It’s quiet as dusk falls on the immigrant town of Immokalee, which means “your home,” a name given by the Seminole people in the 1800s. 

But now, “the people are scared. They don’t come out,” says Ofelia, a Guatemalan clothes vendor with a green card, packing up her merchandise for the evening. Ever since ICE started targeting the flea market in February, she says, she’s lost 60% of her business. “Don’t drive if you don’t have to. Don’t be out and about,” says Melissa, a vendor whose sales cratered from $700 to $300 in one week. 

Glenda Gonzalez, a short and stout middle-aged Mexican-American woman, was my guide in this small rural town in South Florida. A product of the pueblo, whose mother nicknamed her la Loquita (the crazy one), she says her hair salon has lost 40% of its business. “It’s affected every angle, even the stores.” 

Glenda Gonzalez (left) and Melissa (right) standing at the vendor fair (Photo: Ethan Dodd).

What started two years before as a policy seemingly full of holes has turned into an all-out war on illegal immigrant labor in Florida’s economy.

“All it boils down to is just a desire for cheap labor,” Governor Ron DeSantis said during a roundtable at New College of Florida in March. And he wants to get rid of it. The two-term governor signed a raft of measures in 2023 he called “the most ambitious anti-illegal immigration laws in the country.” One of them, Senate Bill 1718, mandated large employers verify the legal status of new hires using a federal system known as E-Verify, or get fined.

“If you remove the enticement of employment, then they’re not going to want to come illegally to the state of Florida,” DeSantis said in front of a podium that read “BIDEN’S BORDER CRISIS” when he proposed the E-Verify mandate, a priority of the popular two-term governor long before he ran against President Donald Trump for the 2024 presidential nomination. The idea was to remove the “magnet” of higher wages that attracts illegal immigrants to the United States.

At least that was the goal. The reality is more complicated in a state so reliant on undocumented labor. State figures are hard to come by, but 42% of agriculture workers nationally don’t have work authorization, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And though not necessarily undocumented, data from 2023 shows that 47% of workers in Florida agriculture, 38% in construction, and 25% in hospitality services are foreign-born. 

And yet, despite initial reports of migrants fleeing the Sunshine State, after almost two years since the law took effect, E-Verify has not crashed Florida’s economy.

Critics worried that E-Verify would cause a worker shortage and bring industry to a halt. And yet, despite initial reports of migrants fleeing the Sunshine State, after almost two years since the law took effect, E-Verify has not crashed Florida’s economy. 

“The media was saying our whole economy would collapse because we were discouraging illegal activity, which is totally false, and we’ve continued to grow very, very significantly,” DeSantis said in January.

But not without growing pains. Few employers want to talk about it for fear they’ll be targeted, but E-Verify has disrupted business as usual. That may have been the governor’s goal all along. Workers are harder to find and labor costs (wages) are up. Meanwhile, the state has outsourced enforcement to the federal government and Americans have not in fact flooded the workforce. If they haven’t found loopholes, many businesses have turned to federal programs to import workers legally. The foundation of Florida’s economy is shifting. 

***

“When DeSantis did E-Verify, it really shook South Florida,” says Mark Baker, a landscaper and nursery grower based in West Palm Beach. As we drive past lavish developments in his Ford F-250, he points out projects he worked on. “How many of my $15-an-hour workers can live in these houses?” he says with a laid-back sigh, frustrated that the lack of affordable housing is costing him workers. Though he “grandfathered in” 30% of his employees, who he suspected might be illegal but got the job before the E-Verify mandate, many workers fled to other states after the law passed, shrinking Baker’s company from 108 employees down to 80.

“It kept us from growing,” he says. Though his business did grow to $9 million in revenue in 2024, that was after 15 years without growth, he explains, during which he could never break seven figures. “It’s hard to gain work when you don’t have the staff.” He says wages have gone up 30% since President Joe Biden took office. To avoid losing money, he’s had to raise prices—losing 20% of his contracts, he grumbles. “E-Verify was just another gut punch after the three- to four-year recession,” he says, adding that he’s had to pay more to attract and keep his workers.

“E-Verify was just another gut punch after the three- to four-year recession,” he says, adding that he’s had to pay more to attract and keep his workers.

It isn’t just Baker taking the hit from E-Verify. He takes me to his contract at Palm Beach Atlantic University, only a stone’s throw from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion. “If they had 200 employees, now they’re down to 100 employees,” says Miguel Gutierrez, the university’s horticulture manager, who used to work for Baker, referring to the numerous landscaping companies that tend to the mansions on Palm Beach Island. As Baker’s men shave off bark from nearby palm trees, Gutierrez explains, “If I need to bring in these people who are not used to it, they’re not going to do it for $18. They’d rather be in Chick-fil-A.” He says a foreman doesn’t work for less than $22-24 an hour these days. “The prices are going to go higher.” 

