MONTGOMERY, AL (AP)- Alabama’s strict new immigration law was touted by state legislators as a job creation bill.
The idea was to force illegal workers out of jobs and open them up for legal residents. Early indications are the plan is backfiring.
Few people are filling any of the vacancies that have been created by the construction workers, landscapers and farmers who are leaving. The absence will surely deal a blow to the state’s economy and could slow the rebuilding of Tuscaloosa and other tornado-damaged cities.
It’s not clear how many of an estimated 185,000 Hispanic people in the state have fled. One estimate figured as much one-fourth of the commercial building work force had left since much of the law was upheld last week.
Meanwhile, the Southern Poverty Law Center has won some encouraging victories in the months since they launched their effort to defeat Alabama’s harsh anti-immigrant law.
Currently, the following provisions of HB 56 are in effect:
• Police are allowed to check the immigration status of people they stop and reasonably suspect are in the country unlawfully.
• All new contracts between an undocumented immigrant and another person are unenforceable in state court, with the exception of contracts for one night?s lodging, food purchases and medical services.
• It is a felony for undocumented immigrants to enter into a “business transaction? with the state of Alabama. The scope of this felony remains unclear, but includes applying for a driver?s license or a business license. The provision also include transactions with subdivisions of the state, such as cities and counties.
• Beginning April 1, 2012, employers will be required to use e-verify to determine the immigration status of prospective employees.
Other provisions of the law have been temporarily blocked by the courts. These include provisions that:
• Require K-12 school officials to question students about their immigration status and that of their parents.
• Prohibit residents from transporting or harboring undocumented immigrants.
• Make it a traffic violation for motorists who stop in the roadway to hire a day laborer.
• Prohibit universities from enrolling certain immigrants ? including asylees, refugees or those granted temporary protected status.
• Make it a misdemeanor for failing to complete or carry an alien registration card.
• Prohibit employers from taking state tax deductions for wages paid to undocumented workers.
• Allow employers to be sued for discrimination by people with U.S. citizen or legal immigration status when they are fired or not hired by an employer with undocumented employees.
—————————————————————— In Other Republican/Fox HATE THY IMMIGRANT News:
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1.REPORT: IN IMMIGRATION COVERAGE, FOX SHUNS PRO-IMMIGRANT VOICES — A year ago, News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch claimed that Fox News is not “anti-immigrant,” a statement seemingly contradicted by near-daily segments on the network portraying immigrants in a negative light. Now, a Media Matters analysis of Fox News guests from April 2010 to June 2011 has found that of the guests Fox chose to discuss immigration, an overwhelming majority took anti-immigrant positions or held anti-immigrant views. In fact, our data show that anti-immigrant guests outnumbered those with a pro-immigrant point of view by a 3-to-1 margin. [ READ MORE ]
The fallout from Sen. John McCain’s(R-AZ) patently false statement that undocumented immigrants were responsible for the destructive wildfires in Arizona continued last Friday, as his fellow Arizona senator Jon Kyl(R) and Maricopa Sheriff Joe Arpaio entered the fray. “Sheriff Joe,” as he’s called, may be the most notoriously ruthless law enforcement official in the country.
John McCain’s Wildfire Accusations: Sen. McCain said there was “substantial evidence” linking wildfires in Arizona to illegal immigrants. The increasingly racist Arizona senator accused in particular — Mexican immigrants of starting wildfires.
Arpaio is known for cramming detained immigrants into inhumane outdoor “tent cities” he proudly likens to concentration camps, and for parading prisoners around in pink underwear, in addition to his numerous legal violations. [ READ MORE ] [ MORE ON ARPAIO ]
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Meanwhile, with the renewed national focus on immigration reform, Fox, the Republican propaganda machine and right-wing HATE-RADIO — are busy revving up their anti-immigrant lying campaign.
MMFA: Fox News has spent the past several weeks misleading on the issue and slanting its news coverage to paint immigrants in a negative light. [ READ MORE ]
Hate-Talker Michael Savage: “Most” Latinos In America Are “Illegal”
By: Bryan Curtis The Senate is set to vote on a controversial immigration bill. If it fails, Rep. Luis Gutiérrez tells Bryan Curtis he’s prepared to ditch Obama and the Democrats–and take the movement to the streets. “If we couldn’t do it when Democrats were nearly 260 in the House and 59 in the Senate, how do we propose to tell people we can do it now?” Gutiérrez says. “The opportunity to have gotten it done is gone.” Hispanic leaders find themselves wedded to a president and a party that is their only conceivable hope to pass immigration reform. But the president and the party–because of the GOP, or because of internal priorities–could not pass immigration reform.
