By Molly Parker and Kristen Poland
Staff Writers

Apolinar moved to the United States from Veracruz, Mexico in 1989, at the age of 20, leaving behind his parents and brothers and sisters to find employment in America so that he could help support his large family.

He found a job at a poultry rendering plant in Delaware, a company that, like many others, prospered on the backs of immigrant labor. So Poli, as he is known, said he doesn’t understand why immigrants are now the source of such national scorn.

Poli, who asked that his last name be withheld, moved to Berkeley County eight years ago to work with his brother as a stable hand. He became a U.S. citizen last year, but still has many friends and family members who remain in the country illegally.

“I would just like the state to help us, at least people who try to work and get driver’s licenses so they can drive their children to school,” he said. 

But South Carolina appears primed to do just the opposite. In the absence of a congressional compromise to deal with illegal immigration, states and municipalities across the nation are taking matters into their own hands by passing laws and new regulations to crack down on people who are living in the country without permission and the businesses that hire them. 

Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, House Speaker Bobby Harrell, R-Charleston, and Republican Gov. Mark Sanford all have announced support for finding a solution to dealing with the state’s illegal population, which ranges anywhere from 36,000 according to a U.S. Census Bureau estimate released in 2000, to 76,000, a number calculated by the Federation for American Immigration Reform.  

Lawmakers don’t have an unrealistic expectation that illegal immigrants will all pack their bags and go home. But there is concern that if South Carolina doesn’t act while neighboring states such as Georgia enact tough new laws, the Palmetto State will become a safe haven for illegal immigrants, said Phillip Lenski, staff attorney for the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

“You want to know the truth?” he said. “I think the intent of this legislation is to make it unpleasant and difficult—more so than it already is—for undocumented aliens to live and work in South Carolina. It makes it relatively less easy to live here.”

It’s unclear what illegal immigration measures will win passage when lawmakers reconvene for the spring legislative session in January, but one particular bill sponsored by Sen. Jim Ritchie, R-Spartanburg, has been garnering a lot of attention around the state of late.

The S.C. Chamber of Commerce successfully fought passage of the measure over the last few years, but announced its endorsement of the proposal for the first time at a recent legislative forum on the topic held at the Trident Technical College in North Charleston. The about-face by the business community’s largest lobbying arm could give new life to the measure that passed the Senate last session but stalled in the House.   

“While we still believe our federal government should take action to secure our borders and provide workable solutions for employers to verify the legal status of employees, we recognize now is the time for South Carolina to address meaningful reform,” Darrell Scott, the chamber’s government relations manager, told the standing-room-only crowd, about half of which erupted into applause.

Businesses target of legislation

Ritchie’s bill would train state police officers to act as auxiliary immigration and custom enforcement officials, limit state social services, such as non-emergency medical care, available to illegal immigrants, and create a state offense for harboring or transporting illegal immigrants, which is already a federal crime. It also would establish a hotline for reporting suspected illegal immigrants, which could also be used by immigrants, legal or otherwise, to report abuse.  

But the legislation’s major components are aimed at employers. It would require any company doing business with a public entity to register for the federal E-Verify program, formerly known as Basic Pilot, or ensure that all employees have either a South Carolina driver’s license, or the documents necessary to obtain one.

It would prohibit any business from taking the standard tax deduction for labor services if the employee cannot demonstrate proof of citizenship or a temporary visa work permit. And if a company does decide to employ illegal immigrants, it would be required to withhold 6% of all earnings paid to those individuals who fail to provide a correct taxpayer identification number, though in an indication that it’s still a little rough around the edges, the bill does not say where that money should be directed.

The bill also would declare an “unfair trade practice” if a business fires a legal citizen and replaces him or her with an illegal citizen, and would give the laid-off employee means to pursue a civil cause of action against his or her former employer, Lenski said.

House Speaker Harrell said he supports most of the aims of that legislation, though he is working on his own bill that he said could include even more serious ramifications for illegal immigrants, such as granting the state the ability to deport them.

“Oklahoma law has a provision where they did something like that. We’re studying that to see if that’s something we could do,” the speaker said, referencing a new Oklahoma law that went into effect at the beginning of the month despite lawsuits challenging its constitutionality and weeks of vigils and protests. 

Asked if he was concerned such measures could open the state and businesses to costly lawsuits, Harrell said, “You have to enforce the law or there’s no point in having it.”

Yet illustrating just how prickly this issue has become, the speaker could very well play a major role in implementing a new law that punishes businesses such as the one his father ran as recently as two years ago. 

Robert Harrell, the House speaker’s father, said he always did his best to validate the legal status of the 30 to 40 temporary workers he hired every year to harvest pecans and work in the catalog shipping plant at his farm in Meggett in rural Charleston County. As an American, he thinks it’s only fair that everyone living and working in this country earn that right through legal means.

But occasionally, Harrell admits, he was duped by an illegal immigrant with a false Social Security card or green card.

“I don’t understand any laws that target businesses,” said Harrell, a former state Department of Transportation commissioner and longtime local businessman. “That just leaves me speechless. If the illegal immigrant provides you with invalid documentation that looks like it’s real, then whose fault is that? Would that be the (fault of the) immigrant or the merchant being charged for being fooled? It’s almost like quicksand.”