Mark Baker driving his Ford F-250 to his various contracts (Photo: Ethan Dodd).

One of Baker’s older employees, named Joe, a short man from Haiti, stayed through the E-Verify turnover because he had his green card, but he says in a thick accent, “Lot of people got big trouble. They go home.” Scooping up nuts and tree debris from the pavement, he continues, “Old people got good paper. New people go home.”

Back at the office, which is a wooden house with an alligator pond surrounded by palm trees and shrubs as far as the eye can see, crew leaders are juggling a children’s basketball with their feet. Baker smiles and tells me, “85% of my workers are Guatemalan.” 

But who knows for how much longer. Teresa Perez, his account manager, says, “The employment rate went down ever since E-Verify. It’s very difficult to find good workers.” She explains how she spots fake papers, like a turquoise Social Security card (they’re supposed to be blue). “Unfortunately most of the workers that fit well, we can’t hire, because the documents are not valid,” she says. That’s what E-Verify is supposed to catch. 

The federal system started in 1996 as a voluntary pilot program to crack down on the fraudulent document industry that emerged a decade earlier when Congress first made it illegal to hire unauthorized workers and created the dreaded I-9 Form for Employee Eligibility Verification. Before that, “it was considered a right of employers to hire whoever you wanted,” explains Muzaffar Chishti, a legal expert who tracks federal worksite enforcement at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank. The problem, which seems endemic to immigration policy, was enforcement. Employers could avoid sanctions by claiming not to be “document experts” and accepting whatever papers looked real, undermining a decades-long effort since President Harry Truman to root out competition from low-skilled illegal immigrants suppressing American wages. 

By running I-9 information—name, birthday, and Social Security number—against federal databases, E-Verify can better detect fraudulent documents and deny work authorization. Though not a national requirement, a number of states have passed E-Verify mandates on private employers. Florida’s 2023 law is the latest, with a partial mandate on all new hires for employers with 25 or more employees. If employers don’t comply, the state can impose a fine of $1,000 per day and suspend their business license.

“We don’t want to get fined,” Baker’s current HR specialist Heather Sanchez tells me as she walks me through the E-Verify system on her desktop. As long as their employees from before the law don’t leave, she says, “They’re locked in.” She only runs E-Verify on new hires. “It’s super fast if their stuff is verified,” she says, the system giving a worker a green “EMPLOYMENT AUTHORIZED” designation. The system will shoot back a yellow designation asking for more time or information if the system doesn’t find a match on the spot. And if the applicants want to proceed after that (many don’t), they may get a “FINAL NONCONFIRMATION” in red. But they rarely do get to this point if they are illegal.

Sanchez says a handful of people without papers show up looking for work once a month. Perez translates in Spanish and sends them on their way to companies with fewer than 25 employees, who are not subject to E-Verify.

Florida wants to look tough on immigration, but E-Verify is riddled with loopholes, seemingly by design. Construction subcontractors with more than 25 employees split up to avoid E-Verify.

Florida wants to look tough on immigration, but E-Verify is riddled with loopholes, seemingly by design. Construction subcontractors with more than 25 employees split up to avoid E-Verify. “You’ve seen all these big companies turn into a bunch of small companies. The workers haven’t gone away,” says Tim Conlan, a roofing subcontractor in Jacksonville whose company has—you guessed it—24 employees. “I have to compete with 550 roofers in Jacksonville. Ninety-five percent of those have under 25 employees. I cannot start a new company with all those additional requirements,” he says. 

Previously, Conlan was president of Reliant Roofing, where he saw the “shock and awe” as E-Verify scared off employees, shrinking the company from 100 down to 50. To attract and keep workers, they raised the piece rate some 40% from $60 to $85 a square. He’s had to raise prices at his company to keep up with labor, and now he sees little subcontractors registering only half their employees and getting work without roofing licenses. 

Right now, E-Verify is “broken,” Conlan says. “It’s not helping small business. It’s not helping the worker. It’s not keeping costs down for the consumer. So what’s the purpose?” He wants an immigration policy that makes sure workers are safe and paying taxes. But E-Verify, he says, “hasn’t accomplished anything.”

In theory, E-Verify should protect American jobs from competition with illegal workers. “This is about making sure U.S. citizens stay employed. This is about keeping wages at a certain level, not decreasing wages,” said Trump’s border czar Tom Homan at a roundtable with DeSantis. 

