D.A. King: Immigration law isn't optional

Athens Banner-Herald

Published Friday, January 15, 2010

Buzz up!A recent Banner-Herald story about Athens-Clarke County businesses and a "new" Georgia law brought a nod of sad amusement (Story, "Law change catches businesses off guard," Tuesday).

In 2006, amid public outrage over illegal immigration, the Georgia legislature passed the Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act. Essentially, it says Georgians must obey existing federal immigration, employment and benefits laws.

Among other things, the law requires government entities and their contractors to use federal tools to verify eligibility for employment and public benefits. It is a federal crime to knowingly hire illegal labor - and by federal law, most public benefits are denied to illegal aliens. The immigration status of noncitizens, and thus their eligibility for public benefits, is verified using a federal online database called SAVE.

The state law used language from federal law to define public benefits to include "any grant, contract, loan, professional license, or commercial license, retirement, welfare, health, disability, public or assisted housing, postsecondary education, food assistance, unemployment benefit, or any other similar benefit for which payments or assistance are provided to an individual, household, or family eligibility unit by an agency of a state or local government or by appropriated funds of a state or local government."

It should be easy for people to understand that a business license, by any name, is a commercial license and thereby a public benefit. Yet like many immigration laws that do not directly benefit the illegal aliens or the Americans who have created an industry out of using and rewarding them, the 2006 state law was treated as an optional requirement by virtually all local governments in Georgia.

In the 2009 legislative session, another law was passed, despite great resistance from the taxpayer-supported Georgia Municipal Association and Association County Commissioners of Georgia. The 2009 law merely clarified the language of the 2006 law and allowed for potential appropriations problems for agencies that continued to encourage illegal immigration by ignoring state and federal laws.

We now have a law that says we must obey the law that says we must obey the law. And I'm sure I'm not the only one asking why a law is required for any responsible local government to do everything possible to discourage already-illegal actions.

Yet the anti-enforcement crowd surely will regard as "intolerant extremism" any effort to deter illegal aliens from residing in Georgia and taking American jobs, taxpayer benefits and services, while we watch unemployment hover at 10 percent and a legislature that again must cut the state budget.

• D.A. King is president of the Georgia-based Dustin Inman Society, which advocates for the enforcement of immigration laws.