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Changes to Alabama's Immigration Law: For Better or Worse?

By Ryan Vasquez, APR News

http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wual/local-wual-1012047.mp3

Tuscaloosa, AL – Alabama's strict new immigration law has been quite the hot button issue. Since passing House Bill 56 last session, immigrants have left the state in droves as expected, but with all the legal challenges to the law Dorthy McDade like many others thought the evacuation would be temporary...

"At the very beginning a lot of them left they were still keeping their jobs."

McDade is Hispanic Ministry Services Coordinator for Holy Spirit Church in Tuscaloosa. She says as time went on though things changed.

"Now a lot of people have let them go and they can no longer have them employed where they pay their taxes and things like that and of course now they are having the problems of being stopped for traffic infraction and being arrested and then deported."

This was one of the intended consequences of the bill...to free up jobs being done by illegal immigrants for out of work legal residents. Set up as a jobs bill, supporters of the law say it's been a success with unemployment rates at their lowest in years. But opponents of the immigration law, like the ACLU's Justin Cox, are skeptical of the true motives.

"Legislators have been saying this is all about protecting jobs but the reality is that only something like seven percent of Alabama's businesses are apparently enrolled in e-verify, but there is no enforcement mechanism to make sure that businesses actually enroll," he says. "I mean if they were serious about protecting jobs, and they thought that that was the central aim of this I think that more attention would be paid to that and less attention would be paid to harassing school kids."

E-verify is the federal program to confirm whether a migrant is here legally or not. While some industries have seen the impact of the law in a positive way, others like agriculture have not. For a second straight growing season farmers in the state are dealing with labor shortages. McDade says that just illustrates the importance non-legal immigrants play in the state.

"They eat humbly and they live humbly and the citizens need them because they can't afford to pay someone 15 dollars and hour when someone can live off of eight dollars an hour."

The uncertain status of the state's agriculture industry has been one of the unintended consequences of the law. But it's not the only one. The law means more red tape and that's being blamed for longer lines for license and tag renewals, and the cost of doing daily business is going up for cities and counties to keep in compliance. This prompted legislators to take up bills that looked to repeal or modify the law this legislative session. Senator Gerald Dial who sponsored one such bill says it was a collaborative effort with Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange.

"People asked the Attorney General to look at this bill and define what in that bill is most defensible and something that he thinks would make that bill something he can defend and win in Supreme Court," Dial says. "He furnished us a list of that items so I put took those items and put it in a legislative bill to correct those inequities and unintended consequences."

After much debate in the legislature if became clear repealing the law was off the table, but making it more streamlined and defensible in federal court still had a chance. A bill to clean up the unintended consequences of House Bill 56 had passed the House, but in the Senate Scott Beason, who sponsored the strict immigration law, says he wasn't happy with fixing something he didn't think was broken.

"It's done basically everything that we've ever said it would do. A lot of people want to talk about unintended consequences. Most of the consequences of HB 56 were intended."

Now as the legislature prepares to conclude business for this year's session Senator Beason says he's pushing to make only minor tweaks to the bill and to leave other sections alone.

"When you begin to change large majorities of the bill under the guise of not really changing it but you go in an change things that weren't enjoined that weren't challenged that don't make a difference I believe you open yourself up to more legal challenges than you already had. And we've been very, very successful in the court system already and I think we're going to prove out to be even more successful on appeal. You don't mess with things that aren't broken."

While Beason claims he only wants to clarify those things that were misinterpreted in House Bill 56, some of the changes he's made has been making opponents of the bill even more worried than before. Justin Cox says some new parts are very concerning to the ACLU.

"One section which we've been calling the Scarlet Letter provision would require the Alabama Department of Homeland Security to post on its website a list of every undocumented individual who came into any state court for any reason which doesn't seem to serve any public purpose other than to publicly identify undocumented individuals for harassment."

The bill to modify Alabama's immigration law will be up for debate tomorrow on the last day of the legislative session with Senator Beason's changes included. While it may get priority, that doesn't guarantee it will pass. "If it doesn't," Beason says. "Then we're going to live with 56 which is the best law in the country and then administratively we'll try to make sure the bureaucracy knows how to use common sense and administer the law. And you know we might be able to get way with not making those changes. "

The legislative session isn't the end for debate over Alabama's immigration law. The oral arguments related to the federal case regarding Arizona's similar law will be released in June. What happens there could have an effect on similar provisions in Alabama's law.

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