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Florida wants ‘legal’ visitors from Mexico to boost tourism

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Visit Florida, the state’s tourism marketing arm, has a $368,000 contract to “protect and increase visitor volume from Mexico to Florida.”

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The state of Florida, hoping to boost tourism from Mexico, is willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to increase “legal” traffic from south of the border.

Visit Florida, the state’s tourism marketing arm, is advertising a $368,000 contract to “protect and increase the volume of visitors from Mexico to Florida” and “extend the length of stay and increase spending by Mexican visitors “, according to a request for proposals.

The agency outlines requirements for the PR strategy, including paying for Mexican journalists and content creators to come to Florida and write tourism-related stories.

The initiative comes around the same time that Gov. Ron DeSantis, an outspoken critic of the federal government’s response to the surge in migrants at the Mexican border, has proposed a special session for Florida lawmakers to tackle immigration enforcement.

“We encourage all visitors to come through the proper legal channels to experience all that Florida has to offer,” said Visit Florida spokesperson Allison Hopkins. “And if anyone tries to come to our state illegally, the governor’s words speak for themselves.”

This year, DeSantis signed legislation that increases penalties for driving without a valid driver’s license, a problem for undocumented immigrants who cannot apply for a driver’s license in Florida, and prohibits counties and municipalities from accepting identification documents issued to people living in Florida illegally live. The United States

DeSantis also sent the Florida State Guard to Texas in February to help erect razor wire along the Rio Grande, a move that went against the U.S. Supreme Court decision that gave the Biden administration authority to manage the border.

“It’s sad that you don’t have a president who’s willing to just, you know, put his foot down and say, ‘I’m not going to let this happen to my country,’” DeSantis has said. “But in the absence of that leadership, despite the dereliction of duty, we will step up and do our part.”

Mission to Mexico

According to Visit Florida statistics, 514,000 Mexicans traveled to Florida last year. The top countries of origin for travelers visiting Florida were Canada, with 3.8 million; the United Kingdom, with 1.1 million visitors; and Brazil, with 1 million.

The agency selected for the marketing campaign will be tasked with increasing media coverage in Mexico to “support targeted demographic markets” and to “increase economic impact and profits for Mexican leisure travelers through marketing initiatives from (Visit Florida) and the tourism industry.”

The agency awarded the contract will have an annual budget of $128,000 for public relations and $235,000 for trade, according to the request, and the agency must provide a full-time staffer for each, in addition to a general manager for the marketing campaign.

Trade is a marketing strategy that focuses on distributors, wholesalers and retailers to promote businesses rather than consumers.

In 2023, Florida had 135 million tourists, but international travel has still not returned to pre-coronavirus levels. Of the 135 million tourists in 2023, only 12.1 million were from Canada or overseas markets, according to Visit Florida. Before the pandemic, 13.9 million visitors were international tourists.

Hopkins said 2023 had the largest number of “legal visitors” from Mexico ever. Last March, Florida saw a 61% increase in Mexican tourist visits compared to the same period in 2019. Hopkins said these numbers do not include undocumented immigrants.

Also, the campaign to promote Florida tourism in Mexico is not new, Hopkins said. The request for proposals “is a continuation of the routine business that (Visit Florida) has been conducting for many years.”

Visit Florida has long been in the crosshairs of the state’s legislative budget hawks, especially House Republicans, beginning with then-House Speaker Richard Corcoran in 2016.

It was leaked that the state’s tourism marketing department had secretly made a deal worth up to $1 million for Miami rap superstar Pitbull to promote Florida tourism. VISIT Florida’s then-CEO Will Seccombe resigned shortly afterward, and the House of Representatives spent years trying to abolish the agency through legislation or defund it in the budget process.

Florida’s 2024-2025 budget includes $80 million for VISIT Florida. DeSantis has not yet signed next year’s budget, which is expected to be several billion dollars lighter than the year before.

Border politics

DeSantis, who ran unsuccessfully for president for eight months, has consistently supported legislation to keep undocumented immigrants from living in Florida, including what has been called one of the nation’s strictest immigration laws.

He has criticized Biden and the federal government not only for their response to asylum seekers at the Mexican border, but also for a Department of Homeland Security rule that allows vetted Haitians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and Cubans to enter the country and two years to work. .

“We are doing more in Florida to deal with it than Congress,” DeSantis said in Naples last week. “It’s just sad that this is happening. So I was very, very disappointed to see that they basically completely capitulated at the border, and right now you don’t see anything happening at the border for the rest of this year.”

“Why are we allowing another two million people in and not doing anything about it? I think it was a real, real failure,” he added.

Last year, when SB 1718 passed, Mexico’s president urged Latino voters not to vote for DeSantis the day after the governor announced his campaign for the White House. “I hope the Hispanics of Florida wake up and don’t give him any vote,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said.

USA TODAY contributed. Ana Goñi-Lessan is the State Watchdog Reporter for USA TODAY – Florida and can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter/X: @goni_lessan.

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