For Florida, Alabama’s Immigration Enforcement Has Unintended Consequences

Published on November 9, 2011.
By Ralph De La Cruz
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

After experiencing domestic out-migration for the first time in its history, Florida may finally be attracting folks from other states to move here.

More snowbirds from New York? Disenchanted Beltway residents?

Nope.

Laborers from Alabama.

For more than a month, news outlets have been reporting an influx of undocumented workers moving to Florida from Alabama as a result of a newly passed state law that is the harshest immigration enforcement measure in the country. Entire communities packed up overnight and moved on.

The law requires police officers to check the immigration status of anyone they pull over, detain or arrest if they suspect that person might be here without papers. If they can’t produce papers, they’re taken in.

It also makes educators accumulate immigration information on students, which has had a chilling effect on Hispanic schoolchildren of Alabama — even if they are American-born and perfectly entitled to public education. That’s because many families are “mixed,â€