The state of Georgia will be like Nazi Germany if it requires enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws, says a business-first Republican in the state legislature.

The claim was made by GOP Rep. Heath Clark as he announced his subcommittee was gutting a pro-American immigration reform bill which is backed by Lt. Governor Casey Cagle in the GOP gubernatorial primaries.

“This isn’t Nazi Germany — we are not asking people to carry their papers around on them at all times,” said Clark, the vice chairman of the House Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee.

The original Cagle-backed bill — Senate Bill 452 — says police shall notify local, state and federal officials when they arrest an illegal immigrant.

But Clark and his allies took out the word “shall” and inserted “may” at the behest of business lobbies. That change allows local business groups and ethnic lobbies to pressure police chiefs to minimize the reporting and deportation of the many illegal-immigrant workers in Georgia who hold down Americans’ wages.

Clark explained March 20:

In section one we did change a ‘shall’ back to a ‘may.’ There were some concerns within the business community with international companies. A CEO or somebody might be here with a foreign driver’s license and if they were pulled over for, for some reason, and if they didn’t have their visa on them. You know most people don’t carry that around on them on a permanent basis because they don’t want to lose it because it’s a pain to get another one. We want to allow for discretion, for the police officer to maintain some discretion there … This isn’t Nazi Germany – we’re not asking people to carry their papers around on them at all times.

Federal law does require foreigners to carry their visas. “Section 264(e) of the INA says:

e) Every alien, eighteen years of age and over, shall at all times carry with him and have in his personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt card issued to him pursuant to subsection (d).

“I think he has a very common [soft-on-eforcement] attitude in the General Assembly, but he has the arrogance to not hide it,” said D. A. King, founder of the Dustin Inman Society, a pro-enforcement advocacy group. “This is clearly the open-air voice of the illegal alien lobby and the business lobby.”

Clark is an “anti-enforcement liberal masquerading as a Republican conservative,” King told Breitbart News.

Rep. Clark also changed the bill to remove a requirement that courts tell federal officials when they have convicted an illegal of any crime in the state. Clark’s amended version now says judges shall only report felony crimes. That change will reduce the deportation of wage-lowering illegals who commit non-felony crimes, such as drunk-driving.

Clark did not respond to Britbart News.

Clark first made the changes in a back-room subcommittee meeting but announced them in a televised meeting of the full committee. He announced the changes only a few days before the legislature finishes its annual session on Thursday.

“This is what happens every year … most of this will not be done in public,” King said, adding that the room was:

packed with the same people who scream in American streets against immigration enforcement … For a sense of the room, the man sitting in front of me and next to communist Adelina Nicholls , leader of the anti-borders ‘Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights’ , was wearing a GLAHR t-shirt that read ‘DEFY, DEFEND, EXPAND.’

However, Clark’s changes can be rejected by the Senate — which passed the”shall” version of the bill — and also can be reversed by the House’s GOP leadership if they feel public pressure, King said.

In the GOP gubernatorial primary, “I’m grateful that all of the gubernatorial candidates are concerned about illegal immigration in our state [because] we have more illegal aliens than Arizona,” King told Breitbart. However, he cautioned:

I am very alarmed that they all seem to be unwilling to mention the [role of] illegal employment which creates most of the illegal immigration. We have an E-Verify law [barring employment of illegals] that needs a lot of work. That is where their campaigns should be focused.

The state’s Hispanic population is now more than 850,000, up from roughly 30,000 in 1992. Many of the newcomers work in low-wage, low-tech blue-collar jobs, so helping company owners cuts costs and avoid investment in labor-saving machinery.

The mostly poor immigrant population is also shifting the state towards the Democratic Party while helping to lower wages state-wide and also drive up housing prices for young Americans.