Georgia passes immigration bill similar to Arizona's

[QueEx]

<font size="5"><center>
Georgia passes immigration bill
similar to Arizona's</font size><font size="4">

Police would be given the power to check the immigration
status of 'criminal' suspects and many businesses would
be required to do the same with potential hires.</font size></center>

Opponents of the bill protest outside the Capitol in Atlanta. Immigrant advocates threatened a
state boycott if the bill becomes law, and Georgia's powerful agricultural industry warned of a
field worker shortage. (David Goldman / Associated Press / April 14, 2011)


Los Angeles Times
By Richard Fausset,
April 14, 2011


Reporting from Atlanta— Following Arizona's lead, the Georgia Legislature on Thursday passed a strict measure that would empower police to check the immigration status of "criminal" suspects and force many businesses to do the same with potential employees.

The bill passed in the waning hours of the legislative session despite critics' outcries. Immigrant advocates threatened a state boycott if it became law, and Georgia's powerful agricultural industry warned, among other things, that federal guest worker programs alone could not provide enough laborers to meet farmers' needs.

<SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">Now the measure heads to the desk of Republican Gov. Nathan Deal, who campaigned last year on the promise of implementing an Arizona-style law in a state with, according to one 2009 estimate, 480,000 illegal immigrants — about 20,000 more than Arizona</span>.

Since his election, however, Deal has warned that immigration laws should not place an "undue burden" on employers, raising concerns among foes of illegal immigration that he was wobbling.

A Deal spokesman declined to comment late Thursday on the governor's plans for the bill.

Whether or not it is enacted, Georgia's legislation underscores the increasingly disparate strategies that states are invoking in lieu of a comprehensive federal plan to deal with illegal immigration.

On Monday, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a federal judge's order striking down parts of the controversial Arizona law, known as SB 1070, which was signed by Gov. Jan Brewer last year. Among the rejected sections was a provision requiring police to check the immigration status of people they lawfully stop whom they also suspect to be illegal immigrants.

• Some states, including Florida, are considering significant immigration bills;

• others, including Nebraska and Colorado, have rejected such bills recently;

• Utah passed immigration-control legislation last month but softened its effects by also passing a law that creates "guest worker" ID cards for undocumented immigrants; and

• just this week, Maryland's General Assembly passed a bill that would grant in-state tuition to illegal immigrants (as California does). Maryland's governor was expected to sign it.

• Georgia is one of several states that denies in-state tuition to illegal immigrant residents.

In a provision with rough similarities to the most contentious part of the Arizona law, the Georgia bill gives police the authority to check a suspect's immigration status if the suspect is unable to produce a valid ID and if the officer has probable cause to believe the suspect has committed a "criminal offense." If the person is verified as an illegal immigrant, police can detain that person or notify federal authorities.

Charles Kuck, a prominent Atlanta immigration attorney, said the way the bill is written, "criminal offenses" could be as minor as traffic violations.

Kuck, a Republican and outspoken critic of the legislation, said there was some question as to whether this provision gave police any more power than they already have. But the bigger problem, he said, was with "the message that it sends — this bill says, 'Immigrants, do not come to Georgia.... You're gonna have to show us your papers when you come.' "

He scoffed at another section prohibiting police from considering "race, color or national origin" when enforcing the bill.

"Let me ask you a question," Kuck said. "Do you think any white people are going be taken in for an immigration background check if they forgot their wallet at home?"

Among other things, the bill outlaws the use of fake IDs to secure employment and the transporting or harboring of illegal immigrants while knowingly committing another crime.

The biggest sticking point proved to be the provision that all but the smallest companies use the federal system called E-Verify to check the immigration status of new hires.

Critics from the farm lobby said E-Verify was not totally accurate, and put employers at risk of lawsuits if they erroneously denied a legal resident a job. The bill's supporters characterized that as overblown rhetoric from an industry addicted to cheap labor.

An earlier Arizona law, passed in 2007, requires all employers to use E-Verify and dissolves businesses that repeatedly hire illegal immigrants. That law, too, has been challenged on grounds that it usurps federal authority. The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in December.

If Georgia's bill becomes law, it too is likely to wind up in court. But Peter Spiro, a Temple University law professor, said its fate may hinge on whether Arizona's laws pass constitutional muster.

