Portrait of a Negro Corporate Politician

Atlanta corporate attorney and Democratic Georgia state senator Kasim Reed was deeply distressed at our March 13 BC cover story “Blacks and Browns: The Need to Make Common Cause.” We know because he told us so. BC spelled out the tale of Reed’s shameful attempt to ape the demagogic meanness of Republicans on the immigration issue. In a bill that had no chance of passage, Reed proposed, among other things, to lock up anyone who applied for a job in Georgia with a fake ID for five years. With no detectable irony in his voice, Reed assured BC in a phone conversation that he was acting to “protect the jobs and living standards” of black families in Georgia.

Let’s be clear. Kasim Reed is no champion of working people in Georgia or anyplace else. Senator Reed is a corporate attorney, a partner in the transnational firm of Holland & Knight with offices in Palm Beach, Tel Aviv, metro DC, Atlanta, Beijing, and elsewhere. Holland & Knight is heavily involved in union busting, or as legal firms prefer to call it, “union avoidance” – advising employers how best to intimidate, coerce and selectively fire employees, how to bend, skirt and occasionally break the law to prevent formation of labor unions and break existing ones. The firm is a major anti-environmental player on the national stage, representing the chemical industry on Capitol Hill. It maintains deep connections with the Republican party, and its partners advise Republican state legislators on how best to disenfranchise black voters via the redistricting process in Georgia and other states.

We asked Reed about the incongruity between posing as an advocate of the rights of working families and the union busting practices of his law firm. Amazingly, the man told us that he couldn’t be responsible for what all 13,000 lawyers at the firm actually did, and that he should be judged on his own record. Supposing for the moment that this is an acceptable answer, his bio page on the company web site tells us all we need to know about that record.

There it is. The black state senator who rails against brown immigrants for “taking black jobs” practices employment discrimination law – for employers – and civil rights law for the corporate violators of civil rights. With that bit of context firmly established, we here reprint Reed’s email to us:

To the Publishers:

The BC article was factually incorrect on several counts and failed to properly discuss my position on illegal immigration in Georgia. I am an unabashed supporter of legal immigration and legal immigrants in our country. After all, our country is a nation of immigrants. Our state benefits greatly from the contributions of immigrants in every way possible. I have never, and will never, oppose the right of someone who seeks to enter our county under the laws established by our citizens.

After studying this issue in the legislature, we concluded that we could not simply do nothing about the illegal immigration problem in Georgia because it hurts working people and the federal government has failed to act. The bill I authored punishes individuals who present fraudulent documents to employers by making this offense a misdemeanor for the first offense and a felony on the second offense. This was not properly explained by Mr. Dixon.

Mr. Dixon fails to mention that the legislation seeks to establish fines in the amount of $12,800 per employee against employers who violate the statute. The Pew Hispanic Center recently released a study showing that you can not address the problem of illegal immigration without addressing the employer side of the issue. My bill did that.

Dixon also asserted that I was a member of the Democratic Leadership Council. While I respect that organization and the work it does on a variety of issues, I am not a member. A simple fact check or telephone call to me would have revealed that. Further, the “current Republican leader for the Georgia State Senate” is not a “former Democrat.”

Unfortunately Black Commentator has produced a very poor and unprofessional piece of journalism without the normal fact checking that most credible journalistic organizations engage in.

Mr. Dixon completely ignores Republican measures on the immigration issue which Democrats worked vigorously to defeat. I also notice a consistent pattern in his writing of denigrating Democrats, while ignoring Republican’s role in leading on issues which are damaging to our community. Increasingly, the privilege of public service is tarnished by people like Mr. Dixon who too often ignore basic facts, misconstrue motives and take ill informed cheap shots at those who are working to find solutions to complex problems which impact each of us. Nonetheless, I am going to do my job on the front lines of the struggle in the Georgia State Senate where this effort continues every day.

Sincerely,

The only factual error in our BC cover story was that the Republican leader of the Georgia senate in 2002 wasn’t a former Democrat. We never said Reed was a DLC member. We did call him a “DLC Democrat” because the DLC claimed him as “New Democrat of the Week” on their website. That’s good enough. As for BC ignoring the damage Republicans do, we slammed Reed precisely for following the Republican lead on criminalizing immigration. And we didn’t bore our readers with the employer sanctions aspect of Reed’s bill because they are empty threats. Employer sanctions have been on the books since the 1980s. BC wasn’t the only publication not to take Reed’s bill any more seriously than he did.

“…Reed had no hope of passing his bill,” noted Atlanta’s Creative Loafing newspaper. “… the plan was for it to be rejected by the GOP so Democrats wouldn’t look soft on illegal immigration in the fall elections.”

In the real world, proposals to criminalize immigration or to lock up folks who apply for a job with a false ID are demagogic. Nobody is going to round up, imprison and deport millions of people back to their countries of origin. They may propose it to provoke divisions and get votes, but it’s just not going to happen.