It’s no mystery that since the beginning of the recession, the No. 1 topic in voters’ minds has been job creation. But what happens when politicians fail miserably in reaching this goal? For North Carolina legislator Frank Iler the answer is simple: create a smoke screen of anti-immigrant laws.
Iler was elected in 2010 to the State House of Representatives for District 17 (Brunswick County). During his campaign, he supported a plan called “100 Days That Will Change North Carolina.” The document stated that if Republicans won the elections, within three months burdensome restrictions on private enterprise would be eliminated, which would generate more jobs.
Election time came and Republicans won the majority in the State House for the first time in more than a century. Those 100 days came and went. Today, almost a year later, unemployment levels have remained almost unchanged in North Carolina. According to the Employment Security Commission, the unemployment rate in September 2010 was 10 percent. A year later, it stands at 10.5 percent.
The second of the plan’s 10 points said the legislators would look for ways to reduce taxes to make N.C. a more competitive state and attract investment from large companies. For Congressman Iler this was a crucial point, given that Continental had plans to invest $500 million to build a new plant in his county.
A little more than three weeks ago, Continental announced its new plant would not be built in Brunswick County; it will not even be built in North Carolina. The multi-million-dollar investment, which will generate an estimated 1,700 jobs, will be built in South Carolina.
How do you remedy this embarrassing situation? Iler has a strategy: use controversy as a distraction. The Republican legislator is heading a new committee in the House of Representatives with the goal of drafting anti-immigrant laws.
“My personal opinion is that we need to make North Carolina as unwelcome for any illegal alien from wherever they come from,” Iler told the Wilmington Star News a week after Continental’s announcement. Coincidence?
According to Iler, this is a priority, and the committee’s first meeting is scheduled for early December. The committee of nine (six Republicans and three Democrats) will review laws and programs related to immigration in the state and will propose new anti-immigrant laws to the General Assembly.
This tactic is not new, according to a report from the New York-based Americas Society, which analyzed 53 cities that between 2006 and 2009 imposed local laws to “combat” undocumented immigrants.
The study’s conclusion was that these types of laws were more common in places with high rates of poverty and unemployment. (That explains why modern cities such as Charlotte, despite anti-immigrant rhetoric from out-of-touch leaders like Mecklenburg County Commissioner Bill James, has not passed such laws.) In cities like Payson, Ariz., Bellaire, Ohio and Athens, Ala., where there are fewer workers overall, both immigrant and non-immigrant, the economic impact of anti-immigrant ordinances has been negative.
We all remember the infamous anti-immigrant law SB1070 in Arizona. While ignoring critics and failing to use common sense, many Republican legislators from different states started to clone this anti-immigrant legislation, including some in the Carolinas.
When this happened, the voices of some town criers could be heard preaching the gospel of an immigration apocalypse. But because this is a nation of laws that promotes respect for the Constitution, the controversial parts of the Arizona law were suspended by a federal court and the decision was upheld by an Appellate Court.
This year, Utah legislators swept the Constitution under the rug, crossed their fingers and approved a tough immigration law, too, hoping their clone would not have the same fate as the troubled Arizona law. However, 14 hours after the new legislation became law it found itself on the desk of a federal judge. The same situation happened in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina.
At its core, the problem remains the same: Immigration is under the control of the federal government and any state that tries to dictate to the federal government how to implement its laws runs the risk of acting unconstitutionally.
Instead of wasting time with smoke screens, Congressman Iler should be concentrating on finding ways to generate more jobs. The numbers don’t lie. Ask farmers in Arizona, Georgia or Alabama if their anti-immigrant laws have helped improve their economies.
Diego Barahona is the editor of the Charlotte-based Spanish-language newspaper La Noticia.
This article appears in Nov 8-14, 2011.
