A full-scale campaign is underway to criminalize and demonize the immigrant population in Georgia. The corporatist political elite campaigned in the last election on a promise to pass an Arizona-style anti-immigrant law.
Now a series of at least nine bills is making its way through the legislature, and already the politicians are boasting that Georgia will be the toughest state in the nation on immigrants.
One bill, otherwise known as the “Arizona copycat law,” will allow warrantless arrests of people who police have “probable cause” to suspect have committed “any public offense” that may make them eligible for deportation.
It would also punish anybody who knowingly harbors or transports undocumented workers; it would penalize any immigrant who uses a fake ID to get a job; and it would punish anybody who picks up day laborers who are thought to be undocumented. HB 87 has passed and awaits the governor’s signature.
Another bill would make it illegal for undocumented students to attend Georgia universities and technical colleges.
A third would make it against the law for immigrants to collect unemployment benefits. Yet another would ban undocumented workers from getting workers’ compensation after they have been injured on the job.
State agencies already may not hire undocumented workers for any taxpayer-funded project in Georgia.
And while federal law requires that all who need emergency-room hospital care may not be turned away (and, as well, that no student may be banned from attending public schools), measures are being taken measures are being taken to make it much more difficult for immigrants to have access to health care and education.
There is even a bill that would make any immigrant arrested for DUI a felony on the first offense.
All of this makes it clear that anybody who may be declared “illegal” have no rights as human beings, at least as far as certain politicians are concerned.
Indeed, they seem not even to be recognized as human beings by these forces in the Georgia legislature.
The truth is that the immigrant population has been an integral part of the population in Georgia for a long time. They are a part of the Southern working class, which is African-American, Latino, Asian. native American, and white. They pay taxes like everyone else. And all they really want is what their working-class brothers and sisters want – to be able to provide a decent life for their families.
Workers must recognize that an attack on undocumented immigrants is an attack on them. Already we see that in Wisconsin an effort is underway to reduce workers there to the level of the Southern worker. To allow the attack on the Latino and other immigrant workers to succeed is to make the whole class vulnerable to attack.
This is what this fight is really all about. A corporatist state in Georgia is on a campaign to win the war against the workers. Only when all workers realize that an attack on one is an attack on all can we win that war.
