Immigration Bill Hb 56: Polarizing Views In Legislation

Article on the Daily Caller: "Alabama's Toughest Immigration Law Didn't Fail- It was Gutted"

     After learning about Alabama's anti-immigration bill, HB 56, that was passed in 2011, from the article titled: "Alabama's Shame: HB 56 and the War on Immigrants," I decided to do some further investigation. The bill's intent was suppose to make life so unlivable for undocumented immigrants that they would self-deport. The 'Alabama Shame' article reveals that the bill's provisions not only made it legal for police to ask for people's "papers" to demonstrate citizenship or legal status and prevented undocumented immigrants from receiving access to medical aid at hospitals/urgent cares. It also (as the stories in the article report) prevented undocumented immigrants from having access to business permits, prevented access to running water in the homes of undocumented immigrants, rendered contracts with illegal immigrants invalid, etc. It essentially punished the illegal immigrants who were attracted to big businesses' cheap wages without punishing big businesses for hiring them. The "Alabama Shame" article showed many examples of how the bill allowed many businessmen to actually take advantage of illegal immigrant and commit further crime by not giving due process rights to illegals when business did not pay them deserved wages or even repo-ed vehicles after undocumented people already had paid for them. When the undocumented can't turn to the police when they are being victimized, bad people will take advantage of that vulnerability.

     I needed to read more about all the sides of this article before I could better understand the bill's purpose, intents, and impact. The video above is a short 1:50 minute interview with Alabama's first African-American federal judge, retired Judge UW Clemon. He talks about how the bill has resulted in a civil rights crisis due to the fact that the bill has consequentially used racial profiling to essentially drive not only undocumented latinos out of the state, but has resulted in essentially driving all latinos (even citizen and legally documented) out of the state. Clemon compares it to the Jim Crow segregation period that blacks faced. In the state of Alabama, because of HB 56, if you are of hispanic nationality: the color of your skin means being racially profiled by the police, being pulled over at a higher rate in an attempt to catch undocumented immigrants, and having to verify your citizenship on a regular basis just because of your skin tone. That is harassment. That is discriminatory, and yet many people in Alabama have stood behind this bill. 

     I questioned how proponents of the HB 56 bill saw this discrimination, and what I realized is that they didn't. I began to google articles written by proponents of HB 56. At the top of this blog is an article by the Daily Caller, a Conservative news source. The article talks about how the bill didn't fail on its own, but that the Federal Government dismantled it. Apparently there was many predictions made about how pushing out illegal immigrants of Alabama would actually hurt the economy (similar to what we've talked about in class). The article spends its entirety trying to disprove any negative predictions made about the bill, but never once addresses the civil rights issue of the bill. Author Scott Greer of the article "Alabama's Toughest Immigration Bill Didn't Fail-It was Gutted" never once takes in to major consideration that a immigration reform bill shouldn't exist operating on racial profiling and discrimination and that in doing so it violates constitutional rights and that that is enough of a reason for it not to be legal. It's interesting that Greer never once takes in to consideration how the bill could be a civil rights violation for any hispanic citizen who fears increased traffic stops because of racial profiling and having to always keep documents on them to verify legal status. But I guess this has always been the struggle for people of color in America, and this has always been the privileged opinions of many whites in America because apparently somehow people around the US, in places like Alabama, think what has gone on is okay. The disconnect is startling and sad.