I am pleased to announce that today the news is not about Arizona making another ridiculous immigration law. However, it is about another state creating another crazy immigration measure.
Alabama introduced a new immigration policy that requires police check the immigration status of suspects in custody and requires schools ask for a birth certificate for students enrolling in school for the first time.
It also prohibits illegal immigrants from entering into “business transactions” with the state (applying for a drivers license or business permit).
It is considered to be the harshest of the slew of new state immigration laws. Ring any bells?
This law is very similar to Arizona’s own controversial Senate Bill 1070, which raised so much protest at its introduction. The courts mostly dismantled SB 1070, but the Alabama bill stayed intact.
It was challenged by the Justice Department on the grounds that it preempts federal law and that immigration is a federal, not a state, issue. As such, they argue, it is unconstitutional. Unlike in Arizona, the courts upheld the majority of this law.
Republican Gov. Robert J. Bentley signed the law, House Bill 56, in June, and despite being immediately challenged in court, it has now taken effect.
The effect is shocking. There has been a mass exodus of immigrants from Alabama. Freddy Vergara, a manager of a Tex-Mex restaurant in Leeds, Ala., saw three of his 12 employees leave with more to follow, according to a Los Angeles Times article.
It is not just waiters and restaurant owners who are suffering. The law hit Alabama farmers the hardest.
Because many illegal immigrants are willing to work extremely hard jobs for very little pay, the vast majority of Alabama's farm workers are gone.
In an Associated Press article, Keith Smith, a potato farmer, saw most of his employees flee the state, so he hired American workers. This was part of the motivation behind HB 56 — the theory that immigrants take jobs Americans, in a time of nine percent unemployment, so desperately need.
It turns out we don't need them that badly. Smith says most of the Americans he hires do not work as hard as their Hispanic counterparts, and quit after just a few days.
Alabama's unemployment is even higher than the national average — standing at 9.8 percent — but it seems inspiring fear and discrimination from enacting overbearing immigration laws is not the solution to the jobs problem.
Will we ever tire of that battered old argument that immigrants steal jobs from good, honest, hardworking Americans? Please. I personally know I would rather collect unemployment than break my back in a field six days a week picking cotton. Americans do not want the jobs immigrants take. Even if there are no immigrants, Americans will not take those jobs.
So what happens then? No one is willing to work in this industry anymore. Farmers cannot get the help they need. Crops go unharvested and cannot be sold, and the hardworking American suffers. Not only is this law discriminatory and racist, it has inspired so much fear in Alabama. People are literally scared to leave their homes, and it ends up hurting the people it was meant to help.
Immigrants are not the scapegoats conservatives think they are. Getting rid of illegal immigrants is only going to make our economy worse, and hurt thousands of people in the process.
Reach the columnist at omcquarr@asu.edu
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