Thread: Decatur AL: Immigration still polarizing political debate

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MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2006


Daily photo by Emily Saunders
Diana Crisantes of Decatur looks out her front door with her daughter Arisbeth Crisantes, 6, at her side. Behind them are two neighborhood children she watches, and another of her daughters, Monica Crisantes, 15. The Crisantes family, part of a growing influx of Hispanic immigrants in Decatur, has lived in the United States for about 10 years.

Immigration still polarizing political debate
Even after election, positions unclear

Editor’s note: This is the first of a seven-part series, running today through Sunday, on Decatur’s Hispanic influx.

By Eric Fleischauer
eric@decaturdaily.com·340-2435

Many of the Founding Fathers objected to political parties, arguing that factions should form around specific issues, not broad platforms.

They would no doubt approve of North Alabama’s raucous debate over immigration.

Party affiliation is irrelevant in immigration debates, which colored campaigns leading to the Nov. 7 elections. Left-leaning Democrats agreed with many right-leaning Republicans that fewer restrictions, not more, should be the goal of immigration reform. Liberals and fiscal conservatives took shots at each other over the issue, but they said the same things.

Incumbent state Rep. Micky Hammon, R-Decatur, campaigned almost solely on his legislative efforts to persuade illegal immigrants to leave Alabama. Bills he sponsored — several stalled by other Republicans in the last legislative session — would strip illegals of every state public benefit not mandated by federal law.

“If we prevent them from receiving public benefits, if we take their vehicles, if we allow law enforcement to seize the personal property of illegal aliens, if we keep them from using the public health department, these people are not going to be as apt to come to Alabama,” Hammon said. “They will want to locate somewhere else. The ones that are here will probably start leaving.”

He won.

Immigration as a central platform in a campaign for state office would have been inconceivable a few years ago. Census numbers are notoriously unreliable for immigrants, especially illegal ones, but still show dramatic growth in the number of Hispanics in Morgan County. The 1990 census showed 584 Hispanics in the county, well under 1 percent. By the time of a census survey in 2005, that number had grown by almost 1,000 percent and represented 5 percent of the county’s population.

Possibly a better indicator is the number of Hispanics enrolled in the English as a Second Language program in Decatur City Schools. In 1992, there were 27. By 1999, that number had grown to 276; now it is 886. There are 1,500 Hispanic students in Decatur public schools.

Decatur police estimate there are as many as 10,000 Hispanics in Decatur, more than one-fifth of the city’s population.

Whatever the numbers, Hispanic growth has been explosive and has tattered the area’s social fabric. Decatur Hispanics were in force at a Hispanic rally in nearby Huntsville — aimed at reducing immigration restrictions — on May 1, causing some local employers to shut down and shrinking school attendance. Later that month, Decatur was home to a demonstration against immigrants.

The issue is a major one in Decatur, and politicians like Hammon know it.

Hammon’s persuade-them-to-leave campaign position seems clear, but Hammon embodies North Alabama’s schizophrenic view on immigration. Initial appearances notwithstanding, Hammon — off the campaign trail — said his goal is more immigrants, not fewer. The employment shortage created by a crackdown would force liberalization of immigration laws.

“I think the pressures from the business groups that need the labor would change from ‘Leave it alone,’ to ‘OK, let’s find a real solution to this problem. Our labor source is starting to leave,’ ” Hammon said. “Without us putting pressure on them to have to make a change, they will not.”

Decatur immigration attorney Allen R. Stoner said that approach is too simplistic.

“Immigration law is so complicated,” Stoner said. “Particularly in the area of removal. … Every campaign you hear Republicans and Democrats talk about cracking down on illegal immigrants. It’s sad, but that’s the way it is.”

Hammon is more outspoken than most, but hardly unique. The weeks before Tuesday’s election were a blur of mailers, full-page ads and television spots proclaiming hostility to illegal immigrants.

The answers

Hardliner Hammon, though, like many candidates, worries about employers when he’s not making speeches or distributing fliers.

“The answer to this is bringing legal immigrants into the country faster,” Hammon said. “The process is too burdensome and long.”

Helen Rivas is a self-proclaimed “progressive,” a Spanish interpreter and a leading pro-immigrant activist in Birmingham. She has never met Hammon, but has no use for him. His anti-immigrant rhetoric has hurt Hispanics and embodies the defects in the Republican Party, she said. But — and this may pain Rivas — the expressed goals of the two are the same: increase legal immigrants.

