In May 2023, Governor Ron DeSantis signed SB 1718, billed at the time as the toughest state immigration law in the country. Its centerpiece was something business lobbies had fought off for years: mandatory E-Verify for private employers with 25 or more employees, backed by real penalties. Effective July 1, 2023, Florida stopped treating employment verification as a suggestion. SB 1718 turned E-Verify into law with teeth, and the reaction, from farm fields to hospital lobbies to construction sites, told you how much of the economy had been running on the honor system.
What the law actually did
SB 1718 was a package, not a single rule. Its main provisions:
- Mandatory E-Verify for private employers with 25 or more workers for new hires, with fines of roughly $1,000 per day for employers found noncompliant after repeated violations, plus potential license consequences.
- Criminal transport provisions making it a state felony to knowingly transport into Florida a person who entered the U.S. illegally and had not been inspected, language broad enough to alarm families and church groups driving relatives across state lines.
- Invalidation of out-of-state licenses issued exclusively to unauthorized immigrants by other states.
- Hospital data collection, requiring hospitals that take Medicaid to ask about immigration status (with an answer not required) and report aggregate costs.
- Funding for the state's migrant relocation program, the one behind the flights that made national headlines.
The economic shockwave
The immediate story was labor. Florida's construction, agriculture, and hospitality sectors leaned heavily on immigrant labor, some share of it unauthorized. Reports through summer 2023 described crews shrinking, some workers leaving for Georgia or the Carolinas, and contractors complaining about project delays. Predictably, litigation followed too: a federal court blocked enforcement of parts of the transport provision in 2024 on constitutional grounds, while the E-Verify mandate stood.
Here is the honest way to read that shock. If a sector's business model collapses when identity verification is enforced, the problem is not the verification. It is that the sector was built on illegal labor, which undercuts wages for legal workers, immigrant and native alike, and rewards the least scrupulous employers. E-Verify's whole premise is that the demand side of illegal immigration, the job magnet, is where enforcement is most humane and most effective: no raids, no wall, just a database check at hiring.
The federal vacuum behind the state law
SB 1718 exists because Congress has refused for decades to mandate E-Verify nationally, despite the system being free, fast, and accurate for the overwhelming majority of checks. A patchwork of state rules is nobody's ideal: employers face different obligations across state lines, and states end up regulating at the edge of federal preemption, inviting exactly the court fights Florida got. But federal inaction guarantees state experimentation. Whatever one thinks of individual provisions, the E-Verify core of SB 1718 is the part of immigration enforcement that consistently polls well and that a serious Congress would have nationalized long ago, paired with adequate legal channels for the seasonal and skilled labor the economy demonstrably needs.
What this means for you
For our readers, the practical takeaways are concrete. If you are a legal worker in Florida, E-Verify is nothing to fear; your work authorization documents will clear, though you should make sure your records (name spellings, Social Security data, immigration documents) match exactly to avoid tentative nonconfirmations, and you have the right to contest one if it happens. If you are an employer, compliance is not optional at 25+ employees; build E-Verify into onboarding and keep the case records. If you are on a visa pathway, laws like SB 1718 are a reminder of why status documentation matters everywhere now, not just at the border: keep your I-94, EAD, and approval notices current and accessible.
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