Fake Immigration Reform In South Carolina

BEHIND STATE LAWMAKERS’ PANDERPALOOZA

By Tim Manning, Jr.

FITSNews – July 16, 2008 – Immigration reform in South Carolina was a slow debate.

President Bush passed federal reform with the stroke of a pen on June 6, but in South Carolina, it took our legislature seven months to pass an identical bill. Our legislators periodically brought it up from December through June, throughout the entire year’s legislative session. They did lots of public grandstanding on it, all the while fevering fiendishly over how much pork they could sneak in under the radar.

The grandstanding I’m talking about is the E-Verify system endorsed by Tom Tancredo.

And, no, Tancredo is not guilty in this. In fact, he is perhaps the most abused. The source of the problem is the legislators in South Carolina and their benefactors who took his idea and passed a fake version of it.

In Georgia, after a groundswell of grassroots support, Gov. Sonny Purdue signed a tough immigration bill, and illegals immediately began leaving the state.

Many of them have come to South Carolina.

Here, however, there was never any proper channeling of a groundswell of support for a bill similar to Georgia’s.

To start with, our bill applies only to companies that receive government contracts – but some filter on the tidal wave is better than none, especially when illegal immigrants see it as a sign of diminished hospitality.  And, in South Carolina, state government employs more people than any other single entity.

From the very beginning, the E-Verify plan was endorsed by the least likely of South Carolina Republicans to agree with anything that emanates from the mouth of Tom Tancredo. In fact, none of them would have been caught dead at either of the tiny gatherings put together for him by Confederate flag supporters during his two trips to the Palmetto State.

The legislators who proposed the bill were the crowd often referred to in these parts as “the Chamber crowd” or the Bush crowd. They are our state’s liberal or moderate Republicans, and they are tied into the establishment consultants who work for a man named Warren Tompkins.

The Tompkins coalition of political clients has dwindled to next to no one over the last few years. His most notable was President Bush. He also worked for Mitt Romney and consults with Sen. Jim DeMint and Rep. Bob Inglis.

His state legislative client incumbents have been retiring and losing elections, but are still strongly represented by Bobby Harrell and Joan Brady, who held the initial rally in support of the state bill that was drawn up by Tancredo.

It was an unlikely union that hard-right South Carolina politicos denounced as pandering: an unholy union of bad Republicans and good Tancredo legislation.

Support for the bill, S 0392, began to trickle in from legislators who endorsed, of all people, John McCain.

They made the difference and tipped the scales in favor of passing the bill. In fact, John McCain had three times as many endorsements from S.C. Republicans as any other candidate. His support in S.C. comes from Richard Quinn, Sr., Tompkins’s successor as the Big Dog of S.C. consultants.

After Harrell’s initial proposal of the legislation, State Senate Majority Leader Glenn McConnell announced his new American Amendment organization, whose purpose was to pass the E-Verify bill. Then, one by one, all of Quinn’s client legislators began chiming in.

Supporters of the bill heralded themselves as the champions of Americanism. They held rallies for America on the State House steps.

The only problem? None of the right people were there. Television news channels covered the rallies, but there was no grassroots support. No throng of the masses. Forty legislators posed for cameras, but they didn’t have a single supporter cheering them on. Not one.

And why not? After all, 1,000 people rallied in Greenville last year to protest the infamous “Pathway to Citizenship” bill. Long before there was even an immigration problem in South Carolina, most South Carolinians felt that Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity were far too nice to Lindsey “Grahamnesty” and John McCain.

The highlight of this year’s confusing and drawn-out squabbling over the supposed immigration crackdown was in March. Governor Mark Sanford’s Chief of Staff, Tom Davis—to his credit—resigned from office to run against one of the bill’s authors, State Senator Catherine Ceips.

Ceips’ campaign, in one of the boldest moves in recent memory in S.C. politics, got an illegal alien to break into her opponent’s house – yes, his personal residence!

Immediately following the illegal immigrant, Josias Mirales Ayala, came Ceips’s Chief of Staff, Randy Bates, carrying a camera and accompanied by a Spanish-speaking translator.

Ayala was happy to pose for the camera and talk about his status as an illegal worker.

The very next day, Ceips’s consultant, Rod Shealy, passed on the photos to the well-known Associated Press reporter, Jim Davenport, who immediately went to press with the scandal: “Senator Ceips’s Opponent Employs Illegal Aliens”.

The story claimed that Ayala worked for Partners Painting Company in Beaufort, S.C.

Their Manager, Henry Tome, immediately fired back.  He said he’d never heard of Ayala, and provided legal papers on all of his employees. In fact, Davis had gone to extra lengths when choosing a company to paint his house. He insisted on one that provided papers on its employees before work began.

The Ceips scandal is emblematic of the fake-from-the-very-beginning immigration reform that passed this month in South Carolina.

Ceips’s illegal immigrant worker was just as fake as her co-authored bill (with Senators Ritchie, Sheheen, Campsen, and Scott).