This, of course, is where the Founding Fathers opposed to the party system would say, “I told you so.” The far left and the corporate right find themselves in an embarrassing marriage.

Helen, meet Micky.

“My opinion is you have a group of Republicans who really seriously want to do something about this problem,” said Hammon. “Then you have some other Republicans who would really rather not deal with it. You have special interests on this; employers are one of them. … There is a split on this in both parties.”

The arguments Hammon used to support his anti-illegal-immigrant political campaign were typical of other campaigns in the weeks leading to the Nov. 7 election:

# Illegal immigrants commit crimes.

# Illegal immigrants reduce wages of U.S. citizens.

# Illegal immigrants use up tax dollars by relying upon public services.

Some of these arguments are decades old.

Charles Fanning, director of Irish Studies at Southern Illinois University–Carbondale, is the author of several books on Irish immigration. He said the crime and wage issues triggered U.S. protests as millions of Irish escaped famine in their homeland to enter the U.S. in the late 1840s.

Immigrant crime

“A lot of these people,” Hammon said, referring to Hispanics, “don’t work real jobs. They work in human trafficking; they work in illegal drugs; they work in money laundering, fraudulent document sales. The drug trade in this area has been totally taken over by illegal aliens.”

Fanning said studies have shown that crime among Irish immigrants, though much ballyhooed, was no greater than others of their economic status. Anti-immigrant cries that the Irish were violent made good press, but the statistics belied them.

“There was no such thing as an illegal immigrant until the 1920s,” Fanning said. “Everybody could come.” By 1890, there were 3 million Irish-born people in America.

“They were seen as uncivilized, not able to live under the social contract. They were going to destroy the cities; they were lawless,” Fanning said. “But at the same time, as with the Hispanics, everybody recognized that there’s a huge contribution being made to the economy by these people. So we don’t want them in, but we’re making a lot of money because they are here.”

The state does not identify perpetrators of crime as Hispanic, although that will occur soon, but Lt. Col. Kenneth Collier of the Decatur Police Department said he sees no evidence that area Hispanic immigrants commit more crimes than do others in their economic class.

Criminologists question the link between immigrants and crime, too.

Robert J. Sampson, a Harvard sociologist and lead author of a recent study on the topic, said the recent flow of immigrants “has been one of the more plausible explanations that we’ve seen for the decrease in the violence rate.”

Sampson’s study focused on Hispanics, and its conclusion was that first-generation immigrants, regardless of educational level or parents’ marital status, are less likely to commit violent crimes than the rest of the population.

Not all scholars agree. Another study, by Northwestern University political scientist Wesley Skogan, concluded that an influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants increased violent crime in some Chicago neighborhoods. The probable reason, the author theorized, is that most of the immigrants were young men, who have the highest crime rate regardless of ethnicity.

A paper by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Urban Institute was blunt: “Few stereotypes of immigrants are as enduring, or have been proven so categorically false over literally decades of research, as the notion that immigrants are disproportionately likely to engage in criminal activity … (If anything) immigrants are disproportionately unlikely to be criminal.”

Said one sociologist: If native-born Americans had the same low probability of being incarcerated as immigrants, the nation’s prisons would have one-third fewer inmates.

The job issue

Most politicians, like Hammon, accept that illegal immigrants reduce the wages of U.S. citizens. More workers competing for a given number of jobs push wages down, even more so when those workers are willing to work for low wages.

A common argument in the past, that illegal immigrants increased unemployment among U.S. citizens, holds less credibility these days. Morgan County’s unemployment rate is 3 percent. Limestone’s is 2.6 percent. Lawrence County is at 3.4 percent. The Federal Reserve has expressed concern that the unemployment rate is too low and may spark inflation.

“I understand our unemployment rate is low,” Hammon said. “But illegal immigrants are driving down the wages for the laborers in our state.”v

Auburn University Economics Professor Richard Ault is not so sure.

“A knee-jerk analysis is that immigration increases the supply of unskilled workers and depresses the wages of those workers. It is tempting to stop there,” Ault said. “However, the depression of wages serves to keep jobs here which would otherwise have been lost. It also provides incentives for new firms to locate here.”

