Tennesseans reasonably could have expected state lawmakers to be hard at work on Monday. After all, the state budget crisis remains unresolved. Pending cuts across the board threaten education. And a raft of other unfinished business is pushing the Legislature to extend the current session beyond the traditional end-of-May adjournment this week.
But never mind their real duties. Just when Tennessee’s House members should have had their nose to the grindstone, they took a time-out Monday to debate and approve a resolution praising Arizona’s Legislature for passing a harsh immigration measure that has sowed controversy across the nation.
That wasn’t the best use of their time, nor was it in Tennessee’s best interest. The Arizona bill the House lauded has spurred business groups from many states to cancel meetings and conventions in Arizona and to seek more hospitable venues elsewhere. It has elicited scathing criticism from many prominent leaders. It also triggered a quick rewrite to mitigate the racial discrimination and illegal profiling that the over-reaching law effectively mandated in the hope of scaring illegal immigrants away.
Tennessee’s Legislature didn’t have to meddle in the Arizona controversy, nor identify our state as a nosy and noisy advocate of an ill-considered law. Worse, there’s more than a little hypocrisy in the Legislature’s gratuitous grandstanding on the Arizona law.
Businesses across the South have long facilitated illegal immigration by spurious hiring practices that fail to verify legal residency and visa status. And like most states, Tennessee has refused to help close the job magnet that lures illegal immigration. For example, it has not required employers to use the federal E-verify data base for confirming visa and immigrant status, and won’t seriously debate that issue.
Employers have wanted cheap labor, and the system has blinked for them. It’s only since the economy slowed and job openings fell off that Republicans have begun pandering to public anger over illegal immigration as a political wedge issue.
There’s another irony: Even as most state legislatures have refused to support serious immigration reform, Tennessee’s Legislature, among others, has raised the xenophobic flag by proposing an English-only drivers’ license tests. Tennessee lawmakers quickly backed up on that, however, proposing exceptions early this year for the languages of the Japanese, German and other foreign investors who open plants here.
House Minority Gary Odom, D-Nashville, rightly noted the “gamesmanship” behind the House resolution approving Arizona’s law, which subsequently passed on a 67-27 vote. “It’s created a real dilemma for that state (Arizona), and my question is why do we want to become engaged in that debate and possibly hurt our state,” he said.
“If the sponsor wants to send a message to the state of Arizona, write a letter,” he said. “Why drag the state of Tennessee into a controversial issue?”
Why, indeed.
The answer, of course, is obvious. Tennessee’s lawmakers, who gained national notoriety a few years ago by passing the “road-kill” law to allow motorists to claim dead game struck and left on the highway, has more recently bought into the NRA’s guns-in- bars-parks-restaurants-and-churches agenda. Responsible leadership just isn’t a guiding value.
That’s also why the Republican-led Legislature, forgetting the Sundquist-era lesson of bulging deficits, is once again clamoring to expand use of non-recurring reserve funds to help finance the state’s ongoing operational budget. But that issue wasn’t resolved Monday. Joining the Arizona controversy was more important.