“Florida Invites You!” (But Not You): State Immigration Policy and the Making of Modern Florida
In May, Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor and U.S. presidential hopeful, signed legislation to curtail activities associated with undocumented immigrants. The laws, which went into effect July 1, invalidated undocumented residents’ out-of-state drivers’ licenses, restricted their access to health care, and made it a felony to “knowingly and willingly” assist undocumented people in coming to Florida. Immediately, several groups issued travel advisories warning visitors against the state’s hostility towards immigrant communities and, along with other state policies under DeSantis, Black and LGBTQ+ people. The effect was chilling. Within weeks, employers reported an exodus of workers, especially in Florida’s massive service industry, which depends heavily on migrant labor.
In a seemingly ironic twist, the new laws — which the New York Times described as the most restrictive anti-immigration legislation in over a decade — coincided with equally vigorous efforts to court a different kind of migrant to the Sunshine State: those with money. Visit Florida, the state’s “official tourism marketing corporation” (tourist bureau), announced a revamped and scaled up campaign to increase tourism, which waned during the COVID-19 pandemic before rebounding in the winter of 2022-23, when record numbers of visitors travelled to the Sunshine State. The state’s proposed budget called for increasing funding for the public-private agency by over a third.
Figure 1. Back cover of Florida of Today (Tallahassee: Bureau of Immigration, 1927), brochure in Box 10, Margolies Collection of Travel Ephemera (Acc. No. 20171116-JT). Courtesy of the Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware.
This Janus-faced policy toward newcomers, far from a contemporary aberration, has shaped Florida’s landscapes of labor and leisure for more than a century. In the 1920s, the state created a Bureau of Immigration to attract farmers, industrialists, and investors. Its work shifted to tourism with the onset of the Great Depression. Yet even as it pandered to potential visitors with exhibits and advertisements, the governor created a border patrol, in the mid-1930s, to restrict immigration of the poor from other states. After World War II, efforts evolved to concentrate on luring white, middle-class tourists craving a suburbanized form of semi-tropical leisure, evident in the myriad vacation and retirement developments built across the state, especially its southern half. This exclusionary landscape continues to define, and drive, Florida’s economy and identity.
“Florida Invites You!”
Until a century ago, Florida welcomed immigrants. The state constitution of 1868 contained a provision for a Commissioner of Immigration charged with encouraging foreign settlement. The Commissioner produced a series of brochures for foreign audiences, including several editions of The Florida Settler, or, Immigrant’s Guide.[1] The goal was largely to attract a new, non-Black labor force, a trend driven by white prejudice during Reconstruction.[2] This coincided with the development of railroads, which sold land along the lines to newcomers of all sorts.
Things changed in the xenophobic 1920s. In 1923 — a year before the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 — Florida established a Bureau of Immigration that was focused exclusively on domestic migrants: Americans from other states.[3] The bureau’s earliest campaign focused on the affluent and ambitious. Specifically, it touted investment opportunities in the wake of a great land boom, when developers, platting would-be cities out of the swamps, had sold lots on credit until the market collapsed. A marketing booklet put out by the bureau in 1927 signaled the welcoming spirit, proclaiming to readers that “Florida invites you!” The brochure’s cover highlighted the lumber industry and urban development, along with shipping and agriculture (Figure 1). It also focused on lifestyle, and short-term and part-time “immigration” in the form of tourism, featuring images of golf and tennis, fishing and boating, and sunbathing. [4]
Figure 2. Cover of Florida: March of Progress (Tallahassee, Florida: State of Florida, Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Immigration, 1932). Courtesy of the State Library of Florida.
Figure 3. Tropical Garden at the Florida Pavilion - Chicago, Illinois. 1933. Florida Memory, accessed Aug. 8, 2023. Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida.
During the Depression, the bureau honed the focus on tourism. Florida: The March of Progress (1932), featured tourists frolicking at a hotel by the beach, while ghosts of colonial settlers and indigenous people hover, implying a state of “progress” culminating in Florida as a vacation destination (Figure 2).[5] At Chicago’s Century of Progress in 1934, the Florida display portrayed the state as America’s playground (Figure 3).[6] As the nation inched toward economic recovery, gains showered upon Florida, with one strong winter season after another starting in 1935. To the bureau, though, a tourist was also a prospect. As real estate promotors and boosters had understood since the coming of the railroads, tourism was a gateway to growth.