And it’s true: Hispanic subcontractors are directly competing with Americans, at least the ones who haven’t left the roofing industry. Conlan calls it an “underground system.” Another North Florida commercial roofer whom we’ll call Heath, one of the last to still employ white and black crews, says Hispanics took over roofing in the late 2000s. He currently employs 130 white and black workers in-house and has another 70 Hispanics as subcontractors because that’s the business these days. “The only way we can compete with them is if we know we can use a sub crew. We can’t do a job with our in-house guys as cheap as they can do it,” Heath says. If it wasn’t for competition with illegal workers, he’d hire 70 more in-house employees. But he’d make more money if he replaced his men with illegal workers. “It’s hurting them. There’s no doubt.”

“The fact is we have the highest share of working-age men not working ever recorded,” says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank. Removing immigrant workers, which would induce a labor crunch, would give Congress an incentive to address why so many Americans are dropping out of the labor market, he explains.

Heath calls E-Verify a “double edged sword.” While he doesn’t want illegal immigrants “draining emergency room services,” he wants good workers. “It may be great, but it may stop construction in its tracks,” he says. His business would shrink without his Hispanic subcontractors. And Conlan, who’s overseen workforce development in high schools for a decade, doesn’t see white kids getting on roofs anytime soon. “It’s hot. It’s hard work. It’s extremely challenging. The youth of this nation is looking for an easier route,” he says.

DeSantis suggested that a younger workforce could make up for lost illegal workers, and his office drafted a bill, on top of a 2024 law, to loosen work restrictions on teenagers. “What’s wrong with expecting our young people to be working part-time now?” he said during the roundtable with Homan. “Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when, you know, teenagers used to work at these resorts. College students should be able to do this stuff.”

Though they might work at the restaurant bar, “American people don’t like to clean the rooms,” says Jan Gautam, the owner of a 5,000-room hotel chain in Central Florida. He lost 25% of his workers after E-Verify passed, forcing him to raise wages to attract and retain workers, like cleaning crews, roles he’s still struggling to fill. Unable to raise prices without losing customers, he says the labor shortage has halved his operating profit. “Some days I’m breaking even.” 

E-Verify mandates generally tighten labor markets and reduce immigration in the short run, explains University of North Florida economist Madeline Zavodny, but those effects fade as people realize the laws aren’t being enforced.

E-Verify mandates generally tighten labor markets and reduce immigration in the short run, explains University of North Florida economist Madeline Zavodny, but those effects fade as people realize the laws aren’t being enforced. Even then, “It doesn’t necessarily mean Americans step in to take those jobs, and it doesn’t on average raise wages for Americans.”

“The problem really is enforcement,” Zavodny says. “This is a federal database, and these are state laws. How would you check that employers are using it?” The letter of the law needs to be met with consistent, random, and physical inspection, says Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute. “If there is not muscle behind the law, it doesn’t work.” 

For instance, Conlan says that some workers who fled Florida because of E-Verify came back after “they realized there wasn’t real teeth to it.” Right now, the Florida Commerce Department is responsible for auditing almost 40,000 small businesses. If they completed three audits a day, 365 days a year, it would take 36 years to do all of them just once.

Republican legislators pressed DeSantis about the apparent lack of enforcement this March, after which the administration sent out “non-compliance letters” to 40 Florida businesses and blamed the legislature for not funding the E-Verify program. “But whose business license have they yanked?” Zavodny asks. The state continues to contract with a major transportation company even after one of its workers, a twice-deported illegal Honduran immigrant, drove into and killed a sheriff’s deputy in 2022. He didn’t have a driver’s license and was found to have used someone else’s Social Security number.

“It isn’t perfect,” admits Krikorian. “All kinds of fraud are possible.” Illegal workers still get through either because they are paid under the table or they fully impersonate someone with valid ID. “That’s no argument not to do it. That’s an argument for progressively improving the system,” Krikorian says, which has happened over the years. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services can now check if a green card matches the real one on file. Florida also became the second state to grant the agency electronic access to its DMV records, allowing E-Verify users to compare driver’s licenses. 

Krikorian says the next step would be a biometric identifier, perhaps using facial recognition or matching fingerprints with driver’s licenses, to ensure the person presenting I-9 documents is not just someone who looks similar. “It’s harder to get around E-Verify than it used to be,” Krikorian says.

