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“To be clear, I am not in the camp that trusts Gov. Kemp on illegal immigration statements.”

May 10, 2021

Re: HB 34, HB 268, HB 395 – interstate compacts on professional licensing

Dear Georgia Republican state legislators,

The professional licensing compacts you voted for in the 2021 General Assembly are apparently now something of “an issue”. We hope our work from here is connected to your increased interest in and investigation of these bills and how they may effect illegal immigration in Georgia.

Interstate compacts are new to us. But along with other illegal immigration-related code sections I helped create, improve and defend, I have been working on OCGA 50-36 -1 since 2006.

I first noticed HB 34 on the morning of Feb 25 – just hours before it passed the House. After a quick but careful read of the lengthy bill, I sent out emails to several House members alerting them to possible problems the proposed compact may create with the existing eligibility verification system for public benefits. I also called and emailed the Speaker’s office. I confirmed receipt of my email.

I pasted the text of my original Feb. 25 email into the first blog post done on HB 34. I hope you have seen examples of my time consuming write-ups on these bills. I assure you this was not done out of boredom.

A House member who I have known for years followed up on my concerns in February. “…I went to legislative counsel on HB 34 and you were right, D.A…..” I wanted to be wrong.

I also became aware of HB 268 and shortly afterwards, HB395. I knew the Georgia Chamber of Commerce was pushing the compacts contained in this legislation and that these agreements could effect illegal immigration. There are no examples of the GA Chamber advocating on the side of immigration enforcement available to send you.

After the House passed all three of the bills, I sent notes to several members of the senate – including the Senate Majority Leader – asking for line numbers on language that would eliminate my fears that the interstate compacts would reduce security on immigration verification. The only response I received was from my own senator. There was no citation of language that would alleviate my fears. I also personally asked several interested Georgians to ask for the same information from their own senators. I have not talked to anyone who even received a reply.

I also learned about the GORRC and the involvement of the Georgia Secretary of State office in the council’s procedure in consideration of the compact legislation. I continued to pursue the hope that somebody in power would cite language I may have overlooked in the bills to remove my concerns that illegal aliens could access the professional licenses covered in the measures. I spoke to an official in the SoS office, sent a request for comment and information – and again asked for citation of a line number to language that would remove my fears. There was no response other than confirmation of receipt.

I now see a May 6, 2021 opinion letter from legislative counsel to a House member who apparently asked the same question another House member asked about HB 34 in February. This time the opinion is that the sentence “nothing herein prevents the enforcement of any other law of any member state that is not inconsistent with the Compact” represents language that preserves the current system of immigration verification.

I read the cited sentence several times in my review of the bills. I do not agree that it will automatically result in use of verification system – including the affidavit process – in processing applications for professional licenses from applicants with existing credentials from other states. But it is my fervent hope that the most recent opinion reflects how the new laws will actually be implemented.

I need to add that knowledge gained from nearly twenty years of studying illegal immigration and according to retired ICE agents, retired Border Patrol Agents and several Georgia sheriffs, a background check by law enforcement does not reveal illegal immigration status unless the alien has already been arrested and fingerprinted. And that hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens have valid Social Security numbers.

My interest in the bills also led me to legislation that put Georgia in an interstate compact on nursing licenses in 2017. (SB 109). I was not aware of that legislation at that time. We will soon know if if the verification system required in OCGA 50-36-1 has been followed in the reciprocal process of licensing nurses from other states since that law was put in place in 2017.

In closing, I respectfully extend my sincere thanks to Rep Chuck Martin for taking the time this month to investigate the effects the legislation may have on illegal immigration and the law requiring verification of ‘lawful presence’ for applicants for professional licenses.

In the recent past an expert on the issue who is willing to help legislators fight illegal immigration in Georgia was not automatically regarded with suspicion.

I respectfully put forth the hope that moving forward, Republican lawmakers ask how legislation may effect illegal immigration before they vote.

So there is no confusion on my message, two opposite opinions on this matter have come out of legislative counsel. I have seen Gov. Kemp’s *signing statements on the three bills.

