Immigration Reform SC Style 2008

Well, with the 2008 Legislative Session scheduled to kick in gear today, January 8th, Immigration Reform is the "Topic de Jour." Speaker Bobby Harrell and the SC House Republican Caucus has embraced the idea and went public on Monday with the plan. Now the SC Senate is saying "Hey, just pass the Senate Bill currently sitting in a House Committee."

I am just glad to see this topic start to pick up steam. With the US Congress failing to do anything substantive, and with them focusing so much on amnesty (giving citizenship and citizenship rights to illegal immigrants), the states are having to address the issue of what state services we want to see our citizen's hard earned taxpayer dollars paying to provide to immigrants who are in our state and our country illegally.

That is really what it all boils down to with me: do we continue to use your tax dollars to pay for goods and services that we as a state provide for our citizens and allow them to be used to pay for illegal immigrant's access to healthcare, public education, corrections and the like.

Some folks say that it is "un-Constitutional" for the states to address this issue. I disagree and here is why: The US Constitution says that any power not specifically spelled out as a power belonging to the Federal Government, nor prohibited, by that same document - the Constitution, to the states (meaning that individual states may not exercise that power), shall be reserved to the states and/or to the people. I don't see anything in the Constitution that says that the individual states may not decide which goods and services the state will provide with state taxpayer dollars and to whom these are provided.

Press on South Carolina General Assembly, Press On!