It’s zero hour for the DREAM Act, a bit of immigration legislation that has taken on a hulking importance among Hispanic leaders. For two years, Barack Obama failed–or, if you prefer, refused–to nudge along a major immigration bill. The last-ditch hope is that departing Democrats, and a few Republicans, somehow band together in the lame-duck session and pass a law allowing illegal immigrants who came to the United States as minors to gain citizenship. Harry Reid promised to bring up the bill for a Senate cloture vote this week. Republicans vowed to scuttle it, just as they did in September.
But as Chicago congressman Luis Gutiérrez prepares for a rally at a church in Brooklyn a few weeks before the vote, the DREAM Act seems like the end of his interest in congressional gamesmanship rather than the start. Gutiérrez is one of several Hispanic leaders who have found themselves politically estranged from the president. Moreover, they are numbed by the legislative process that denied them a vote on immigration reform, much less a victory, when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. “If we couldn’t do it when Democrats were nearly 260 in the House and 59 in the Senate, how do we propose to tell people we can do it now?” Gutiérrez tells me. “The opportunity to have gotten it done is gone.”
The DREAM Act, Gutiérrez says, is for now his final legislative maneuver. He’s finished waiting for the mythical 60th vote to materialize in the Senate. No, when the lame duck ends, Gutiérrez and his movement allies will ask for a divorce–from the Democratic Party, from the entire lawmaking process. To hear Gutiérrez tell it, Hispanic leaders are about to stage a full-tilt campaign of direct action, like the African-American civil-rights movement of the 1960s. There will be protests, marches, sit-ins–what César Chávez might have called going rogue. The movement will operate autonomously, no longer beholden to wavering Democrats, filibustering Republicans, and–perhaps most tantalizingly–no longer beholden to Barack Obama.
Gutiérrez, 56, is a wiry, handsome man whose childlike features mask his penchant for roaring oratory. He is a master of the bilingual stemwinder, toggling between English and Spanish in alternating sentences, judo-chopping his applause lines. A recent Pew Hispanic Center poll named Gutiérrez as the second-most important Latino leader in America, behind only Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. As we speak in a room inside St. Brigid’s Church, a Mexican-Dominican-Ecuadorean congregation in Brooklyn, journalists from New York’s Spanish-language papers pry open the door to peek at us. They look at me and give me the cut sign across the neck so that they, too, can get a word with Gutiérrez.
American Anti-Immigrant Xenophobia: Exposing American Anti-Immigrant Bigots, Racists and Xenophobic Extortionists.
If Gutiérrez is leaving the legislative process behind, the move will follow a long and strange odyssey. Gutiérrez has been attempting to write reform legislation since the Bush administration. (George W. Bush, like Obama, supported immigration reform.) The election of a longtime ally who promised to push for reform within one year of taking office seemed to offer new hope.
But after the deadline expired, Hispanic leaders began to look at Obama less as an ally than an antagonist. In January, President Obama devoted only a single sentence of his State of the Union to immigration reform, when many reform advocates expected it to be a centerpiece of the speech. In the spring, after Obama excluded illegal immigrants from a provision of the Affordable Care Act, Gutiérrez blasted him in an op-ed. “Barack Obama has delivered ‘change,’” he wrote. “It’s been a change for the worse.” In move to ratchet up pressure on Obama, Gutiérrez got himself arrested outside the White House at a May rally.
In September, Gutiérrez met with Obama in the Oval Office. Immigration reform still hadn’t budged, but he was thinking big. “Let’s do comprehensive in the lame duck,” Gutiérrez recalls telling Obama. “It’ll be our last chance, Mr. President. Because if things are bad now, imagine what it’s going to be like with new Republicans coming in, Tea Party, the SenateLloyd Grove” The key word here is “comprehensive.” Gutiérrez was suggesting that Obama bypass piecemeal reform like the DREAM Act and go for the whole enchilada–a path to citizenship for the country’s 11 million illegal immigrants. According to Gutiérrez, Obama agreed then to push a comprehensive plan in the lame duck. (The White House wouldn’t comment on the conversation.)