UPDATE: I have also seen the letter from Reps Belton and Werkheiser to the House Republican caucus asking for help in convincing the governor to sign the bills.

     * Compact bills letter to Caucus 2

• Veto Messages and Signing Statements

We will follow up to see actual practice.

To be clear, I am not in the camp that trusts Gov. Kemp on illegal immigration statements.

D.A. King

 

Part 1

Kemp voted for the verification system as state senator

Topic may be worthy of consideration at upcoming Republican conventions

The governor can sign, veto or take no action. Legislation becomes law if he does nothing. May 10 is final day in process.

 

Pro-enforcement Georgians are watching to see if Gov. Brian Kemp signs several Republican bills that apparently quietly begin to dismantle the system that verifies lawful presence of applicants for public benefits. Examples are  HB 395, HB 268 and HB 34 .

The Georgia Chamber of Commerce pushed these measures with letters requesting support placed on legislators’ Chamber desks. Two of those letters are posted on the Dustin Inman Society website.

Related: Georgia Chamber distributing letters…

State law implemented in 2006 was an effort to prevent illegal aliens from accessing public benefits. The goal was to make Georgia less hospitable to illegal immigration. Professional licenses are public benefits under that law. When he was state senator the governor voted for the legislation that created the verification mandate.

Georgia code (OCGA 50-36-1) requires that an applicant for public benefits swear on a notarized affidavit that he is either a U.S. citizen or a “lawfully present” and eligible foreign national. The applicant is required to present verifiable document to prove that eligibility. The foreign national’s ‘lawful presence’ is then verified using a federal database known as ‘SAVE.’

The legislation in question puts Georgia in interstate “compacts” that essentially require reciprocity in licensing and issuance procedures. “Interstate compacts are contracts that are negotiated between states. The US Supreme Court has held that the term “compact” should be understood to refer to a “contract” according to the Library of Congress.

Georgia would be joining compacts that honor the professional license of covered occupations for people who relocate from one participating state to another. If another state in the compact has issued a professional license to a resident for one of the covered professions the idea is to issue a license for the same job here without most of the current processing if that person migrates to Georgia.

The bills include provisions for quicker licensing for spouses of active duty military personnel.

If Kemp signs the bills new law will eliminate the step of verifying the “lawful presence” of the covered applicant. The abbreviated licensing process would result in quicker participation in the workforce – and a more hospitable experience for illegal aliens.

The Georgia Chamber says this will make Georgia “a better state for business.”

Including the Speaker’s office and the Senate Majority Leader, the Dustin Inman Society alerted individual legislators in both the House and senate about the result of the bills becoming law. We also asked several state senators for citation of line numbers in the legislation containing language that would dispute our analysis of these bills. The sole response came from Senator Kay Kirkpatrick (R- Marietta) who replied,  “…these bills are important to the military and passed the Senate unanimously. Compact language cannot be changed.” We are grateful to Sen. Kirkpatrick.

It appears the legislative choice was between compliance with the dictates of the business lobby or the preservation of procedures put in place to make Georgia less attractive to illegal immigration. The business lobby won out. Again.

Georgia is home to more illegal aliens than is Arizona, according to the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security.

Absence of media coverage or Republican resistance

We note the past press attention and the brutal fight to implement the verification law in question and the unsurprising absence of liberal media coverage on the decision to further the process of dismantling the law.

Between the three bills, there was only one “no” vote in the House and Senate. It came from Rep Matt Dollar (R- Marietta) who voted against HB 34.

We repeat:  then-Senator and Public Safety Committee Chairman Brian Kemp voted in favor of the 2006 ‘Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act’  (SB529) that put the verification of lawful presence for public benefits in place (senate vote # 1037).

“Georgians are “fed up” with illegal immigration,” Kemp told the AJC newspaper then. They still are. But as Governor, Kemp is conspicuously silent on the entire crisis.

As can be seen by a recent letter written by an angry retired federal immigration agent, and the Dustin Inman Society’s Brian Kemp page, most conservatives are not willing to overlook that silence.

The phone number at Gov. Kemp’s Capitol office is 404-656-1776

This story continues here.

