From the July issue of Governing Magazine:

Excerpt from the below article:

Chip Rogers, the author of SB 529, thinks it’s a mistake to dwell on the issue or even on the question of whether illegal immigrants help or hurt the economy or pay more in taxes than they use. “The law is not for sale,” he says. “If someone is in violation of the law and they realize that Georgia is going to enforce the law and they make a decision not to be in Georgia because they don’t want to abide by the law, to me, that’s a good thing.”

COVER STORY/IMMIGRATION

Crackdown

Immigration pressures are rearranging politics in more than one state capitol.

By JOSH GOODMAN

When the subject of illegal immigration comes up, the states you think about first are Texas and California. Maybe Arizona. But, as of July 1, it is Georgia, a full thousand miles from the Mexican border, that is at the center of the immigration debate in the United States.

That’s because SB 529, its new immigration law now taking effect, is the most stringent statute of its kind anywhere in the country. It is the sort of law that immigration hard-liners would like to see enacted on a national basis. Under its provisions, state and local government agencies have to verify the legal residency of benefit recipients. Many employers will have to do the same whenever they make a hiring decision. Law enforcement officers are given authority to crack down on human trafficking and fake documents. In sum, SB 529 touches every facet of state policy that relates to illegal immigrants.

The central question about the law is, obviously, whether it will work as intended and reduce the impact of undocumented newcomers on the state. But an equally important question is whether the political situation that led to SB 529 can be sustained and replicated in other places. The topic of illegal immigration has bedeviled virtually every state legislature and the U.S. Congress for years, without much substantive result. What made Georgia different was a populist uprising that all but forced the legislature to crack down on the undocumented community. If that sort of pressure gains momentum elsewhere, the near future may portend a series of state laws as strict as Georgia’s — even if Congress manages to pass an immigration bill of its own. Oklahoma and Colorado have both enacted laws with some provisions similar to SB 529 — the question is how many states will follow.

If Georgia’s experience does become a prototype for other states, it will be through the building of improbable coalitions and unlikely rivalries. In many places, the Chamber of Commerce finds itself at war with the Republican Party over immigration; Christian conservatives are unsure whom to support; and union members and African Americans are forced to reevaluate their ties to Democrats.

These rivalries played out in Georgia, where businesses did not want to be deprived of a source of cheap labor. “The concern,” says Bryan Tolar, vice president of the Georgia Agribusiness Council, “is that the illegals would still be in the United States, but that we might not have any of the migrant workers — those who are here legally and those who are here illegally.” Even more than that, businesses did not want the state to turn them into residency-status enforcers, creating bureaucratic obstacles every time they take on a new employee.

But the Republican legislative majority that created the law felt little obligation to the corporate community. Senator Chip Rogers, the sponsor of SB 529, says openly that he doesn’t care whether big business opposes him because of his immigration views. “I blame 90 percent on employers,” Rogers says. “They’re the ones that are profiting by breaking the law.” He thinks many businesses, especially smaller ones, agree with him. They would prefer to hire legal workers, he says, and don’t want to be at competitive disadvantage with those that hire illegal ones. He thinks industry groups are out of touch with the views of ordinary Georgians, including rank-and-file Republicans.

Nor did SB 529 owe its success to Christian conservatives, the other pillar of Republican political strength in recent years. Nationally, the Christian right is ambivalent on immigration, conflicted by conservative principles that say lawbreaking should never be tolerated, and Biblical admonitions to provide charity to the “least among us.” Some religious conservatives quietly supported SB 529, but they were not major players in the debate that led to its passage.

So who provided the momentum for the nation’s toughest immigration law? “It really was the people,” says Phil Kent, a Georgia conservative activist who also serves as national spokesman for Americans for Immigration Control. “It was people walking up to their legislators and saying, ’I’m sick and tired of what’s going on in my neighborhood.’ ”

This line, echoed time and again by supporters of SB 529, is part bluster — almost every politician says the people are behind him — and part truth. The reality is that most of the powerful groups in the state, be they conservative Christians and big business on the right or African-American leaders on the Democratic side, didn’t really want a crackdown on illegal immigration, but every opinion poll showed that most Georgians did.

FULL-TIME CRUSADER

If there’s one person that Kent and Rogers have in mind when they talk about “the people,” it’s D.A. King, although he is anything but a typical Georgian. Since giving up his career as an insurance agent in 2003, King has been a full-time opponent of illegal immigration. From his home in a peaceful suburban neighborhood in Marietta, with an American flag flying in front and another one in back, King blogs against amnesty, organizes protests, writes a newspaper column and fields questions from reporters. When the legislature is in session, he spends most of his time at the Capitol in Atlanta. “My typical day is 14, 16 hours long,” King says. “I work seven days a week if my wife can’t drag me out on a Saturday.”

Marathon hours not withstanding, there’s probably an aspiring D.A. King in most states. What’s unusual about Georgia is that legislators cared just as much about his views as they did about the views of Chamber of Commerce lobbyists. Matt Towery, a former Georgia state representative who now operates a polling and political news company, has as good an explanation as anyone as to why this came about.

There is a lot more HERE.