Immigration Bill Divides South Carolina Business Sector

Published February 25, 2011

Businessmen in South Carolina who depend on immigrant labor are finding themselves in the midst of a heated debate between those who favor and are opposed to an anti-immigrant bill.

SB20 has already been approved in the state Senate judiciary committee and it is expected that it will be brought to a vote very soon with a very good chance of passing in the Republican-controlled body.

The measure requires police departments to review the immigration status of people suspected of and arrested for committing a crime or even a minor infraction, such as a traffic violation.

Defenders of undocumented immigrants argue that SB20 will lead to racial profiling by law enforcement.

South Carolina already has one of the strongest immigration laws in the country, which levies fines on firms that hire undocumented workers and obligates them to use the federal E-Verify program to ensure that their labor force has permission to work in the country.

"At the point where we're debating a measure that's going to be detrimental in an unfair way to the same people who produce their goods and services, where are the representatives of all these productive areas?" asked Ivan Segura, a member of the South Carolina Hispanic Leadership Council, a group leading opposition to SB20.

Sectors like agriculture, construction, the hotel industry, restaurants and food services depend in large part on immigrant labor.

"We're following very closely the development of SB20 but we feel that this does not directly attack employers but rather the workers," Russell Ott of the South Carolina Farm Bureau told Efe.

Even so, he said, "we're competing with other states for labor and passing (the bill) would put us at a disadvantage, many believe it's unconstitutional, we don't need another immigration law, there are more important issues like unemployment and fixing the economy."

Tammy Besherse, an attorney with the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center, says the silence or neutrality within the business sector is due to several factors.

"Not giving the impression that they approve of immigrants who are in the country without papers and that they hire them for their companies, and showing that they don't believe in the law could drive potential customers away and affect their businesses," she told Efe.

The South Carolina Chamber of Commerce, representing some 18,000 firms with more than 1 million employees, decided not to take a position with regard to SB20.

According to Elaine Lacy, a researcher at the University of South Carolina Aiken, if undocumented immigrants leave, the state would lose $1.8 billion in consumer spending, $783 million in production and about 12,000 jobs.

Recent figures made public by the Pew Hispanic Center show that the undocumented population in South Carolina fell by 21.4 percent between 2007 and 2010, from 70,000 to 55,000, respectively.

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