Alabama’s major economic success stories of late, the Hyundai automotive plant and numerous suppliers for a Kia plant in Georgia, may owe much to America’s failed border policy, he suggested.

“One could argue that Korean auto firms would be much harder to recruit in Alabama had our labor force not been augmented by immigrant workers,” Ault said.

Economics Professor Niles Schoening at The University of Alabama in Huntsville said he suspects immigrants, legal or not, tend to depress wages, but he said the issue is neither obvious nor simple.

The North American and Central American free trade agreements skew what would otherwise be a simple supply-demand equation.

Free trade

NAFTA and CAFTA, along with reduced trade barriers with China and other developing nations, give U.S. employers two options not readily available a few decades ago. They can outsource labor-intensive jobs to companies across the border, and they can open operations across the border for labor-intensive production.

“I think if we restricted entry, a lot of low-wage industry would probably leave the U.S.,” Schoening said.

In North Alabama, the combination of a shortage of low-cost labor and foreign competition has pushed many jobs to other countries.

Wolverine Tube Inc. outsourced a product line to a company in China. It opened a plant in Mexico and shifted some of Decatur’s production to that plant.

Nova Chemicals, a Canadian company with a plant in Decatur, entered into a joint venture with a company in Mexico, thereby substituting inexpensive Mexican labor for comparatively expensive U.S. and Canadian labor.

In Birmingham, labor costs caused McWane Inc. to quit production of labor-intensive pipefitting. It outsourced production to a company in China.

Wolverine, Nova and McWane, of course, are the success stories. Alabama textile mills have gone out of business. In Decatur, Solutia did not outsource its textile division — it closed it.

The impact of each of these decisions was a loss of American jobs. That loss of jobs, which did not come with a corresponding decrease in American workers, has the same economic impact as a flood of immigrants. Too many people chasing too few jobs reduce wages.

In the wake of globalization, American workers are competing with low-wage foreign workers whether those workers live in America or in Mexico, said Schoening.

“I’m afraid we’re hopelessly a part of the global economy,” he said. “We can’t isolate ourselves, and we probably can’t isolate our labor market either.”

Fanning agrees.

“The porousness of the economic borders now are dramatic,” he said. “Go to Wal-Mart, everything’s made in China. Trying to stop the people without stopping the products is inconsistent.”

Politicians, Fanning said, would do well to study the Irish “immigrant crisis.”

“We’re seeing the same sort of intolerance (toward Hispanics) that the Irish and Germans faced,” Fanning said. “But they were able to work through it, they did contribute and they came out on the other side making the society stronger.”

The death-knell of opposition to Irish immigrants, Fanning said, did not come until John F. Kennedy Jr. became the first Irish-Catholic president.

“The Irish were willing to work for less. They were seen as taking jobs from people who had been here longer,” Fanning said. “They were welcomed by others who said they were building the railroads, building the canals, doing factory work.”

Fanning said those who welcomed the Irish were largely employers.

Public benefits

Without question, illegal immigrants are a drain on North Alabama tax dollars. The children of illegal immigrants often have language barriers that dramatically increase the expense of educating them. They burden the free-lunch program. Emergency rooms must treat illegal immigrants, who rarely have health insurance.

A study by the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative group, concluded that households headed by illegal aliens imposed more than $26.3 billion in costs on the federal government in 2002 and paid only $16 billion in taxes, creating a net fiscal deficit of almost $10.4 billion, or $2,700 per illegal household. Among the largest costs are medical treatment for the uninsured, free school lunches and federal aid to schools.

Interestingly, the same study concluded that documented immigrants are an even greater drain on tax dollars because they don’t pay much more than their illegal counterparts in taxes, but they are eligible for many benefits that illegal immigrants can’t receive such as food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid and welfare assistance.

Political rhetoric notwithstanding, Schoening aptly summarizes the immigration debate: “There is no simple answer to this.”

Hispanics in Decatur

# Decatur police estimate up to 10,000 Hispanics live in the city.

# 1,500 Hispanic students are in Decatur schools.

# English as a Second Language costs the school system $875,807.

# Hispanic visits to the Decatur Health Department have increased 74 percent in the past three years.

# A child born in Decatur or the U.S. to illegal parents is a U.S. citizen and entitled to all government benefits.

See this post on the draw for Decatur AL.
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