Alabama’s Harsh Immigration Law Takes Effect Today

So why do you care about this immigration law? I would say these should be your top reasons:

• If you’re Latino, this law means cops and other authorities can make your life very difficult.
• After all, Alabama doesn’t exactly have a tidy record when it comes to not being racist towards Latinos.
• “Immigration” is a code often used to talk about “those people,” you know, Latinos.
• If you think that Alabama’s, Arizona’s and Georgia’s immigration laws are about “the law,” and not about anti-Latino sentiment, you’re sadly mistaken.

This is the breakdown of the new law in Alabama:

• Public schools are now required to “to determine, by reviewing birth certificates or sworn affidavits, the legal residency status of students upon enrollment.”
• Detain “suspected” undocumented people without bond until they figure out that person’s status.
• Courts won’t have to enforce contracts made with someone without papers (it reminds me of when people used to get immigrants to do work, or a job, then call the authorities on them so they wouldn’t have to pay them).
• It’s illegal for undocumented people to enter into business transactions (this is capitalism at work, right?)

Some parts of the law were not implemented, including:

•  Making it illegal to search for work.
• Making it illegal to “transport or harbor” someone without papers.
• Allowing discrimination lawsuits against companies “that dismiss legal workers while hiring [undocumented] immigrants.”
• Barring people without papers from attending public colleges.
• Making it illegal for people to hire temporary workers on the street.
• Making federal documents the only way to determine legal status.

It’s a sad day, if you ask me, ’cause I’m not a lawyer, but I remember learning about search and seizure and free market capitalism in school and some of these laws seem, well, to conflict with those lessons I learned in school. There are currently at least three lawsuits against this law, we’ll see how it turns out.