Florida state reports say that immigrants are not only not a burden on the state, they are essential for its economic well-being.
If you find that confusing considering the harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric stemming from most state officials and the barrage of nativist legislation from the Florida Legislature, I don’t blame you. “Florida: An Economic Overview,” a report released in January by the Legislature’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research, outlines how, even as DeSantis signs more bills cracking down on immigration, more immigrants are needed as young people leave the state and death rates exceed birth rates.
A few snippets:
- “Going forward, Florida’s annual participation rate is expected to decline steadily from the 59.3% expected for FY 2023-24 to 56.9% in FY 2032-33, as the last of the Baby Boomers reach retirement age (age 65) in FY 2030-31.
- “Population aged 65 and over is forecast to represent at least 24.6% of the total population in 2030, compared with 21.2% in 2020 and 17.3% in 2010. In 2000, Florida’s prime working-age population (ages 25-54) represented 41.5% of the total population. With the aging Baby Boom generation, this population represented 36.8% of Florida’s total population in 2020 and is anticipated to represent 36.3% by 2030.”
- “Population growth is the state’s primary engine of economic growth, fueling both employment and income growth … In the three years since the 2020 Census, Florida’s strong migration trends have continued, increasing its population by almost 1.1 million net new residents. This number takes account of both people leaving the state and losses in natural increase (more deaths than births).”
- “In the past, Florida’s population growth has largely been from net migration. Going forward, this will produce all of Florida’s population growth, as the natural increase is anticipated to remain negative with deaths outnumbering births.”
This is not a report conducted by an advocacy group, nonprofit organization, political action committee, or any other outfit with an agenda. The Office of Economic and Demographic Research can hardly be accused of being some sort of partisan outfit. They are merely pointing out the obvious: We have an increasingly aging population on or near the age of retirement and a growing trend of young people of working age packing their bags for more affordable places. You add to that death rates overtaking birth rates, and there’s only one solution to address a declining population and all the economic malaise, like acute worker shortages, that comes with it — increased migration to the state.
But this is not the only Florida report contradicting state officials on immigration. The Florida Legislature passed one of the harshest state-level anti-immigrant laws seen in this country last year in Senate Bill 1718. One of the provisions within that bill was a mandate for health care providers that accept Medicaid dollars to ask about the immigration status of patients, and while patients themselves were not required to answer, it instituted a climate of fear and intimidation. Undocumented people are now steering clear of hospitals and clinics, worried that they’ll be arrested or deported. As Politico noted in a recent article, fewer pregnant migrant women are seeking treatment, even in emergencies.
The Florida Legislature also allocated $558,000 so the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration could hire four people to put together a report showing that undocumented people were a burden due to uncompensated health care costs.
Unfortunately for their preconceived notions, the report showed exactly the opposite. It found that people who self-reported their undocumented status made up less than 1% of all hospital admissions and emergency room visits. The report also says that “high levels of uncompensated care are more associated with rural county status than illegal immigration percentages. There also did not appear to be a correlation between total profitability and illegal immigration percentages. All the counties that had negative profit margins had below average illegal immigration ratios.”
This report was apparently so contradictory to what state officials assert in terms of uncompensated costs related to undocumented people that they actually tried to hide it by sloppily messing with the data. The AHCA’s new dashboard does not include some of the caveats to the information provided in a mandatory report on the same subject that was given to legislators weeks earlier. When asked about it, AHCA refused to explain the differences.
So, according to research carried out by the state government, the anti-immigrant rhetoric by state officials is a bunch of nonsense. Is it any wonder that after the passage of Senate Bill 1718, which also contained measures restricting the ability of undocumented people to work, already existing worker shortages worsened to the point that lawmakers who voted for the bill lied about the impact of the law while meeting with a Latino evangelical congregation? State Rep. Rick Roth, R-West Palm Beach, claimed that the bill was “100 percent meant to scare” immigrants and begged the crowd to “urgently” convince “your people” to not leave Florida since folks in the agriculture industry were angry that their workforce was leaving the state.
And so there you have it, anti-immigrant lawmakers and state officials twisting themselves into a pretzel to avoid the reality that immigration is good.
Thomas Kennedy is a former undocumented immigrant from Argentina. He has worked with organizations like the Florida Immigrant Coalition, Immigration Hub and as an aide in the Florida Legislature. You can find him on Twitter and Threads: @tomaskenn.