But for the time being, fans of the Georgia bill were heartened by their achievement Thursday.

"We're a law-abiding state," said state Sen. Earl "Buddy" Carter, a Republican from Pooler. "And we want people to abide by the laws."

richard.fausset@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-georgia-immigration-20110415,0,240355.story

 

[Damn Right]

@ turning untrained business owner into ins agents

 

[GET YOU HOT]

Ok, fill out one of these...

Employment Application

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Please print and fill out all sections

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If hired, on what date can you start working? ___ / ___ / ___

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If yes, please describe the crime - state nature of the crime(s), when and where convicted and disposition of the case.________________________________________________________________

(Note: No applicant will be denied employment solely on the grounds of conviction of a criminal offense. The date of the offense, the nature of the offense, including any significant details that affect the description of the event, and the surrounding circumstances and the relevance of the offense to the position(s) applied for may, however, be considered.)

 

[QueEx]

<font size="3">
Where's all the Georgia posters ? ? ?

How is this going/not going in Georgia, generally, and the ATL, specifically ? ? ?

</font size>

 

[Majestic Lion]

It's a play for the conservative xenophobes, of which there are many, and of whom most vote. In true conservative fashion they'll preach it while circumventing it some way or another though. The housing market here depends on immigrant labour almost entirely, and GA is 2nd or 3rd on the foreclosure ranking as it is. If anything this will guarantee wages for immigrants are kept low for the next few years...that may very well have been the plan from the start.

 

[QueEx]

Georgia immigrant crackdown backfires​

A Georgia survey released last week found 11,080 farm positions that needed to be filled.
| AP Photo



p o l i t i c o
By REID J. EPSTEIN
June 22, 2011


Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal’s <SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">program to replace fleeing migrant farmworkers with probationers backfired when some of the convicted criminals started walking off their jobs because field work was too strenuous</span>, it was reported Wednesday.

And <SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">the state’s farms could lose up to $1 billion if crops continue to go unpicked and rot</span>, the president of the Georgia Agribusiness Council warned.

In a story datelined Leslie, in rural south Georgia, The Associated Press writes of convicts calling it quits at 3:25 p.m. — more than 2½ hours before the crew of Mexicans and Guatemalans they replaced.

<SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">“Those guys out here weren’t out there 30 minutes and they got the bucket and just threw them in the air and say, `Bonk this. I ain’t with this. I can’t do this,’”</span> said Jermond Powell, a 33-year-old probationer working at a farm in Leslie. “They just left, took off across the field walking.”

At the same time as the survey’s release, Deal, a first-term Republican, announced a program to link the state’s 100,000 probationers with farmers looking to fill positions, the vast majority of which pay less than $15 per hour.

. . . as many as two-thirds of probationers who have tried working on the two farms in the last week have either walked off the job or not come back for a second day.


. . . farms have already lost $300 million and could lose up to $1 billion if it does not get access to a reliable workforce.


FULL STORY

 

[Greed]

2 years after immigration laws, Ga., Ala., stable

2 years after immigration laws, Ga., Ala., stable
By KATE BRUMBACK | Associated Press
21 hrs ago

VIDALIA, Ga. (AP) — Two years after Georgia and Alabama passed laws designed to drive away people living in the country illegally, the states' agricultural areas are still heavily populated with foreign workers, many of whom don't have legal authorization to be here.

There are still concerns over enforcement and lingering fears among immigrants, but in many ways it appears that people have gone on with life much as it was before the laws were enacted.

Farmers say many of the foreign workers have returned because the laws are not heavily enforced and it once again seems safe to be here.

But the story is more complicated than that: Some are still staying away or have gone underground, according to community activists, and some farmers say they are filling labor shortages not with returning immigrants but with workers hired through a program that grants temporary legal visas.

Meanwhile, employers and workers in both states are watching as Congress wrestles over plans that aim to simultaneously prevent future illegal immigration and offer a chance at citizenship for millions now living in the country illegally.

Georgia and Alabama were two of five states to pass tough crackdowns on illegal immigration in 2011, a year after Arizona made headlines for a hard-line immigration enforcement law that ended up being challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Immediately after the laws were passed, farmers in both states complained that foreign workers who lived there had left and that the itinerant migrants who generally came through were staying away. American workers weren't stepping forward to perform the back-breaking work immigrants had done for years, and crops were rotting in the fields because of a lack of laborers, they said.

