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I’m pretty sure my grandfather’s first reaction about Mexicans or someone else moving near to him would have been to keep them from the area.

By Andy Brack

JAN. 27, 2008 - - My grandfather, Will T. Brack, would have turned 99 last week. Had he not been taken 30 years ago by lung cancer, he might not much like some of what he would see these days.

Born to humble roots in rural middle Georgia, my grandfather left school after seventh grade to work to raise money for his younger brothers and sisters following the untimely death of his father. Through the years, he worked on farms, allegedly ran a little moonshine for a spell and eventually worked as a miller at a country mill. Around the time of World War II, he and his family moved to the big city – Macon – and he started a career as a bus driver, a job he retired from sometime in the 1970s.

Will Brack was a simple man with simple tastes, but he always seemed content. When he drove down the highway with me and my sisters, he’d spy a cow and say, “Boy, you know what that is? Hamburger.” And then he’d laugh and laugh. He enjoyed fishing and doodling in his workshop making things from birdhouses to gadgets. He reportedly took an occasional nip from a stash of brandy that wasn’t supposed to be in the family’s Primitive Baptist home. He spent a lot of time with family – his mother and widowed sister even lived next door.

My life is much different. As a member of both the Baby Boom and Generation X, I live in a comfortable home with twice as many bedrooms as Granddaddy had. We have three color TVs to his one black-and-white. We probably spend as much today on electricity and power as my grandparents spent on their mortgage. I get about 200 emails a day; Granddaddy didn’t live long enough to have to deal with cable TV, cell phones, computers, email, the Internet, chat rooms, text messages and the weird online world of Second Life.

A lot of people around the world, particularly those from Mexico and Central America, want to be part of our communities here in the United States. Conditions in their third-world countries are similar to, but perhaps worse, than those of my grandfather’s world almost 100 years ago. They have large families, live an agrarian lifestyle and work hard. It makes perfect sense that they’d want to move here or to another developed country that is gobbling up the world’s resources but has a better quality of life.

Yet our response in South Carolina is to shut the door. Even though the people who move here take the menial jobs that Americans don’t seem to want, we want to keep them out. South Carolina legislators are falling all over themselves to be tougher on illegal immigration than their colleagues with bills to have English-only drivers’ licenses or to put burdens on businesses to be tougher in checking identification cards. Even odder: some lawmakers want to make it a felony for people to give rides or let folks stay in their homes who aren’t 100 percent American. (What do they want – for every citizen to become an ID checker? How absurd.)

These insular reactions often seem to be by politicians who, in the past, pushed free-trade agreements and policies that promoted globalization. A natural byproduct of such policies is that borders become less important…and outsiders move in.

I’m pretty sure my grandfather’s first reaction about Mexicans or someone else moving near to him would have been to keep them from the area. But after thinking about it awhile, he probably would have seen that his new neighbors were just trying to do the same thing he did almost 70 years ago when he moved from a poor Georgia farming community into a larger town to get a better job.

We can do better than using the pretense of illegal immigration to discriminate. To continue to react this way is, quite frankly, un-American. We ought to be able to figure out a way to welcome new immigrants without seeming selfish.

Andy Brack, publisher of S.C. Statehouse Report, can be reached at: brack@statehousereport.com.

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