“Border Patrol”
As new hotels and furnished apartments filled with middle-class tourists during the 1930s, state leaders grew concerned about growing numbers of “undesirables”: poor Americans, Black and white, looking for work. According to the New York Times, “Florida finds itself in the embarrassing position of inviting the world to come here for the Winter and then stopping thousands of would-be visitors at the State line to ascertain whether they would be good visitors.” After blocking more than 25,000 migrants the past few years, the state’s “Border Patrol” had gotten an early start in 1936 turning away potential “bums” to protect the “better class of Winter visitors.”
Governor David Sholtz (1933-37) created the patrol in 1934. Stationed along major highways, its charge was to turn back indigent travelers.[7] An avid business booster, Sholtz justified the program on grounds that it benefitted the state’s rapidly growing tourist economy. Sholtz “does not want Florida’s 2,500,000 visitors annoyed by hoodlums,” explained the Times. As the program came under growing criticism in its third and final winter season, 1936-37, including legal challenges, Sholtz argued it had deterred theft and mendicancy. Critics pointed out that while petty crime had declined, gambling and racketeering had increased, raising questions about what actually constituted an “undesirable.” Meanwhile, the lack of migrant labor hurt the state’s economy, particularly affecting businesses catering to tourists, as well as citrus growers.[8]
While the jobless transient was the target, what constituted its opposite — the desirable immigrant — was less well defined. An editorial in the Miami Beach Tribune attempted a guess (with a bit of sarcasm): “In Florida, ‘visible means of support’ does not include a pair of calloused hands and a disposition to work and earn. On the contrary, Florida prefers soft hands and a disposition to loaf and spend. In Florida, a rich wife is satisfactory proof that a subject is a desirable immigrant . . . The great trouble with the working class or undesirable immigrant in Florida is that he wants to earn a living off the community. Florida frankly prefers to live off her immigrants.”[9]
“The governor’s anti-immigrant position is in line with the state’s history of pandering to “a better class of citizens” to “Visit Florida.””
The desirable migrant was also white and gentile. The 1942 edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book listed scant options for Black travelers, including only two hotels in Jacksonville; two in Miami (both in the segregated northwest portion of the city); three each in St. Petersburg and Tampa; a single hotel in Orlando; and a handful of “tourist homes.” Hotels, motels, and tourist camps across the state (perhaps most conspicuously in Miami Beach) prohibited Jews and other ethnic groups until well after World War II, advertising that they catered only to a “restricted” clientele.
Florida’s exclusionary practices were by no means unique; the Los Angeles Police set up their own “Bum Blockade” to keep destitute migrants out of California. But they had an outsize impact. In tandem with the Bureau of Immigration’s national advertising campaigns to lure a “better class of citizen” (featuring white tourists enjoying leisure activities), they shaped the state’s image as a white, middle-class playground. The Bureau itself never explicitly barred anyone. But it worked hand in hand with Sholtz’s more overtly discriminatory measures.[10]
“Live, Work and Play”
World War II, which brought more Northerners than ever, along with advancements in air conditioning and air travel, accelerated migration to Florida, whose year-round population rose from 1.9 million in 1940 to 9.7 million in 1980. (Today it’s 22.3 million). After the war, the Bureau of Immigration launched a new campaign focused not on aspiring farmers, businessman, or investors, but on promoting the state to the white middle classes as a place to “live, work, and play” (Figures 4 and 5).
Figure 4. Ad from Cosmopolitan (January 1949): 97. Advertisements like this evoke tropes of middle-class suburbia with a tropical twist, showing young white families or older adults enjoying outdoor living Florida style.
Figure 5. Ad from Cosmopolitan (February 1948): 131. While many postwar ads targeted vacationers, some, like this one, targeted the potential permanent transplant, making the case one could “live, work, and play” full-time in the Sunshine State.
“Yield to the lure of the playground of America,” read a 1944 brochure, After Victory, with its “many and different beaches,” “a sports program almost without parallel,” and “some of the world’s greatest fishing waters.”[11] With photographs of young women sunbathing, children playing on the beach, middle-aged men golfing and fishing, and older adults (presumably retired) playing shuffleboard, the booklet presented the state as a tropical paradise focused on middle-class leisure. And it billed this paradise not just as a place to visit but to settle, underscoring that the state, by design, had no state or local income taxes, or property taxes on houses valued up to $5,000. Where racial difference appears, it was as a foil for white, middle-class leisure: Latin entertainers in Miami, Black workers peddling tourists in Afromobiles in Palm Beach, and Native Americans performing for visitors in the Everglades (Figures 6 and 7).
