Exhale, Florida. Biden’s COVID-19 and immigration policies are good for us | Opinion

No thanks to us, but it’s almost safe to exhale, Floridians.

On Election Day, Florida may have turned crimson for President Trump, but the state won’t have to wait long after today’s historic inauguration to benefit from President Joe Biden’s policies.

Democrat Biden has promised to urgently take action to stem the unfettered spread of COVID-19 and to deliver immigration reform and relief, both areas critical to the Sunshine State.

The effects of federal policy changes will be felt immediately in Florida.

On Inauguration Day — also the anniversary of the first recorded U.S. case of the novel coronavirus — Biden should immediately tackle first the COVID-19 pandemic, whose death toll surpasses 400,000 Americans as the new president takes office.

That’s more people dead than live in the cities of Tampa, Orlando and Hialeah.

Let that sinister statistic sink in.

Making our dire situation worse, a new and more contagious strain of the virus is spreading across the country — and Florida, a state without a mask mandate, is leading the nation in new cases of the U.K. variant, the CDC reports.

COVID vaccination

To boot, the vaccination program here is a mess, haphazard, and politics-driven. Biden can change this 180 degrees.

Not only is Florida behind where it should be in vaccinating vulnerable populations, but people may not get their second dose in a timely basis, largely due to the incompetence and political posturing of Gov. Ron DeSantis.

We can’t afford it, but the governor is already attacking Biden’s “whole-of-society” plan to mobilize resources in the public and private sector — and to give a centralized emergency vaccine management role to FEMA.

DeSantis called the move “not necessary” and a “big mistake,” dubbing Biden’s intention to set up FEMA clinics “FEMA camps.”

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But setting up a centralized command post is exactly what a president is supposed to do when managing a national emergency.

It’s called running a professional operation instead of a political one.

“We need one chief and everybody marching to the tune of that one chief,” said Abel Fernandez, a retired battalion chief for Miami-Dade Fire Rescue. “Right now we have 50 incident commanders [the state governors] and all municipalities doing their own thing. There’s no shared mission.”

Biden is giving a sorely needed organizational role in the distribution of vaccines to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has the infrastructure and experience in place to respond to crisis, and now has the right person to lead it.

Biden chose Deanne Criswell — the first woman to head the agency since it was founded in 1979. She has been a crucial player in New York’s response to the pandemic, is an expert at managing hurricanes and has been outspoken about the threat of climate change and the role it plays in exacerbating disasters.

Good news, too, in light of Florida’s more menacing hurricane seasons and its fragile environment.

Immigration reform & relief

On Day One, Biden is also expected to deliver to Congress an immigration reform plan he wants to pass that will positively affect hundreds of thousands of people living in Florida under uncertain status. This includes the parents of DREAMers, young people brought here as children who only know this country as their home, and whose parents had been living with the threat of deportation under the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies.

And Biden will restore programs for asylum seekers and refugees.

Legislation the Biden transition team said would “restore humanity and American values to our immigration system” will take time, but on the most pressing issue — deportation — relief will come right away.

While the Trump administration cruelly carried out one last deportation flight to Haiti Tuesday on the eve of the inauguration, Biden has promised to halt deportations during his first 100 days.

Most important, under Biden, we won’t be treated to immigrant-bashing harangues.

Biden doesn’t demonize refuge-seeking immigrants, but pays tribute to our history as a nation of immigrants and to our contributions to the country, as his appointment of Alejandro Mayorkas, a Cuban-American Jew, to lead Homeland Security shows.

And more poignant, we’ll see Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor swear in as vice president Kamala Harris, the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants.

There’s poetic justice in Biden appointing a Cuban American to lead Homeland Security | Opinion

What else could Florida possibly want?

I know: a new governor.

But, for now, we have Biden, competent, sane, decent — and he doesn’t act like he’s in a reality show every day.

Biden will protect our quality of life in the way his predecessor didn’t and Florida’s governor doesn’t: He’ll follow the science, listening to doctors and public health experts instead of debunked herd-immunity theory.

He’s focused on saving lives, not on political posturing, and he will continue to model proper mask wearing.

He’ll lead by example — what a concept.

Biden, a true seeker of bipartisan input and alliances, should put the Florida governor on his radar.

If he invited Mitch McConnell to church to pray with him, he can extend the outreach to DeSantis. And if DeSantis tries to derail Biden’s sensible leadership, he will have a lot of explaining to do to voters when he runs for reelection in 2022.

Maybe only then he and other naysayers will understand that people are looking for hope, inspiration — and solutions for Florida.