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“The increasingly elitist Democratic Party has grown increasingly comfortable over the last decade or so [supporting policies that harm domestic U.S. private sector workers] on trade and especially immigration policy.”

From Alan Tonelson in ImPolitic

If you want to start a (hopefully verbal only) fight about American politics, one good way is to tell a Democrat that his or her party – and especially its powerful progressive wing – has been abandoning the country’s private sector working class in favor of what New York Times columnist Ross Douthat just called “the winners of globalization, from wealthy suburbanites to Wall Street and Silicon Valley elites….”  (Here’s some polling evidence for this proposition.)

So it’s more than a little interesting that if you take this position, you’ve recently gotten some devastating ammunition from no less than one of progressivism’s leading intellectual lights – economist Stephanie Kelton.

Kelton has achieved renown for her pioneering “Modern Monetary Theory” take on economic policy. As she has explained, it holds that “Governments in nations that maintain control of their own currencies — like Japan, Britain and the United States, and unlike Greece, Spain and Italy — can increase spending without needing to raise taxes or borrow currency from other countries or investors.”

Naturally, Democrats of most stripes have seized on this argument to varying extents to justify running much bigger federal budget deficits to deal much more ambitiously with a whole host of national problems – to engineering an adequate recovery from the CCP Virus-induced recession to remedying major social and economic ills that they believe dangerously plagued the economy before the pandemic.

One aspect of Kelton’s views, though, has been widely ignored, and it’s this stance that led her last week to support explicitly measures with proven records of harming domestic U.S. private sector workers but with which the increasingly elitist Democratic Party has grown increasingly comfortable over the last decade or so – on trade and especially immigration policy.

The ignored Kelton stance: on inflation. As she has specified (in the column linked above), “Politics aside, the only economic constraints currency-issuing states face are inflation and the availability of labor and other material resources in the real economy.” And in the author’s latest column, she argues that it’s precisely the appearance of these threats today that require the Biden administration to embrace unfettered trade and mass immigration policies.

Read more of this essay here.

The ‘Ramos Plan’: The U.S. should limit immigration to 2 million a year

A topic worthy of discussion

Posted 12:00 PM.

Finally! Jorge Ramos has come out for immigration restriction in a recent New York Times opinion piece (The Perpetual Crisis at the Border — and What We Can Do About It ). The Univision star has gone public on an annual, numerical limit to “authorized immigrants.”

“…the United States should start accepting between one and a half and two million authorized immigrants every year” wrote Ramos in his April 2, 2021 Times OPED.

The high end of the ‘Ramos Plan’ essentially doubles the current annual flow.

“Today, all along the U.S.-Mexico border, the aspirations of new immigrants are colliding with a country reluctant to revamp its way of welcoming and absorbing newcomers. The struggle is real, but we know how it has to end, with more legal immigration. As they say in Mexico, “No hay de otra” — There is no other way.”

Let’s save Ramos’ past demands for total amnesty for “the 11 million” victims of borders for later.

And for now let’s set aside his 2014 idea presented to Time magazine that we open the borders in North America to the free flow of people to match the flow of goods and services. But let’s not forget it.

“The taboo issue of an open border should be tackled. Not now. Politically it is impossible even to discuss that,” he said. “But I don’t see why we can’t have in North America the same immigration system that they have within the European Union” Ramos told Time then.

All concerned in the immigration debate should recognize that the latest ‘Ramos Plan’ of numerically restricting immigration to two million souls a year must come with an enforcement mechanism. It will need procedure that would create full control of our borders and enforced visa departures.  A system that would prevent “authorized immigrant” number two million from scratching his head wondering why unauthorized immigrant number one and his family are marching in the streets of America demanding amnesty ten years from implementation of the ‘Ramos Plan.’

We cannot honor the immigrants who obey the law unless we enforce that law – so, the ‘Ramos Plan’ should be considered.

I know and like Jorge Ramos. We have had on-air discussions on immigration and amnesty in the past. I enjoyed it very much. So did he. I am happy to see that Jorge has apparently come around to a more sensible outlook on the issue. I would enjoy the opportunity to discuss the ‘Ramos Plan’ further on his Univision show again.