Figure 6. Page from “Welcome to Florida, All Year Vacation Land,” ca. 1950. Box 10 (item 22), Margolies Collection of Travel Ephemera (Acc. 2017116JT). Courtesy of the Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware. Like the flamingos, parrots, and the sandy beach, the Seminole boy wrestling with an alligator – a common form of tourist entertainment in South Florida - is presented as another tropical amenity for the would-be visitor.
Figure 7. Page from “Welcome to Florida, All Year Vacation Land,” ca. 1950. Box 10 (item 22), Margolies Collection of Travel Ephemera (Acc. 2017116JT). Courtesy of the Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware. Single-family dwellings, with generous features for “outdoor living” in the form of patios, large backyards, and Florida rooms were designed to promote “a sunnier way of life for everyone,” at least those who were white, middle-class, and suburban.
As people moved to Florida by the millions, builders and real estate developers erected sprawling communities of single-family houses, apartments, and hotels, with leisure amenities of the sort the Bureau had been promoting. This great wave of construction, concentrated on the southern Atlantic and Gulf coasts, fundamentally transformed the state into a (mostly) suburban semi-tropical paradise of sea and sand, golf and tennis. But this seemingly benign leisure landscape belied an ugly history, even by U.S. standards.
Today, three-quarters of a century later, prejudice seems to all but define Florida’s political imagination — despite the prominence of the Cuban, Haitian, and, now, Puerto Rican (and other) immigrant communities, and the fact that the state’s population is only 52% non-Hispanic white. Yet as disturbing (and economically counterproductive) as the governor’s anti-immigrant position is, it is very much in line with the state’s history of pandering to “a better class of citizens” to “Visit Florida.”
Now as a presidential candidate, DeSantis threatens to spread Florida’s toxic logic. His campaign pitch to “Make America Florida” assumes a particularly sinister meaning against this historical backdrop of exclusion, with its roots in a highly circumscribed understanding of human value and citizenship. Bringing this dark history to the fore is a first step in pushing the state — and the nation — to imagine a new, more inclusive future.
Author’s note: I would like to thank the librarians at the State Library and Archives of Florida; the Hagley-NEH fellowship program; and Trish Kahle for feedback.
Citation
Anna Andrzejewski, “’Florida Invites You!’ (But Not You): State Immigration Policy and the Making of Modern Florida,” PLATFORM, Aug. 14, 2023
Notes
[1] The Florida Settler, or, Immigrants' guide; A Complete Manual of Information Concerning the Climate, Soil Products and Resources of the State (Tallahassee: Commissioner of Immigration, 1873).
[2] George E. Pozzetta, “Foreigners in Florida: A Study of Immigration Promotion, 1865-1910,” Florida Historical Quarterly 53, no. 2 (October 1974): 164-80.
[3] Martin LaGodna, “Agriculture and Advertising: The Florida State Bureau of Immigration,” Florida Historical Quarterly 46, no. 3 (January 1968): 195-208.
[4] Florida of Today (Tallahassee: Bureau of Immigration, 1927), brochure in Box 10, Margolies Collection of Travel Ephemera (Acc. No. 20171116-JT), Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware.
[5] Florida: March of Progress (Tallahassee, Florida: State of Florida, Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Immigration, 1932), collection of the State Library of Florida, Tallahassee, Florida.
[6] David Nelson, “When Modern Tourism was Born: Florida at the World’s Fairs and on the World Stage in the 1930s,” Florida Historical Quarterly 88, no. 4 (Spring 1910): 435-68.
[7] “Florida to Turn Back 50,000 ‘Undesirables’ at Borders,” Tallahassee Democrat, November 17, 1936.
[8] Harris G. Sims, “Florida is Divided on Border Patrol,” New York Times, December 20, 1936.
[9] Westbrook Pegler, “Fair Enough,” Miami Beach Tribune, December 18, 1934.
[10] Florida; The March of Progress (Tallahassee: Bureau of Immigration, State Department of Agriculture, 1932), collections of the State Library of Florida.
[11] After Victory (Tallahassee: Bureau of Immigration, 1944), collection of the State Library of Florida, Tallahassee, Florida.
