Alabama immigration law

RECENT POSTS

March 16, 2012 | 9:12 AM | By

‘Where’s your green card?’ Mississippi becomes latest immigration battleground state

Yet another Arizona-style immigration bill is moving forward in the South, this time in Mississippi, where members of of the state House approved a strict anti-illegal immigration bill early Thursday. And within hours, at a college basketball tournament game between the University of Southern Mississippi and Kansas State yesterday, members of the Southern Miss Band were chanting “Where’s your green card?” at a Puerto Rican-born player from the other team.

Never mind that Puerto Ricans don’t need green cards, since they are automatically U.S. citizens at birth. The exchange, by now widely reported, highlights the tension surrounding immigration that’s been brewing in Mississippi and surrounding states, including neighboring Alabama, which enacted a similar law in September.

Earlier this month, a Southern Poverty Law Center report that tracked calls to a hotline set up after the Alabama law took effect suggested rising discrimination against Latinos, including taunts of “go back to Mexico” hurled at U.S. citizens. One citizen complained of being asked to provide “American” identification at a store while making a purchase.

The incident took place during a NCAA tournament game when the Kansas State player, Angel Rodriguez, was about to take a free throw. An NPR piece from last night links to a tweet from a sports reporter who called out the band members after witnessing the chanting.

The Mississippi bill is expected to clear the Senate, according to news reports. It’s slightly more lenient than the Alabama law in that a provision that would have required schools to track students’ immigration status was struck before the passing vote. Alabama’s law, considered the nation’s strictest, passed with a similar provision that has been temporarily blocked in court.

Called the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act,” the Mississippi bill includes provisions similar to Arizona’s SB 1070, like empowering police to check for immigration status. CNN reports that it also proposes a ban on “business transactions” with undocumented immigrants, such as renewing a driver’s license and getting a business license. If it becomes law Mississippi would become one of four contiguous Southern states – along with Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina – with similarly strict anti-illegal immigration measures.

As for the green card chant, University of Southern Mississippi’s president has issued this apology statement:

“We deeply regret the remarks made by a few students at today’s game. The words of these individuals do not represent the sentiments of our pep band, athletic department or university. We apologize to Mr. Rodriguez and will take quick and appropriate disciplinary action against the students involved in this isolated incident.”

FILED UNDER: Alabama, Alabama immigration law, Angel Rodriguez, Kansas State, Mississippi, Mississippi immigration law, Southern Miss, University of Southern Mississippi
December 30, 2011 | 9:56 AM | By

Top five immigration stories of 2011, #1: The battle in the states

Photo by naslrogues/Flickr (Creative Commons)

A year ago, when Multi-American was counting down the top five immigration stories of 2010, topping the list with Arizona’s game-changing SB 1070 was a no-brainer. Not necessarily because news of the 2010 anti-illegal immigration law dominated immigration coverage last year, but because of the lasting impact the law was bound to have on other states. I wrote then:

What continues to make SB 1070 such an important story are its ramifications beyond Arizona, which will be playing out in the years to come. Even with some of its provisions still hung up in appeals court by the pending federal challenge, SB 1070 has emboldened conservative state legislators around the country to draft their own versions of the law, some just as strict or more so than the original.

A year later, SB 1070-inspired immigration enforcement bills have made their way through statehouses around the country. Similarly strict laws have taken effect in states like Alabama, Georgia, Utah, Indiana and South Carolina.

Like the Arizona measure that inspired them, headed to the U.S. Supreme Court on a state appeal, all of these face their own court challenges. Federal judges have blocked several of these laws’ most stringent provisions, including a controversial provision in Alabama that would require public schools to check the immigration status of students, which when the law first took effect prompted a rash of school absences.

Agricultural states like Georgia and Alabama, meanwhile, have experienced severe labor shortages as immigrant farm workers have fled their fields for more welcoming climes.

The new laws enacted are but one small aspect of what’s been happening in the states. The National Conference of State Legislatures reported recently that in 2011, there were 1,607 bills and resolutions relating to immigrants and refugees introduced in all 50 states and Puerto Rico, significantly up from a little more than 1,400 in 2010. Bolstered by the relative success of SB 1070, even as parts of the law remain hung up in court, immigration restriction-minded legislators in many states banded together, working with the same legal teams to help them draft immigration crackdown bills.

Interestingly, in spite of the bill-filing fury, 11 percent fewer of these state immigration bills became law this year than in 2010. Among those that didn’t get anywhere were a series of bills intended to end birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born babies of undocumented immigrants, written with the aid of the same legal counsel behind SB 1070 and introduced in states like Arizona, Indiana and Iowa. Also voted down was an Arizona “omnibus” bill that would have denied public services to undocumented immigrants, similarly to California’s ill-fated Proposition 187 in 1994, and an Arizona bill requiring that hospitals check for patients’ immigration status.