As the election neared, Gutiérrez was bent on holding the president to his word. On October 30, he collared Obama on the O’Hare tarmac as he stepped off the plane for a rally. Gutiérrez told the president he wanted to meet right after that Tuesday’s election to plot strategy. Obama apologized and said he couldn’t make it–he was off on a scheduled 10-day trip to Asia.
“We lost two weeks, which is probably half of the lame duck,” Gutiérrez laments now. In the push for immigration reform, it was a typically baffling setback. Gutiérrez and his allies shelved their grand plans and decided to make a play for the DREAM Act instead.
“It’s what we call Plan B,” says Jorge Ramos, a news anchor for the Spanish-language network Univision and an advocate for reform. These days, Ramos–who finished two spots behind Gutiérrez in the Pew survey of Latino leaders–speaks with the same wariness of the legislative process as the congressman. For it was Ramos, back in 2008, who extracted the promise from Obama to push immigration reform within one year.
“The real story behind everything has to be that we missed a great opportunity to have immigration reform approved when Barack Obama and the Democrats had true control of both chambers,” says Ramos.
“I think Hillary Clinton was right,” he adds. “When she was running for president, she said that immigration reform needed to be done during the first 100 days. Of course, she didn’t win and that didn’t happen, and look where we are right now.”
None of this is to say Latino voters have dumped Obama. “The honeymoon is not quite over,” says Fernand Amandi, the managing partner of the polling firm Bendixen & Amandi. A June Gallup poll showed Obama down more than 10 points among Hispanics. But as the midterms neared, the immigrant salvos of candidates like Jan Brewer and Sharron Angle made the president seem more appealing to Hispanic voters. If Obama had once looked like the hesitator-in-chief, next to Brewer and Angel he looked like César Chávez. Hispanics voted overwhelmingly for Democrats.
This, then, is the dilemma for Hispanic leaders:
They find themselves wedded to a president and a party that is their only conceivable hope to pass immigration reform. But the president and the party–because of the GOP, or because of internal priorities–could not pass immigration reform.
Which brings us to the divorce. “I haven’t thought this out completely,” Gutiérrez says in the church. Then he begins tentatively spelling out a plan to sever the immigration-reform movement from the Democrats.
“We need to decouple the movement for comprehensive immigration reform and justice for immigrants from the legislative process and from the Democratic Party process,” Gutiérrez says. “They are too linked.”
“When black people in this country decided they were going to fight for civil rights and for voting rights, they didn’t ask if the majority leader was with them and when they were going to tee up the bill. They said, ‘We’re sitting where we need to sit on the bus! We’re integrating this counter! We’re going to march!”
Gutiérrez is pacing around the room and his voice is rising. “Their actions propelled the nation. It’s the way changes are made. Look at John F. Kennedy–he was president. Martin Luther King, I don’t think he was real concerned whether he was going to reelected in 1964.”
This is a pretty radical notion, especially for a sitting congressman. And Gutiérrez is quick to suggest the goals of the Democrats and immigration movement may not jibe. “Is it reelect the president?” Gutiérrez asks. “Is that your priority? Or is it get comprehensive immigration reform? Those things can be in contradiction with one another.” “The Democratic Party is the party of immigrants. But its leader–in this case, Barack Obama–has to continue to be challenged.”
“I’m not the only one thinking this way,” he adds.
In the broad strokes, the kind of divide Gutiérrez is talking about is not only reminiscent of the African-American civil-rights movement, but the arms-length distance the Chicano Movement kept from the political establishment during most of its late-1960s heyday.
As the rally begins in the sanctuary of St. Brigid’s Church, the extent of the divorce is already becoming clear. A letter is passed around demanding that Obama sign an executive order to stop deportations, one of the acts the president can authorize without Senate approval. “You just need a pen,” the petition reads. Gutiérrez’s dual roles as a powerful legislator and civil-rights leader put him in the crosshairs, too. Some of the students who would become eligible for citizenship under the DREAM Act have tweeted at Gutiérrez, asking him to stop appearing on cable TV on their behalf. When the immigration-reform movement has divorced Gutiérrez, it has truly gone rogue.
