Alabama State Legislature HB56, Voter fraud, E-Verify

States Deal With Illegal Alien Problems

- Phyllis Schlafly
Friday, June 10, 2011
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Alabama has suddenly become the leader in comprehensive immigration reform, passing up Arizona whose laws have had so much news coverage. By large margins, the Alabama State Legislature passed a bill, known as HB56, which covers most areas of abuses by illegal aliens.

HB56 requires proof of citizenship or residency before voting, a giant protection against vote fraud. It prohibits aliens not lawfully present in the United States from receiving state or local financial benefits.

Like the Arizona law upheld on May 26 by the U.S. Supreme Court, Alabama’s HB56 requires employers to verify the legal status of their employees by using the federal government’s E-Verify program. That Arizona law, which has been kicking around in the courts since 2007, was signed by then-Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, who is now director of the Department of Homeland Security.

E-Verify, which was created by the federal government for voluntary use, can be made mandatory by state law. E-Verify instantly checks workers’ Social Security numbers to make sure they are eligible to work, and is so easy and inexpensive for employers to use that more than 99 percent of lawful workers receive positive verification within seconds.

Opponents of the Arizona law that made E-Verify mandatory tried to get supremacist judges to knock it out on the argument that it was preempted by federal law. They lost bigtime when the Supreme Court ruled that the Arizona law is okay as a business license statute, which is an ordinary power of the states and expressly allowed by federal immigration law.

The employer doesn’t commit a crime if he fails to use E-Verify, but he could lose his business license, which the state government has the authority to revoke. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the leading expert in this area of law, observed that “Alabama is now the new No. 1 state for immigration enforcement.â€