Nov. 30 -- South Carolina has embraced foreign investment, with companies from BMW to Michelin transforming a state once dominated by the textile industry. Another aspect of the global economy hasn't gone down as well: immigration.
While an influx of money from overseas has made free trade palatable even as thousands of mill jobs have vanished, voters are growing increasingly hostile to undocumented foreign workers, polls and analysts say. As a result, illegal immigration is a top economic issue in the state's Jan. 19 Republican primary, a key test for the candidates since it's the first in the South.
``Trade is all right as long as everybody goes by the same rules,'' said David Robinson, 65, who recently retired from a job at a Michelin tire factory in Spartanburg and whose son works in a Hitachi Ltd. plant nearby. Illegal immigration, on the other hand, ``is a big problem, and that's one you can get a handle on,'' he said.
South Carolina has been ``whipped into a frenzy'' over immigration, according to Greenville Mayor Knox White, and that's posing a challenge to Republican candidates such as Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain and Fred Thompson. All have spoken recently about clamping down on illegal immigration, yet earlier backed policies including the establishment of ``sanctuary cities'' for undocumented residents and providing a path to citizenship.
Second to Iraq
It's striking that immigration is the paramount domestic issue in South Carolina, since the state has no more than 75,000 undocumented residents, estimates the Pew Hispanic Center, a Washington-based research group. All immigrants, legal and illegal, make up just 3 percent of the population of 4.3 million, compared with 12 percent of the U.S. as a whole.
Yet in a Clemson University Palmetto Poll in September, South Carolina Republicans ranked illegal immigration second only to the war in Iraq as the nation's biggest problem.
Immigration isn't as burning an issue for Democratic voters: In the Palmetto Poll, they ranked it as the nation's fifth-biggest problem, behind such issues as health insurance and education. Still, New York Senator Hillary Clinton's recent stumble over the question of whether illegal immigrants should be allowed to get driver's licenses suggests it might also pose a danger to candidates in that party.
Record Immigration
Some 10.3 million immigrants arrived in the U.S. between 2000 and 2007, the highest for a seven-year period in U.S. history, according to a new report by the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington. More than half of those arrivals are illegal aliens, estimates the Center.
What makes South Carolina, and the Southeast, different from the rest of the nation on immigration is that the phenomenon is new to the region, said Jeffrey Passel, a senior research associate at Pew. The number of illegal immigrants in the state grew 1,000 percent between 1990 and 2004, according to the Washington-based Urban Institute, which lists South Carolina as a ``new growth'' state for unauthorized immigrants. As of 2004, 41 percent of its immigrants were illegal.
``These are states that, a generation ago, had no immigrants, basically, so it's as much the rapidity of the change as the numerical presence,'' said Passel. That suggests the issue is more cultural than economic, political analysts say.
`Visceral' Not Economic
``It's more of a visceral than an economic issue,'' said Joseph Stewart, the chairman of Clemson's political science department, who researches racial and ethnic politics. ``It's the outsider-versus-insider reaction.''
Talking to factory workers such as Robinson and other residents makes clear that the issue transcends economics. They usually don't compete for work with illegal migrants, who tend to take the lowest-paying jobs in industries from agriculture to animal slaughtering.
Pharmacist Reid Ringer, 49, a lifelong resident of Saluda, said immigrants are destroying his community.
``We're becoming a Third World country,'' said Ringer as he took a visitor on a tour of a dozen squalid trailer parks that have sprung up in the town of 3,000 to house Hispanic immigrants. Chickens and goats roamed among the dwellings. Plumbing and garbage collection were absent, and Central American gang graffiti was evident on some buildings, while Mexican tiendas and panaderias dot the hamlet's downtown.
`Bottom Feeding'
``It's the bottom-feeding that emerges from illegal immigration, the slum lords, the declining education standards, the burden on emergency rooms, the increased crime rates,'' said Ringer. ``It wasn't like this 15 years ago.''
Victor, an illegal immigrant encountered outside a trailer, is among many who came for jobs at a local poultry-processing plant. He said he was from Mexico and worked at the plant until he got injured.
Immigrants like Victor have had little to do with the decimation of South Carolina's textile industry, which has lost 16 percent of its employment since August 2006 and is the biggest contributor to the state's job losses in recent years. Low-labor-cost countries, which churn out cheap goods, are the culprits there.
The blow has been cushioned -- and protectionist sentiments marginalized -- as South Carolina has become a magnet for foreign investment, lured by the state's base of manufacturing workers and its low tax and unionization levels.
`Connecting the Dots'
Tiremaker Michelin & Cie. of France, which has invested $2.1 billion in the state since 1975 and employs almost 8,000 workers, said in August it would spend an additional $350 million over four years, generating additional jobs.
BMW North America, a unit of Bayerische Motoren Werke AG of Munich, the world's largest luxury carmaker, said last month it would boost annual production of its X5 sport-utility vehicle and other cars in Spartanburg by 100,000 units by 2012. Germany's BASF AG and Japan's Fujifilm Holdings Corp. also have major facilities in the state.
``People around here are beginning to connect the dots that this area is increasingly tied to trade and exports,'' said Greenville's Mayor White, an immigration lawyer, adding that there's been little job displacement due to undocumented workers.
Even so, one group, the Americans Have Had Enough Coalition, plans to make immigration the defining issue in the Republican primary. In October it began running radio ads accusing Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who like Arizona Senator McCain backed a bill proposing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, of ``being on the wrong side of the fence'' on the issue.
`Make an Example'
The coalition said it will also target McCain, ``if that's what it takes to expose the truth about his immigration positions,'' said executive director Roan Garcia-Quintana.
``We want to make an example of John McCain so he'll come in third or fourth in South Carolina,'' said Garcia-Quintana, a refugee from Cuba and now a U.S. citizen. He also has his doubts about Giuliani, a former New York mayor, and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.
Immigration was the focus of the first question in a debate this week in Florida among the Republican candidates, opening the way for them to criticize each other's records while vying to sound the toughest on the issue.
``I want to assure you that I'll enforce the borders first,'' said McCain.
Romney came under the sharpest attack, with Giuliani accusing the former Massachusetts governor of operating a ``sanctuary mansion'' because illegal aliens worked at his home.
South Carolina Republican State Senator Jim Ritchie, who has been holding town hall meetings around the state on immigration, said voters view the issue as a test of character for the candidates.
``People in this state are looking for a president who is willing to take bold action in Washington on immigration, to put political capital out there to compel Congress to act,'' he said.
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