D.A. King: The Georgia Senate has voted on immigration enforcement and E-Verify
As I write on the eve of day forty and a 2011 Georgia Senate decision on who really runs the state [1], I can’t help but think back to the golden days of the first term of the Perdue administration.
What a difference five years seems to have made in the support for immigration and employment enforcement in the Republican controlled Georgia Senate.
Many of the same GOP state senators who voted “YEA” for the 2006 Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act authored by Senator Chip Rogers have now promised to defect to the “NAY” side [2]and vote with the Democrats on illegal immigration. If they allow a vote. That is recorded.
A quick look into the fairly recent past at the record of the senate floor vote on Rogers’ landmark “06 legislation shows forty (40!) “YEA” votes for the bill that not only allowed for state law enforcement to be trained to expand their authority to enforce immigration law and verification of eligibility for public benefits. But it also had the biggy. The proven effective verification tool.
The 2006 legislation [3] contained an E-Verify requirement.
Too many news reports and commentaries have left out the fact that Georgia has had an E-Verify requirement in place since April of 2006 when then Governor Sonny Perdue signed SB 529.
It is still there. Current anti-E-Verify senator John Bullock even voted for it. So did then Senator Casey Cagle. And Greg Goggins. And Ross Tolleson. Along with Jeff Mullis and Johnny Grant.
The 2006 law says that the no-cost federal E-Verify system must be used by all “public employers” and their contractors. Think… Atlanta, city of, or DeKalb County or GDOT. Or Turner Construction when they bid to build a school or courthouse.
E-Verify was much less accurate and less easy to use back in 2006. And we had fewer unemployed Americans.
But unless this long-time American is forgetting what he saw from the senate gallery then, the concept of voting against protecting jobs in Georgia with use of E-Verify was a very Republican concept.
How times change.
Take a look at the entire 2006 Senate vote record on SB 529 HERE [4] . You may even see that five years ago, on illegal immigration, some Democrats also voted to protect jobs and the rule of law in Georgia.
Huh.
In any language, “change” has indeed come to Georgia. Today, we will all see just how much.
Si?