Gutiérrez says the moment for direct action to make its mark is now, and over the next several months, before a presidential campaign once again reduces the political world to a binary choice. Until then, Barack Obama will no longer have Luis Gutiérrez and his allies inside the tent raising a ruckus. They will be on the outside holding a sign.
About The Author: Bryan Curtis — is a national correspondent at The Daily Beast. He was a columnist at Play: The New York Times Sports Magazine, Slate, and Texas Monthly, and has written for GQ, Outside, and New York.
By: Devona Walker Why does the mainstream media ignore that when covering it? The immigration mess in this country is not a fake problem. But the debate surrounding how you solve it is completely artificial. Immigration reform has been the most politically divisive issue in this country for going on six years. That is insanely idiotic when you consider that both sides essentially agree on how to solve it. You cannot find one (unless you are talking to those racist nativists) anti-immigration groups that honestly believes this country can or should deport millions of illegal immigrants. Likewise, you cannot find one pro-immigrant advocate who believes we should not do more to enforce the rule of law and secure our borders.
It all boils down to who is going to blink first. Who is going to take up this fight, which is political suicide in the short-term for Democrats and in the long-term for Republicans?
And which one do you do first? Do you secure the borders first? Or do you start a legal process by which illegal immigrants currently in the country can begin a process of becoming a legal citizen? Yes, amnesty folks. Despite all the vitriol on the anti-immigrant side of things, there is not one expert among them who does not believe that “amnesty” in some form must be a part of solving our current immigration mess.
The truth is the law doesn’t have a chance of becoming law as it is written. It does not merely encourage, but requires racial profiling. But it also violates due process. It sets up a system in which the innocent can be indefinitely detained without any proof they are illegal. Validating someone’s immigration status at present takes several days and the Department of Homeland Security has already been sued several times for detaining legal citizens. If the federal government can’t get it right, with all the resources and training available to them, how do you think some small-town Arizona cops will fare?
But the really inexcusable thing about this whole immigration farce is that the folks penning these “enforcement-only” immigration statutes around the country, know these laws are not enforceable or legal.
The little-known secret behind this whole “anti-immigrant” movement is that the laws are not written by individual legislators, but the legislative arm of a far right anti-immigrant group called FAIR, that is the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Each bill serves as test legislation for future bills. They have built this movement entirely upon bias, fear and emotion and have no intention of actually helping resolve the immigration mess in this country. Their ultimate goal is to repeal the 14th amendment, which is citizenship by birthright. They want to create a situation where you are not necessarily a U.S. citizen simply be the act of being born in this country. They feel citizenship should be reserved onto to children born in this country and whose parents were also American citizens. They also feel admittedly that Latinos, not necessarily illegal immigrants, are a threat to our country.
It should be noted that in our last presidential election we had two choices, Sen. John McCain and Barack Obama. If these birthright folks had their way, neither would be eligible for U.S. citizenship. Obama’s father was Kenyan and McCain wasn’t actually born in this country.
It should also be noted that the far right folks fueling the anti-immgration debate and writing the immigration statutes are not at all in line with most Americans concerned about the rate of illegal immigration, the impact on social services, public schools, or necessarily the potential that exist for the Mexican drug war to spill over into U.S. cities. These folks are not even in line with groups like the conservative) Center for Immigration Studies, they are simply exploiting the immigration tensions that exist to further their nativist movement.
American XENOPHOBIA: Anti-Immigrant FEAR, HATE and LOATHING
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The last 11 states that enacted immigration statutes had direct connections to FAIR. FAIR is a fairly controversial group. It has been listed since 2007 by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. It’s not necessarily immigration legislation that caused them to receive this distinction but because of its historical ties to a Eugenics Foundation (Eugenics is a pseudo-science founded in the late 1800s that deals with the improvement-as by control of human mating-of hereditary qualities of a race or breed).
SPLC has also investigated FAIR’s founder John Tanton, a guy who has been warning for years, not about illegal immigration, but a “Latino onslaught.”
“In a majority of the states where legislation has been proposed or discussed, the leading lawmakers behind the bills are associated with FAIR’s legislative arm, a group called State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI) that operates in at least 35 states,” it was reported in Colorlines.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, FAIR has received more than $1 million in grants from the Pioneer Fund, a group that promotes the notion that blacks and Latinos are inherently less intelligent than whites.