But some people think lack of enforcement is the point. “The governor wrote a bill that would have maximum scare impact with minimal impact on the labor force,” says Rick Roth, a mustachioed farmer in Belle Glade, and former state rep gearing up to run for state senate. That’s why Roth ultimately voted for the bill: E-Verify wouldn’t apply to existing farmworkers, only new ones, while signaling that more restrictions would come. And it would only apply to workplaces with 25 or more employees, which account for less than 20% of Florida small businesses. 

With that knowledge, “I can start building H-2A [guest worker] housing or do something to prepare for the future,” Roth says. “It tells you that Florida will continue to ratchet up E-Verify, but it’s not immediate.” And when enforcement comes, “I don’t want you coming to my farm and scaring my people. Come to my office,” Roth asks of DeSantis. “So far, I haven’t seen much.” Notably, a bill to expand E-Verify to all employers died in the State Senate this May, even though DeSantis said he would have signed it.

But immigrant communities and businesses are scared. A month after Trump took office, DeSantis ordered Florida law enforcement to train with and assist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In April, Florida law enforcement worked with ICE to arrest 1,120 illegal immigrants, many of them with criminal records, which ICE called the “largest joint operation in Florida history.” If DeSantis was looking for ways to ramp up enforcement, he seems to have found it. 

“A lot of people sold their trailers, houses,” says Gonzalez back in Immokalee. “It was hard for them to get jobs.” She let one salon worker go because the person only had a Mexican hairdresser license. Her boyfriend Oscar lost his roofing job right after E-Verify passed in 2023. And Gonzalez suspects two of the 34 renters at her camp, known as “the barracks,” were deported or fled because they disappeared after an ICE raid. One of her tenants, Erick, a self-trained plumber who came to Immokalee from Mexico City six years ago, says everyone wants “papeles” (papers), shaking his head. “They will not give me a job.” Gonzalez remembers one renter who told her, “I’m going to live in the woods.”

As we spoke in Gonzalez’s home, I could hear a leaf blower at 11 PM. Soon in walks a short, beer-bellied, mustachioed character named Chavez, holding the leaf blower in one hand and bits of coconut spilling out of the other. His arm drapes along the door frame, and his shirt reads “KEEP CALM AND GET OVER IT.” 

Chavez standing in the door frame (Photo: Ethan Dodd).

“Es un problema,” Chavez says of E-Verify. “No tengo papeles.” (It’s a problem. I don’t have papers.) He picked oranges as a farmhand for years, but—“Domesticos, no mas.” (No more domestic workers.) His job was taken over by H-2A workers. After losing that job, which brought in $70-80 a day, he now makes $60 a day hustling odd jobs. He doesn’t want to self-deport. After 20 years in the United States, he says, “it would be hard to come back.”

Businesses are “calling me because immigration police is everywhere right now. They don’t want to lose the contracts if they don’t have employees. So they’re looking to Mexico,” even if it means paying extra for attorney’s fees.

Trump’s ICE raids are causing businesses to take E-Verify more seriously, explains Alma Aguilar, a naturalized U.S. citizen who immigrated from Mexico 13 years ago and founded the Florida Mexican American Chamber of Commerce. Her company, United National Labor, helps businesses obtain legal guestworkers using federal programs like H-2A and H-2B. “A lot of people leaving,” she says. Businesses are “calling me because immigration police is everywhere right now. They don’t want to lose the contracts if they don’t have employees. So they’re looking to Mexico,” even if it means paying extra for attorney’s fees.

That seems in line with what DeSantis wanted employers to do all along. “They’re bringing in illegal migrants. They’re doing that because they can pay them less than they have to pay an H-2A worker,” he said. “It’s a way to have dirt cheap labor and export all the associated costs with that to the general public,” with taxes going to immigrant healthcare, schooling, and traffic accidents. In May, he tweeted, “Legal workforce = higher wages, less burden on taxpayers, and triumph of the rule of law.”

DeSantis wants farmers to turn to legal workers, but as farmer Chuck Obern of C&B Farms puts it, “H-2A is a bitch. There’s a million rules and laws and things you have to do.” The federal program under the Department of Labor allows farmers to hire seasonal foreign farmworkers if they can’t find enough in the country. “The program has exploded in use since 2010,” explains Jamie Fussell, director of labor relations for the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association. Florida leads the 50 states in most positions certified, bringing in more than 47,000 workers in 2024, slightly less than the almost 52,000 in 2023, the year E-Verify came into effect. 

Chuck Obern leans on produce at C&B Farms (Photo: Ethan Dodd).

