Dive Brief:

• Florida Rep. Rick Roth, a Republican, said this week that the state’s new E-Verify law, which goes into effect next month, has led migrant families to flee the state, creating a “big problem” for industries like construction, Insider reported.
• During a meeting in Hialeah, Florida, on Monday, Roth reportedly told constituents that migrants have fled to other states like Georgia. "The bill has a lot of negative consequences that I'm trying to mitigate," Roth told Insider, adding that he still supports the new law.
• Starting July 1, the state will require private companies with more than 25 employees to ensure workers’ immigration status with E-Verify — a federal documentation system for confirming citizenship and authorization to work in the U.S. —  as a means of preventing foreign-born individuals who are not authorized to work in the U.S. from filling jobs. 

Dive Insight:

Critics of the legislation saw this exodus of workers coming. Within a few days of the bill’s signing, stories of abandoned construction jobsites nabbed national headlines. 

“Anecdotally, things have already gotten tougher in Florida in the last week,” Madelin Zavodny, labor economist and professor at the University of North Florida, told Construction Dive shortly after the bill’s signing. “There’s a lot of fear among the unauthorized immigrant population about what the law means for them, and I’m sure their employers are getting nervous as well.”

Among the concerns raised by experts was the mixture of families with immigration status: some authorized to work, others not. Under the new law, transportation of an unauthorized immigrant could be a crime, meaning dropping a relative off at work could come with a new risk for some families.

Roth addressed that with Insider.

"The negatives is there are families leaving Florida right now where some of them work, some of the family members are legal, and some of them are not," Roth said to Insider. "But they're all deciding that they're not going to split up and live in two different states. So it's going to be a major problem for the agriculture, construction and tourism, which just about happens to be most jobs in Florida."

Nonetheless, Roth said the bill had a useful purpose for his party’s political line: sending the message “Stay away from Florida,” to unauthorized workers.