Tennessee’s legislators plan to consider a bill next year styled after Arizona’s SB 1070, even though the state already has strict laws targeting illegal immigrants.
State Sen. Bill Ketron and Rep. Joe Carr, both Republicans, are preparing a bill that criminalizes illegal immigrants and authorizes local law enforcement authorities to detain “any person” suspected of being in the country unlawfully.
“You can’t deny how [illegal immigration] is affecting us, from education to healthcare to the judicial system to incarceration, and more importantly the number of jobs it’s taken away,” Ketron said.
Like Tennessee, other nearby states, including North Carolina and South Carolina, have expressed an interest in starting out the new legislative session in 2011 reviewing measures similar to the law in Arizona, the first in the nation to criminalize being in the country unlawfully.
Tennessee, where foreign-born people account for roughly four percent of the total population, already has restrictive measures that will take effect on Jan. 1.
The most controversial is SB 1141/HB 670, which requires local jails -- despite no training, funds, supervision or access to federal immigration databases -- to verify the immigration status of all those detained. There is also a measure that allows businesses to insist that employees speak only English for “security and efficiency.”
During the vehement debate over the implementation of SB 1070 in Arizona, a group of Tennessee legislators sent a letter to that state’s governor, Jan Brewer, praising her for signing the bill into law.
Recently, another Tennessee legislator, Republican Curry Todd, who supports strict immigration measures, gained notoriety when he said that illegal immigrants “multiply like rats.”
Todd later apologized for the comment, but maintains his opposition to illegal immigration.
Translated by Fox News Latino.
Yes, saying a population mutiplies like rats isn't very nice - unless it's true like the once-Christian country of Lebanon which is now a moslem country. Anyway, maybe "like bunnies" would have been less rude. Or, how about no analogy at all and just describing it literally. Why be insulting when the bare truth is ugly enough? The illegal immigrant population has far more children than the native born population and thus, like the once-Christian country of Lebanon which is now a moslem country, the native culture and / or population can be overwhelmed in the space of 40 years.
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