What about it, Jorge? Besides, I still want a rematch on the Univision ping-pong table. And some guidance on voter integrity using the Mexican system would be a great help for me to pass on to Georgia state legislators. They don’t seem to listen to me on that one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coca-Cola Co. not getting full recognition of its ‘wokeness’ – GALEO funding matters

The Coca-Cola Company has been under considerable attack from the far left lately. Until they folded like a lawn chair, there were even threats of boycotts. It seems Coke did not hit all the approved talking points from Stacy Abrams and her perpetual victim mob on the fake news surrounding voter legislation here in Georgia.

In its defense, we offer a quick look into reality to those who may not be entirely familiar with the extent of Coca-Cola’s ‘wokeness’ and support for the anti-voter ID left.

GALEO CEO Gerardo Eleazar Gonzalez, known around town as “Jerry”, regularly thanks Coca-Cola as a supporter of Atlanta’s innocuously named Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials (GALEO).

Make no mistake, Jerry and GALEO are firm in their opposition to voter security. We think the folks at Coca-Cola are getting a bum rap.

 Before he was awarded with the leadership of GALEO, Jerry Gonzalez was a Democratic fundraiser and MALDEF lobbyist at the Georgia Capitol, where he is known for his vitriolic outbursts at Republican legislators. Gonzalez and his anti-borders corporation have actively fought every immigration enforcement bill under the Georgia’s Gold Domed Capitol, including HB 87, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act of 2011.  Gonzalez brought the leader of the Socialist Workers party into Georgia to fight for driver’s licenses for illegal aliens.

Western Union, Georgia Power, Coca-Cola and Cox Communications are just a few of the GALEO/Gonzalez financiers.

Gonzalez boasts on the GALEO website that All-American luminary Jane Fonda was a “founding friend.”

An abbreviated list of Gonzalez’s accomplishments on behalf of the anti-borders-borders, brown-supremacist goals include fearlessly marching in the streets of Atlanta demanding an end to enforcement of American immigration laws. And race-baiting 2007 attacks on Cobb County Police and then-Sheriff Neil Warren for supposedly creating “an environment of fear” through the use of the 287(g) program.

287(g) is the life-saving federal 287(g) program that expands the authority to locate and hold illegal aliens who had been captured for other crimes. “This has set us back tremendously” a seething Coca-Cola – supported Gonzalez said then.

Coca-Cola’s donations to GALEO help with its opposition to voter ID as being “anti-Hispanic” and Gonzalez makes it clear that making English our official language would be an “insult to our culture.”

I watched in person several years ago as Gonzalez marched in protest of then-CNN newsman Lou Dobbs with a large group of fellow travelers carrying signs calling Dobbs a “racist” and other placards reading “THIS IS OUR CONTINENT- GO BACK TO EUROPE!” I asked some of the group with Gonzalez to where my black friends who opposed illegal immigration should return.

“Africa” was the quick and defiant reply.

Somebody needs to stand up for Coca-Cola and the leftist work they fund. We are happy to help.

As a favor to Coca-Cola, We have more evidence of the work they help finance here.

‘Si Se Pwodway’ and Viva La Raza!

“After taking office, Biden proposed a pathway to citizenship for millions of people in the United States unlawfully, and promised in an executive order to “create a humane asylum system.”

In a fresh twist on the Biden administration’s decision to house illegal immigrants at hotel facilities, crunching the numbers on the $86.9 million that is set to be spent on 1,239 beds shows that the cost to U.S. taxpayers will be nearly $72,000 per border-crosser housed.

“That works out to $71,666.67 per migrant, paid by your tax dollars, meaning that you are now a co-conspirator to one of the largest smuggling schemes in history,” wrote Andrew Arthur, a fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative policy research nonprofit.

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed to The Epoch Times that the Biden administration plans to use hotel facilities to accommodate family units unlawfully crossing the U.S.–Mexico border.

“The $86.9 million contract provides 1,239 beds and other necessary services,” said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director Tae D. Johnson…

The story from Epoch News continues here.