To the editor:

It must be hard for an undocumented child to keep up with school work and learn to write in a foreign language after having worked 8 hours the night before cleaning up blood in a slaughterhouse.

Unaccompanied children are at risk. Roughly half our “asylum”-claiming undocumented hail from Mexico. This democratic nation with no war has a lively child trade of indenture to the border gangs.

Both sides of Congress are putting these children at further risk. The new rule from the White House proposes these children get to bring their family after migrating to the U.S. Once they get here, Republicans are happy to put the children to work to pay off their debt to the gangs. The Foundation for Government Accountability, based in Florida, is championing as “the right of parents'” efforts to send children back to work, unprotected from unsafe work sites. The legal stripping of child protection by Republican legislatures bring us back to the sweatshop days of Oliver Twist and Upton Sinclair.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, the FGA inked legislation is designed to weaken federal child labor law protections. In six GOP-led states, Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and South Dakota bills to weaken the regulations that protect children have been introduced. The Arkansas law repeals protections for workers younger than 16. According to the New York Times’ recent reporting, in astonishing numbers slaughterhouses and other corporations use undocumented children.

In this context, the GOP crocodile tears from Florida’s legislature about “curbing” illegal migration through humiliation tactics, with SB1718 and a comparable House bill seem disingenuous. Health care providers are supposed to withhold care until after the provider has humiliated the non-whites in the emergency room, demanding to know their immigration status. “Those” people will be asked to confess their legal status before receiving care, in violation of the 14th Amendment.

There is no cost saved, no financial upside to Floridian taxpayers to terrify and disrespect injured people in the emergency room with superfluous interrogation. The method to stick it to the federal government by getting funds for indigent care, is to expand Medicaid. Thanks to the state GOP we in Florida have been denied expanded Medicaid; which was designed to foist indigent medical costs onto the federal budget. It is the feds, after all, who are blocking immigration reform on both sides of the aisle.

Instead, SB1718, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday, is a mean-spirited spit in the eye of the ill, that benefits no one.

The meaningless unkind legislation lies at the font of do- nothing laws to placate their MAGA unemployed and underpaid constituents. Demanding the sick be harassed is GOP propaganda designed to pretend they are “doing something.”

While Washington dithers on immigration reform, SB1718 is performative. People who are undocumented and everybody else now will need to answer the intrusive birther questioning delaying life-saving care. Those who are insulted by the insinuation will likely be those citizens and legal immigrants now waiting in longer ER wait times. Unhelpful and absolutely the wrong venue.

When the GOP had fleeting control in California 30 years ago they tried to restrict the undocumented population’s access to health care and education. CA187 was tossed within months as non-conforming to the 14th amendment in the U.S. Constitution. The upshot was popular outrage and a rout by the Democrats that has left the GOP unelectable in California for decades.

Adding this cruel prank has been tried and found, not just wanting, but profoundly un-American, and unenforceable. The Florida Legislature must know they are — let’s call it ‘massaging,’ their base with a motherism that can’t stand up to the first Constitutional blush. The panders of child labor in the GOP and Democratic party can continue to lower wages with vulnerable children from Mexico. This outrageous exploitation has a financial award to evil that shaming sick people in the emergency room won’t address. In our one-party Florida, we sport a legislature with no shame. We are fast becoming a state with no home insurance, no clean water, no right to local control; and now just plain ugly behavior to non-whites seeking emergency care.

Ellen Starbird

Cape Coral