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Beneath the smugness of Ron DeSantis, at Florida leading the nation in immigration enforcement lies something of a conundrum: how to fill the essential jobs of the scores of immigrant workers targeted for deportation.
The answer, according to Florida lawmakers, is the state’s schoolchildren, who as young as 14 could soon be allowed to work overnight shifts without a break – even on school nights.
A bill that progressed this week through the Republican-dominated state senate seeks to remove numerous existing protections for teenage workers, and allow them, in the Florida governor’s words, to step into the shoes of immigrants who supply Florida’s tourism and agriculture industries with “dirt cheap labor”.
“What’s wrong with expecting our young people to be working part-time now? That’s how it used to be when I was growing up,” DeSantis said at an immigration forum with Donald Trump’s “border czar”, Tom Homan, in Sarasota last week.
“Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when teenagers used to work at these resorts, college students should be [doing] all this stuff.”
Unsurprisingly, the proposal has alarmed immigration advocates and watchdog groups concerned about child labor abuses and exploitation.
They point out that there is nothing “part-time” in the language of the companion senate and house bills currently before lawmakers, which instead will permit unlimited working hours without breaks for 14- and 15-year-olds who are schooled at home or online, and allow employers to require 16- and 17-year-olds to work for more than six days in a row.
“It’s essentially treating teens who have developing bodies and minds like adults, and this will allow employers to schedule them for unlimited hours, overnight and without breaks, and this is during the school year,” said Alexis Tsoukalas, senior policy analyst at the Florida Policy Institute (FPI), an independent research and economic analysis group.
“It’s important to remind people that teens can work. They can get that experience and some extra money if they need it. But there have to be protections in place to protect our most vulnerable, and if we pass this that’s absolutely not going to happen.”
Meanwhile, an attempt by the state senator who sponsored the bill, the Sarasota Republican Jay Collins, to paint it as an issue of parental rights rather than a way to cover Florida’s deportation-driven labor shortfall also failed to impress critics.
“We’re not talking about The Jungle by Upton Sinclair,” he told the chamber on Wednesday, referring to the 1906 novel that described horrific and dangerous conditions endured by cheap immigrant laborers, including children, in Chicago’s meat-packing industry – an environment that still exists today.
DeSantis, he insisted, “is talking about those soft skill benefits to children growing”, and said his bill was aimed at teenagers working in places like grocery stores.
Tsoukalas rejected Collins’s claim. “There’s different arguments that people will put on the floor in order to do what they think it takes to get a bill passed. Given some of the justifications that state leaders have made in recent days, it’s clear that they are linking the immigration issue and child labor,” she said.
“When the sweeping anti-immigrant bill of 2023 passed, we did warn there would be impacts on the labor force and the economy given how reliant we are on immigrant labor. Of course, not all of those people are undocumented, but as we’ve seen recently at the federal level all types of people, even permanent residents, are getting threatened with deportation.
“Combined with what’s going on at the state level, that absolutely is a concern. It’s no surprise that last year, and then again this year, we’re talking about the need to fill gaps with other forms of labor.”
According to the US Census Bureau, more than 27% of Florida’s workforce is foreign-born.
The Farmworker Association of Florida, which represents tens of thousands of low-income, immigrant laborers, says about 60% of its membership is undocumented, and most vulnerable to detention and deportation. Others are among half a million Haitians nationwide who Trump has ordered to leave the US by August after he rescinded their temporary protected status.
Pushback from FPI and other groups persuaded Florida lawmakers to drop some of the harsher provisions in a child labor law that passed last year, and opponents are dismayed to find them back under consideration.
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The state was singled out in a 2024 report by Governing for Impact and the Economic Policy Institute that recorded a surge in workplace injuries and violations involving minors – some in the agricultural industry where hazards include exposure to toxic chemicals and dangerous machinery.
The report noted a corresponding push in at least 30 mostly Republican-controlled states to weaken workplace protections for children, and warned the second Trump administration would seek to escalate the rollback.
“We’ve been saying since 2023 that this is a way for them to exploit minors, it was when they passed this large, anti-immigrant omnibus and the same year that they tried to pass the first law gutting child labor protection,” said Thomas Kennedy, spokesperson for the Florida Immigrant Coalition.
“The only short-term answer to workforce shortages has always been net migration and they’ll never go for that because of their politics. So their only answer is to widen the parameters of who can work, and you either go older or you go younger, and they chose to go younger.”
Kennedy and Tsoukalas are hopeful that Republicans who said they were uncomfortable with some parts of the bill will ultimately decide to vote against it. According to the Miami Herald, the Republican state senators Nick DiCeglie and Tom Wright helped move it out of the commerce and tourism committee on a 5-4 vote, but said it “needed work”.
Republican Joe Gruters joined three Democrats in voting against, saying: “We need to let kids be kids.”
Kennedy, however, pointed to another Republican bill that progressed this week that would allow employers to pay interns and apprentices less than minimum wage.
“To recap, they made the state hostile to immigrants. They deported a bunch of people, or scared people into not coming, or moving out of the state. They exacerbated worker shortages, so now they’re trying to gut child labor protection standards, while at the same time passing a law that would allow them to classify these children and other workers as interns,” he said.
“It’s insane, right?”
