(SC immigration bill) "SB 20 comes out of that dark place in the soul of the state ...

that has given us generations of racial segregation, capital punishment, chain gang laws, and other uncivilized practices."

http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/charleston/the-senate-advances-a-disastrous-immigration-bill/Content?oid=3131408

In the worst-governed state in the nation, our General Assembly is poised to pass another expensive, unnecessary, futile law to quell the primordial fear that it can neither understand nor control. For nearly two centuries that fear has driven this poor old state into a pattern of reckless, irrational, and self-destructive behavior.

I give you the latest folly of our state Legislature, Senate Bill 20, a.k.a. the Show Me Your Papers Act. SB 20 is patterned on the infamous Arizona immigration law that passed last year and is now headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Like those other laws, SB 20 will ultimately be as evil as whatever problem it was meant to fix. And like those other laws, it will be an insult to the highest principles of the nation. In a state famous for its abuse of powerless minorities, it seems that Hispanics are now the objects of our worst impulses.

Another irony is that an increasing number of immigrants — legal and otherwise — come from Eastern Europe and look like, well, those folks who dressed up in their Confederate finery and staged a Secession Gala last December. If "looking like an illegal immigrant" is the rationalization for demanding a person's papers, no son of a Confederate veteran may soon be safe in South Carolina. (I hope Glenn McConnell, one of the sponsors of this bill and the state's most famous Confederate re-enactor, is reading this.)