Let’s take a look at the bill itself. It was essentially the same E-Verify policy that President Bush enacted on June 6, a policy championed by Tom Tancredo. However, in South Carolina, where McCain operatives have hijacked the state government and shot it through with 1960s-style tax-and-spend liberalism, the bill was carefully de-fanged.

State Senator Jim Ritchie offered an amended version of the bill, as below. Ritchie’s amendments are inserted in bold:

Section 41-8-10. (A) On and after July 1, 2009, all private employers of one hundred or more employees must:

(1) register and participate in the federal work authorization program to verify information of all new employees; and require agreement from its subcontractors, and through the subcontractors, the sub-subcontractors, to register and participate in the federal verification of information of all new employees; or

(2) timely and properly complete both the employer and employee portions of the federal Form I-9 documents on each employee, and maintain those documents in accordance with federal law; or

(3) employ only workers who:

(a) possess a valid South Carolina driver’s license or identification card issued by the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles; or

(b) are eligible to obtain a South Carolina driver’s license or identification card in that they meet the requirements set forth in S.C. Code Ann. Section 56-1-40 through 56-1-90; or

(c) possess a valid driver’s license or identification card from another state where the license requirements are at least as strict as those in South Carolina, as determined by the Attorney
General.

In other words, this law only allows the E-Verify system championed by Tancredo to be a legal option for government contractors who wish to use E-Verify.

It adds no new requirements to ensure that illegal aliens are not employed.

The Form I-9 is the old way of doing it.  Using the words “timely and properly” is a totally disingenuous threat—similar to a dysfunctional parent who always threatens to spank their child but never actually follows through.

Ritchie never intended to follow through. In fact, he didn’t even make a real threat.

He changed the bill, essentially saying, “You don’t have to do it this new way. You can still do it the old way, if you want.”

Beyond that, he inserted the extra ‘or’s’ in the third option sub-heads and watered that down, too. But the most important ‘or’s’ are the ones he inserted at the end of each section, which make the old Form I-9 just as legal as the new E-Verify system or any old basic fake ID.

In other words, Ritchie says, “If you’ve found a way to cheat the Form I-9, don’t worry. You can keep doing it.”

How did this happen? Well, it started with State House Representative Jim Harrison.

Harrison—who is so closely connected with the Quinn-McCain-Graham machine that he is the only legislator to have his own office in Quinn’s own office building—sponsored the bill and rallied for the support of all of Quinn’s client legislators.

Why?

Farm Bureau Insurance.

Farm Bureau insures the twelve largest agribusiness-owned farms in South Carolina. As an aside, Farm Bureau’s own State House lobbyist was bypassed by their national team, who came in and gave large donations to the re-election campaigns of Ritchie, Harrison, and all of the other officeholders who supported the reform bill.

In an unexpected move, Gov. Sanford signed the S.C. bill only a few days after the President’s identical federal Executive Order.

The tall order of corporate deception on immigration reform is so high that our little South Carolina example should stand as an object lessen in how these dirty back room deals are manipulated into suicidal legislation.

For example, the S.C. McCain-Graham alliance is dependent, top to bottom, on corporate profits from illegal immigration.

The largest donor to Lindsey Graham’s first U.S. Senatorial election was Amick Farms, the largest employer of illegal immigrants in S.C.

Every Southern state has a town like Saluda, S.C. It’s virtually a third world country. The home of Amick Farms’s headquarters and poultry farms, it has come to be known as South Carolina’s “Little Mexico” — restaurants, convenience stores, cockfighting, the works.

Not to mention that it is deeply infested with M-13 gang warfare equal to that of the gang wars going on in Laredo, Texas. The city of Saluda also happens to be S.C.’s largest source of fake drivers licenses and social security cards.

Near my own home, in West Columbia, S.C., Amick Farms owns “the chicken plant.” Anyone who has driven down Sunset Boulevard during the shift change knows just what it looks like in Pamplona, Spain. The hundreds of workers running across the road to get to the parking lot might as well be the Running of the Bulls—complete with routine injuries and sometimes deaths. Don’t even think of upsetting yourself by looking into their child prostitution ring out on Monticello Road.

The first solution is obvious. It’s not about legislation. It’s about campaign funding. And it’s about one person, in particular: Roger Milliken. His money wasn’t enough to keep Quinn’s clients straight (perhaps in more ways than one).

They took Roger’s money, but Amick Farms and Farm Bureau matched his bid and doubled it. Quinn’s clients, Lindsey Graham included, have simultaneously grown squishy on Milliken’s favorite issue (trade). Are you listening Roger?

The object lesson for immigration reformers in other states is this: Watch out for fakes. Read the amendments carefully. Something good cannot be expected simply because your state is “so conservative”. The only thing that stopped the McCain-Kennedy bill was an unprecedented outpouring of grassroots alarmism.

Don’t think your state legislators will do the right thing without the same kind of fire under their feet.

In South Carolina, they told us they were taking care of it. We thought they were listening to Tancredo. Guess again. We should have paid better attention. Like with so many other good bills, the death of E-Verify occurred while the legislature was singing its praises.

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