The senior Harrell said his son does not consult with him regularly on legislation, but the speaker said he expects lawmakers will thoroughly vet the concerns of business owners before putting a new law on the books.

“That’s why we’re doing this carefully so you make sure that doesn’t happen,” he said. 

A divided nation

It’s an unusual day when a legislative forum draws a standing-room-only crowd. But in late October, more than 100 people crammed into a classroom at the Trident Technical College for their chance to sound off at a forum hosted by a handful of state Republican senators who have been traveling the state recently.    

The room, overflowing with emotion, seemed a microcosm for the divided nation.

When Diana Salazar took the podium and declared, “We are all humans and we have rights to live where we want to live,” she was booed, and a man in the audience shouted, “Go back to your own country.”

“This is my state too,” she shot back angrily. Salazar, now an interpreter in Charleston and South Carolina’s Latino coordinator for New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s presidential bid, was the first Hispanic to work for the state’s bipartisan Charleston County Legislative Delegation Office, serving the local representatives and senators. 

She was hired by McConnell, one of the most vocal supporters of new measures cracking down on illegal immigrants on the state level. The Charleston Republican has even proposed states call a constitutional convention, something that hasn’t happened since the country’s supreme law document was adopted in 1787.

“It’s a human issue,” Salazar, a Mexican-American, said after the forum. “It’s not a political issue. A lot of these folks come to work, but we have a lot of racism here. The state of South Carolina is a racist state. Politically, it’s not a racist thing; it’s a seat they have to hold onto.”

Other area residents lambasted the delegation for failing to act sooner, saying illegal immigrants had stolen their jobs and made them fear for their safety.

Margaret Thompson, who traveled all the way from Clemson, where she is a city councilwoman and retired deputy sheriff, said she’s been in situations facing illegal immigrants where she has “feared for her life.”

“Don’t get brainwashed,” she said. “I think we need to crack down on employers. That’s where we need to go.”

When Scott announced the chamber’s support at the forum, he added a caveat that a new state law supersede any past or future regulations regarding illegal immigration passed by local municipalities, arguing that a patchwork of rules around the state will only confuse the many businesses that work across jurisdictions.

In South Carolina, Dorchester and Beaufort counties have passed ordinances in an effort to curb illegal immigration in their counties. The city of Clemson has explored the issue as well but recently was advised not to move forward with an ordinance after a U.S. District Court judge struck down a local ordinance in Hazelton, Pa., saying it violated the federal supremacy clause and due process rights. New local and state laws are the center of legal challenges across the country.   

They do the work that Americans won’t

The S.C. Farm Bureau Federation, the lobbying organization for the state’s agricultural workers is “standing on the sidelines right now,” spokesman Reggie Hall said, noting that farmers realize new laws are imminent but still wanting to ensure new legislation does not hurt the state’s agricultural industry or make criminals out of farmers who inadvertently hire illegal immigrants. 

“There’s an argument in favor of stringent immigration regulations by a number of people who say you’re taking jobs away from Americans. In agriculture, that’s not the case,” he said. “We’ve had farmer after farmer after farmer tell us they’ve advertised and looked for a local work force, but that people do not want to work these jobs.”

Chalmers Carr, owner of Titan Farms in Ridge Spring, hires 440 seasonal workers each year to help pick his peach crop. Over the past decade, Carr said he’s had fewer than 30 U.S. residents apply for a position, and of those, only two lasted more than one day on the job.

By law, Carr is required to advertise the positions and hire any U.S. citizen who applies as part of the federal H2A temporary work visa program for agricultural workers, which provides a legal means for farmers to hire migrant workers, and mandates that the employer provide a fair wage, housing and transportation. 

That means Carr pays about $8.51 an hour for his employees, which is $2.51 higher than the prevailing wage for peach pickers in the state. Housing and transportation for the workers adds approximately another $2 per hour to the wage.

“I want to participate in this program because I want to be legal, but honestly I don’t know how much longer I can afford it,” Carr said. “I can’t charge any more for my peaches than my competitors do even though they’re paying a wage that’s $4.51 cheaper than the one I have to pay.”

Still, Carr said, the cost of participating in the program, which mirrors the H2B visa program used largely by the state’s hospitality industry, is well worth the peace of mind that comes from knowing his workers are all legal.

Poli said most illegal immigrants want that peace of mind as well. But it’s not always that easy, he said. He was in the country for five years before he secured the necessary paperwork to work in the United States legally. A close family member, however, also had a work permit, but then lost it when she missed an appointment with Immigration Services because she had no way to get there.

Many of the people he knows are fearful of what will become of them if tough new laws are passed, Poli said.   

“People say this all started with Sept. 11, but it wasn’t Mexican people who did that to the towers. It’s not fair for Americans to blame us for something we did not do. Most of my friends, they just come to work, not to hurt anybody. They just want to support their family.”

Molly Parker and Kristen Poland are staff writers for the Business Journal. E-mail them directly at mparker@setcommedia.com and kpoland@setcommedia.com.

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