Where does it go from here? The Supreme Court decision on SB 1070 could well hold the answer.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Alabama immigration law, Georgia immigration law, SB 1070, South Carolina immigration law, State immigration laws, Top five immigration stories of 2011
November 1, 2011 | 12:10 PM | By

Alabama, So. Carolina lead nation in Latino population increase – and strict immigration laws

Photo by Maurice Michael/Flickr (Creative Commons)

The states with two of the nation’s most restrictive new anti-illegal immigration laws also happen to be the two states that saw the biggest jump in their Latino population during the last decade.

Alabama saw a 145 percent increase in its Latino population between 2000 an 2010, according to census data, the second highest Latino growth rate in the nation. Its HB 56 immigration law, which remains partially blocked but has still caused a rash of school absences and a labor crisis in the fields as Latino workers flee the state, contains more restrictive provisions than Arizona’s controversial SB 1070 on which it is modeled.

South Carolina, just sued by the federal government over its new SB 1070-inspired law allowing police to check for immigration status, saw the nation’s biggest percent jump in Latino population growth: 148 percent. And Georgia, where an anti-illegal immigration law known as HB 87 was partially blocked in court over the summer but still caused a labor crisis, is not far behind. That state saw its Latino population grow 96 percent between 2000 and 2010.

The growth didn’t happen all at once. All of these southern states, along with others, saw very sharp increases in Latino settlement during the previous decade as well. Many of the newcomers were foreign-born immigrants, driven there by jobs and prospects that were becoming scarcer in the more crowded, expensive western states. The ensuing culture clash and racial tensions, percolating since Latinos began settling in the South in large numbers, is more than partly behind these far-from-the border states going the way of Arizona.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: 2010 Census, Alabama, Alabama immigration law, Pew Hispanic Center, South Carolina, South Carolina immigration law
October 27, 2011 | 9:58 AM | By

Colbert on Alabama and the farm jobs ‘Americans would like to do’ (Video)

In case you missed last night’s The Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert provided his comic take on the farm labor-immigration crisis in Alabama, where many immigrant workers have walked off the job and left the state in the wake of a stringent anti-illegal immigration law.

Attempts to replace them with native-born American workers down on their luck haven’t worked out, with farmers complaining that they aren’t up to doing the backbreaking work of harvesting crops like hard-to-pick tomatoes. Colbert’s take: That the immigrant workers were “stealing yet another thing that Americans would like to do.”

“All Alabama was trying to do was free up those farm jobs that ‘los ilegales’ were taking from Americans,” he quips. There’s also a clip from his Congressional testimony last year.

FILED UNDER: Economy, Politics/Justice, Alabama immigration law, HB 56, Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report
October 3, 2011 | 12:51 PM | By

The Alabama ruling, SB 1070 and the Supreme Court: What’s next?

Photo by OZinOH/Flickr (Creative Commons)

The U.S. Supreme Court Building, May 2006

As it begins its new term today, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to consider an appeal from the state of Arizona on SB 1070, the controversial 2010 anti-illegal immigration law that has since spurred copycat laws throughout the United States – but whose key provisions remain blocked by a federal judge’s ruling in July of last year.

Among those provisions is one that would allow local police to check for immigration status if there is “reasonable suspicion” that people they encounter while conducting their work could be in the country illegally. But while this component of the law hasn’t gone into effect in Arizona, it was just allowed in Alabama by a federal judge in Birmingham last week, who issued a contradictory ruling when considering an even stricter post-SB 1070 immigration crackdown measure in that state.

While blocking other provisions, the Birmingham judge also upheld another controversial aspect of the Alabama law, one that requires public schools to check the immigration status of students. The decision on this provision has since been tied to a rash of school absences.

What does last week’s ruling in Alabama bode for SB 1070 and state immigration laws in general as the Supreme Court begins its new term? For starters, with two different federal judges in two states now having issued contradictory rulings on state immigration laws, the Alabama ruling ups the ante that the high court will take up SB 1070, potentially settling once and for all whether states can or cannot enforce immigration laws.

The Alabama decision itself is on its way to appeals court. Here is what one legal expert told the International Business Times, which published a good analysis of the Alabama decision and what happens next on a larger scale:

“Because of the proliferation of state immigration laws, we need resolution from either the Supreme Court or Congress,” Stephen Yale-Loehr, teaches Immigration Law at Cornell University Law School, told IBTimes. “Right now, for example, it is very hard for national employers to know what they can or cannot do in various states.”

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Alabama immigration law, Alabama ruling, HB 56, SB 1070, U.S. Supreme Court