Veronica Garcia, the H-2A program manager at C&B in Clewiston, says that before the E-Verify mandate, it was “almost daily” that three or four domestic workers—meaning those living in the U.S., legal or illegal—would come looking for work. On a good day, it was ten or twelve workers. “And now, none,” she chuckles softly. “They scared off all the workers.” Obern recalls losing three-fourths of his remaining domestic workers “before the end of the season because they were so scared.” He still has a dozen domestics, but the farm now recruits 180 H-2A workers from Mexico each year and rents 170 from a contractor. 

And H-2A is expensive. To ensure foreign agricultural workers don’t undercut domestic workers’ wages, the Department of Labor requires farmers to pay H-2A workers the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, which is higher than Florida’s $13 minimum wage. In 2025, that’s $16.23 in Florida, up 10% from last year. On top of that is the cost of getting the workers’ visas, transporting them from Mexico, reimbursing them for time on the bus, and providing them housing as required by law. Between trailers and bunk housing, Obern has spent close to $1 million for 180 beds, Garcia says. Altogether, that brings the cost of a farmworker up to $21 per hour, according to Obern. FFVA says the cost per farmworker is $24-25 for many of its members, accounting for 40-50% of their production cost.

“I’m getting virtually nothing back. I’m just paying people to work,” Obern says as we drive his truck through the muddy slopes of his farm. “I’ve not made money since NAFTA.” With one-tenth the labor cost, Obern says, “Mexico has been dirt cheap. How do I compete?” Fixed contracts with supermarkets like Walmart and Publix help compensate for dips in the market price. C&B has also innovated. Garcia developed a stickering system that would be the envy of McKinsey consultants, incentivizing workers to quickly scan and earn what they’ve picked. “We were able to not be affected by the additional costs by using this stickering system, performance metrics, all sorts of metrics,” he says. But, he adds, “How much efficiency can you save? Wage goes up every year.” 

Back in Belle Glade, Roth says, “We cut our labor costs by two-thirds by using machines,” showing me how he vertically integrated his fields with a mechanized packing house. An optical scanner identifies and sorts “good” radishes from the rest, while another machine shoots radishes into a bag, weighs, and seals them—60 bags a minute. “This machine increases our yield 15%. We’re saving money because we’re not giving more radishes,” he says. “It’s not growing the crop that makes you a farmer. It’s selling it for a profit.” 

“If you’re going to do E-Verify, it has to be national,” Roth says. That way Florida isn’t at a disadvantage competing against illegal immigrant labor in California.

While they’ve been able to adapt, Roth says, “Farmers are getting out of the business. Things are getting worse.” Obern says, “I’m one of the survivors. There’s lots and lots of farmers who didn’t make it.” And using E-Verify to further push costly H-2A on farmers is not helping. “If you’re going to do E-Verify, it has to be national,” Roth says. That way Florida isn’t at a disadvantage competing against illegal immigrant labor in California. National E-Verify would also make it easier for Congress to reform H-2A, removing the Adverse Effect Wage Rate and seasonal restrictions on year-round farmwork. Obern would like to see Trump lower H-2A to the minimum wage and put tariffs on competing nations “to make things even.”

The irony of DeSantis pushing for H-2A is that it seems to benefit foreign workers the most. “There’s more pay here,” says Juan Lara Leon, a crew leader and Mexican immigrant working for Roth Farms. We look out on a field of 42 men harvesting cilantro and bok choy. They wear floppy hats and long sleeves to protect against the hot sun as they hoe from one end of the field to the other. Lara Leon goes back to Mexico every May to find men like these who will take a nonstop 48-hour bus ride and work the flat fields of Central Florida.

Even if they are packed into cramped quarters, 24 to a bunk house, with little privacy or freedom, they make good money. Working 10 hours a day, six days a week, one foreman on C&B Farms says he makes $1,000 a week here compared to $150 a week in Mexico, allowing him to send back $900 every week to build a house for his family. The cartel caught on and kidnapped his wife and 5-year-old daughter for ransom. After he paid it, he stayed to work. “Los extraño,” he said. (I miss them.) But he decided to stay and work until the contract was done, calling them on WhatsApp and FaceTime every night. He says he will keep working until the house is built.

It’s hard to imagine facing that choice. Would you leave your job to protect your family? The tradeoff was worth it to this young father. E-Verify poses its own tradeoffs for American society. Should our society continue to run on illegal cheap labor? Do we want Americans to work on roofs and in the fields? Or do we wish to innovate, forced to by higher labor costs? Florida is collectively experiencing this challenge as illegal workers are pushed out, wages rise, and businesses look for new ways to lower labor costs. The limiting factor, of course, is the price we, as consumers, are willing to pay.