In at least seven of the 11 states where these “immigration enforcement” statutes have been proposed, there are legislators “drafting” them that are member’s of FAIR’s state legislator’s group and Arizona is no exception.
In South Carolina, it was Rep. Michael Pitts. Pitts is a listed as a member of SLLI. The language in the South Carolina bill is strikingly similar to the one in Arizona. In Missouri, SLLI member Rep. Brian Nieves signed on as a co-sponsor of a draconian anti-immigrant bill recently referred to a legislative committee. In five other states-Maryland, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and Texas-the same is true.
Kris Kobach, a lawyer who works with the FAIR legal arm, IRLI, helped write Arizona’s SB 1070.
Why is Arizona any different?
Well, until now, FAIR’s strategy appears to be to have been to eat away at the rights of immigrants along the margins. That is, all the states up until this point, have not had significant immigrant populations or problems in terms of illegal immigration. Instead, FAIR chose conservative strongholds where they would be able to find legislators who found it politically advantageous to propose stringent immigration enforcement statutes. But in terms of really affecting the lives of immigrants, these bills were not that consequential — as those states do not have large populations of immigrants. This, of course, also meant there would be little resistance and pushback from Latino voters.
The difference in Arizona is that it does have a large Latino population. After Arizona, they will probably be emboldened enough to take on Florida, New York, Texas and California. Arizona is a very critical test case for the anti-immigration crowd. And this federal suit is equally critical when it comes to stopping the madness long enough to address the problem at hand.
Notes: A poster at Media Matters For America made this observation — “After destroying the economy, destroying the country, and engaging in the worst kind of racist and classist politics, suddenly we are supposed to believe the Repubschmucks when they say, ‘trust us.‘ They can all go to hell. Why didn’t the Repubschmucks reform immigration when they had control of the WH and Congress?
Because they are all about ethnic cleansing.
That is what is Arizona’s law if for, to begin the purging the nation of all brown-skinned people. Eventually, they will say that descendants of slaves should not be allowed citizenship since they only were anchor babies. Republicanism has turned into an Aryan Nationionalism.
Panel smacks down Senor’s claim that a GOP Congress would be more likely to pass comprehensive immigration reform
Ethic cleansing of Mexicans, and for the record — black and brown lynchings, have happened before. For example, in the 1930s local, state and federal authorities arrested residents of Mexican heritage–citizens and non-citizens alike; confiscated their property, and deported them to Mexico.
During the late 1920s, declining profit margins sparked a worldwide crisis in capitalism known as The Great Depression.
The stock market crash of 1929 paralyzed American industry and produced historically high unemployment rates. Mexican and Mexican American workers, along with African Americas and other minorities, were vulnerable elements in the reserve industrial army and among the hardest hit. The political backlash to the widespread economic hardships of the time, which should have been aimed at the capitalist system of exploitation, fell instead on minority workers and their families. Mexican immigrants, welcomed as laborers during the economic boom of the war years, were scapegoated during the depression and subjected to racist attacks and severe immigration restrictions.
The anti-immigrant hysteria generated during the Great Depression helped defuse the political time bomb of mass unemployment in the U.S. and led directly to the mass deportation of Mexicans. Between 250,000 and 350,000 Mexican workers and their families, many of which included American born children (and therefore American citizens), were deported over the next decade. The Mexican population in the U.S. dropped an estimated 40 percent during the ten-year period. The state of Indiana lost three-fourths of its Mexican population, and another twelve states — Colorado, Illinois, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming — all lost over half. [ READ MORE ] [ STOLEN BIRTHRIGHT: THE U.S. CONQUEST AND EXPLOITATION OF THE MEXICAN PEOPLE ]
The Senate is set to vote on a controversial immigration bill. If it fails, Rep. Luis Gutiérrez tells Bryan Curtis he’s prepared to ditch Obama and the Democrats–and take the movement to the streets. “If we couldn’t do it when Democrats were nearly 260 in the House and 59 in the Senate, how do we propose to tell people we can do it now?” Gutiérrez says. “The opportunity to have gotten it done is gone.” Hispanic leaders find themselves wedded to a president and a party that is their only conceivable hope to pass immigration reform. But the president and the party–because of the GOP, or because of internal priorities–could not pass immigration reform.
