 million undocumented workers. pic.twitter.com/6wFfsgEuIw

— Muffuletta Matzo Man (@NeeNeinNyetNo) May 7, 2023

The federal government’s support for mass migration forces down Americans’ wages as it pushes up their rents, slows innovation, concentrates wealth in a few states, and shoves many Floridians to the sidelines of their own society. A 2020 study by investors admitted that an effective E-Verify law would pressure employers to raise wages for ordinary Americans.

Moreover, the establishment media ensures that Americans wildly underestimate the scale of migration even as they greatly overestimate other Americans’ support for continued immigration. For example, the “American Aspirations Index” survey asked 2,010 Americans in 2021 to rank 55 national priorities. The respondents said they believe that “[being] open to immigration” is the 18-ranked priority for all Americans. But when asked to declare their own views, they ranked the “open to immigration” priority near the bottom, at just 42nd of the 55 priorities.

However, GOP politicians have not used that pocketbook, kitchen-table argument to woo the many Democrat-leaning voters — including white-collar voters — who are growing worried about the scale and cost of Biden’s migration.

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For example, in Florida, some donor-backed GOP legislators worked with pro-migrant Democrats to narrow the ambitious scope of DeSantis’ reforms as they moved through the Florida legislature. For example, the legislature rejected DeSantis’s proposal to penalize employers who house illegal migrants, and it exempted small employers from the E-Verify requirement.

But DeSantis got most of his reforms through the legislature — so the pro-migration groups of investors and ethnic lobbies are still loudly opposing his accomplishment.

“We’re just begging him not to sign this law because it will create economic havoc, and there’s better ways and better public policy that we can promote to attend the issue that we have,” immigration lawyer Aileen Walborsky told The Palm Beach Post.

“We don’t want people going into hiding, avoiding necessary health care services because of the requirements included in this bill,” said Palm Beach County Commissioner Michael Barnett. He is the former chair of the Palm Beach County GOP.

The American Business Immigration Council opposed the law, and its Venezuelan-born Florida director claimed it would “severely exacerbate the acute labor shortage in Florida.”

DeSantis has backed a lawsuit that has shut down some of Biden’s migration plans, sent some of Biden’s migrants to Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and has acted large to sharply raise criminal penalties for drug dealers.