An informal survey conducted in Georgia showed that farmers of onions, watermelons and other hand-picked crops lacked more than 11,000 workers during their spring and summer harvests of 2011, Georgia Department of Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black told a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing on immigration enforcement and farm labor.

But then as courts began blocking significant elements of the law and some loopholes became apparent, some of the workers who had fled for fear of arrest and deportation returned. Others were drawn back by their longstanding ties to the communities.

Victor Valentin, 25, and his wife, Maria Gonzales, 23, came to the Vidalia onion growing region in south Georgia five years ago and found work quickly. But when the state passed its law cracking down on illegal immigration, they feared they would be caught and deported, and left for neighboring North Carolina.

They didn't last long. With two young children and no support network there, life was difficult. At the same time, the situation in Georgia seemed to have calmed down.

"We still talked to people here, and we heard there weren't really any problems, that things hadn't really changed," Valentin said, explaining that the family decided to return to the Vidalia area after about nine months. He's found work harvesting pine straw since his return.

This year, Black and a number of industry leaders in Georgia told The Associated Press they haven't heard of any labor shortages.

The situation in Alabama is similar.

"No one seems to be having any problems," said Alabama's agriculture commissioner, John McMillan, who added that he has spoken with farmers who saw migrants return once it became clear the law passed in Alabama was, in practice, mostly toothless. Courts blocked most of the law's toughest sections, including one that required public schools to check students' citizenship status, and the massive arrests envisioned by some simply didn't happen.

Also, according to government statistics, thousands of employers in Alabama have been ignoring a provision in the state's immigration law that requires them to register with the federal E-Verify system, a program to electronically verify workers' legal status.

And yet, at least in Georgia, the story is a bit more complicated than it may seem on the surface.

Some migrant families — both legally and illegally in the country — are indeed still avoiding Georgia because they fear discrimination and profiling, said Andrea Hinojosa, a community organizer who has worked with Latino workers in the Vidalia area for more than 20 years.

Other laborers who had worked their way up from the fields into more stable factory or construction work have turned to less stable jobs because businesses are starting to use E-Verify, a key provision of the Georgia law, Hinojosa said.

"I think it has probably put people back into hiding, put them back in the shadows," Hinojosa said. "It doesn't mean they're not working. It could mean that they have just found a job where they can't be detected."

Maria Barbosa, a legal permanent resident from Mexico, opened Los Olivos, a store that caters to the Vidalia area's Latino population, in July 2008. She estimates that her profits at the store, which stocks international phone cards, traditional foods and party supplies, dropped by about 30 percent after Georgia's law passed. It has rebounded somewhat in the past two years, but it's still not as strong as it was, she said.

One reason labor shortages in the fields have subsided — in addition to the return of migrant workers who had fled — is that some of the biggest farms in the area have started using or increased their use of a federal guest-worker program to bring in foreign workers legally.

Farmer R.T. Stanley of Stanley Farms, which grows more than 1,000 acres of onions, as well as other crops and vegetables in the area, is one of them.

Stanley said he has started to use more legal guest workers, who are brought into the country on a visa for a defined period of time, because he is not able to find as many experienced migrant workers locally as he used to.

For Barbosa, that can hurt business, because guest workers aren't nearly as reliable as customers as those who settle in and develop attachments to a community.

"They'll come in and buy some beans and tortillas and then send $1,000 to Guatemala," she said of the guest workers.

Many farmers have long complained the federal guest-worker program is too rigid and difficult to use.

"We know we've got to deal with the rules, and we do," said Bob Stafford, director of the Vidalia Onion Business Council. "We do the best we can with them."

Now farmers and workers both are turning their attention to the debate over national immigration reform and are hoping for provisions that will help them.

"We need a real good guest-worker program," Stafford said, "something that will work ... for the growers and for the workers and for the community."

Barbosa, whose husband works as a crew leader recruiting and overseeing field workers for farmers, is also watching Washington.

"People have hope," she said. "But there's been a lot of talk about immigration reform before and nothing has happened, so there's still a lot of doubt."

http://news.yahoo.com/2-years-immigration-laws-ga-ala-stable-135856668.html