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March 6, 2006
Editorial Observer
In Immigrant Georgia, New Echoes of an Old History
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Savannah, Ga.

The Coke-bottle glasses of hindsight can leave even profound historical miseries all blurry with sentimentality. That's one way to explain the Savannah Irish Festival, a two-day celebration of the Great Famine's great contribution to this lovely Southern city — the migration of thousands of starving laborers who toted barges, lifted bales, dug ditches and cellars, and put down roots here in the mid-1800's.

Their descendants crowded the Savannah Civic Center for the festival, eating corned-beef sandwiches, drinking Guinness and applauding the young step dancers who thundered across the stage, tossing their auburn ringlets. Vendors sold teapots and cookbooks and those itchy, kitschy sweaters and scarves that have become the worldwide uniform of warm, fuzzy Irishness.

It is hard to imagine a tubercular immigrant, knee deep in cellar muck, dreaming that his adopted city would one day commemorate his sacrifice with a party. Unskilled Irish immigrants were abused and despised back then, chained to a life of poverty and hard labor that bonded them — at least for a little while — with enslaved African-Americans.

The parallels with the present day are too obvious to ignore. Georgia is undergoing another demographic shift, as Mexican immigrants flock to its farms, mills, processing plants and cities. The Latino immigrant population has soared in the last 10 years and exploded in the last 5, to an estimated 650,000 in a state of nine million. Some experts say the real immigrant number is double that. At least half of the newcomers are illegal, unskilled laborers who, like their Irish predecessors, want "any job, but now."

Anti-immigrant groups have taken to calling the state "Georgiafornia," and have vowed to fight the Latino influx. As Congress takes up immigration legislation in coming weeks, the Republicans who control the Georgia Legislature have been way ahead of them, having already put the issue at the top of their agenda. The leader of the effort, Senator Chip Rogers, has sponsored a bill he calls "the most comprehensive illegal-immigration legislation in America." State Senate Bill 529, the Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act, seeks to cut off illegal immigrants from what its backers perceive to be a vast plundering of taxpayer-financed benefits, like medical care and schooling.

The bill is less ham-fisted than a measure recently passed by the Georgia House, which would impose a 5 percent surcharge on people wiring money abroad who could not prove they are here legally. The Senate bill proposes a strategy of deterrence by bureaucracy. Anyone who hires someone at more than $600 a year, for example, would not be able to take a business deduction on a state tax return without verifying the employee's legal status.

The Republicans who control the Georgia Legislature say that public sentiment is with them and that the time to strike is now. The bill's opponents acknowledge that S.B. 529 is likely to pass and have concentrated their efforts on trying to pull as many of its teeth as possible.

Yet, while Georgia is not about to break out the "Kiss Me, I'm Mexican" buttons, the current political climate is far different from the one the Irish newcomers banged up against a century and a half ago. Much of the state is struggling to find a sensible and humane way to handle the rising tide of newcomers. Even Senator Rogers's most vocal opponents admit that on balance, things could be worse. Senator Sam Zamarripa, an Atlanta Democrat, was able to negotiate with Mr. Rogers to exempt those under 18 from S.B. 529 and to protect access to prenatal care and higher education.

And not everyone here is phobic about living in Georgiafornia. Savannah, for example, is home to people like Melody Ortiz, a recruiter at Armstrong Atlantic State University, who travels the state looking for Hispanic students to apply for scholarships financed by the Goizueta Foundation, founded by Roberto Goizueta, the former Coca-Cola chief executive. One of her goals is to get the children of illegal immigrants into higher education, something an earlier version of Senator Rogers's bill tried explicitly to deny.

Then there is John Newton, editor of La Voz Latina, a free monthly newspaper that circulates in Georgia and South Carolina, part shopper, part immigrant manifesto. Mr. Newton, who is not Hispanic, describes his job as something close to a missionary vocation. "How insane it is," he writes, "for a nation of aging baby-boomers to vilify a work force composed, for the most part, of members of the Christian faith, with strong family values, a willingness to work and a desire to succeed."

Savannah is approaching its biggest celebration of the year, St. Patrick's Day, when hordes descend on the sidewalks and historic squares, and the grits and fountains turn green. That celebration, like its New York counterpart, has become a beer-soaked blowout that has little to do with any specific immigrant group. But underneath the happy, vague ethnicity of it all is a rich and tear-soaked history. And anyone who cares to look around can see the telltale signs of that history repeating itself.