Thread: Alabama’s Tough Immigration Law Didn’t Fail — It Was Gutted

Alabama’s Tough Immigration Law Didn’t Fail — It Was Gutted


SCOTT GREER
Associate Editor
12:57 AM 08/26/2015


“Alabama tried a Donald Trump-style immigration law. It failed in a big way.”

That’s the headline from a Saturday Washington Post article which sought to educate the public on Alabama’s recent attempt to curb illegal immigration in the state.

Penned by Dave Weigel, the WaPo piece maintains that the 2011 legislation — HB 56 — only hurt the Southern state’s economy and serves as a cautionary tale for anyone now advocating stringent immigration measures.

The Alabama law was modeled off Arizona’s more famous SB 1070 and aimed to make conditions for illegals so difficult that they would “self-deport.”

Citing no numbers and relying only on the expert opinion of immigration activists, the Post claims the 2011 law devastated Alabama’s agriculture industry and forced the state government to deal with expensive lawsuits over the legislation.

The Post leaves out how the federal government delivered the most lethal legal action to HB 56, how national intervention gutted the law and how the bill caused no serious damage to state farmers.

This year, a Vice video report claimed the laws were killing the agriculture business in the state.

However, a 2014 Montgomery Advertiser report found that business was booming and farming has “a bright future” in the Heart of Dixie.

At the time the law was passed, it was predicted to have disastrous consequences for the state’s economy. Those predictions of economic doom failed to materialize. Alabama’s unemployment level dropped significantly after passage.

The law even accomplished its goal of convincing illegal immigrants to leave the state — at least, initially.

And that’s where the bill’s real failure comes in. Due to the overwhelming legal pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice and to full-force opposition from corporate lobbies, HB 56 was gutted and made virtually toothless.

After federal judges threw out some provisions and state legislators revised others, illegals returned to the state in droves — invalidating the very point of the bill. The judges said portions of the law conflicted with federal statutes, so the national government was not going to allow the state to enforce its measure.

HB 56’s most ardent supporters clearly explained the reason for why the law fell short.

“Our bill got eviscerated by the federal government,” Republican state representative Jim Carnes told the Post. “It was like 95 percent within the federal standards, but those standards weren’t being enforced. We enforced them, and it worked for several months until the feds did their thing.”

The Post dismissed these arguments as revisionist thinking, even though that’s why the law didn’t work. If HB 56 wasn’t dismantled, there probably would be very few illegal immigrants the state. If then-Attorney General Eric Holder’s DOJ hadn’t sued the state over differing immigration priorities, Alabama would not have had all the expenses that came with implementation.

But that still leaves us with the complaint that enforcing the law hurts agriculture. Shockingly, the best explanation of this complaint comes from the good liberals over at the Center for American Progress. The progressives argue it’s a massive burden for farm conglomerates to follow the law and use E-Verify.

Even worse, these businessmen could even be punished for (gasp!) knowingly breaking the law. Imagine if we lived in a country that forced business owners to follow the law. What a nightmare that would be!

Big agriculture is not above the law and should follow it. If food prices go up because your industry actually has to employ legal labor, then that’s an acceptable cost to bear. The real problem with agriculture and immigration enforcement is not that it “hurts” the business, but that farm companies have built the industry around breaking the law.

While they may claim they have to rely on illegal labor to get the job done, that’s a debatable assertion. As the immigration-loving Wall Street Journal reports, farmers all over America are now turning to automation in the face of labor shortages. That innovation could mean more productivity and lower food costs, all while following the law and rendering illegal labor obsolete.

The most important thing to take away from Alabama’s effort is not that it failed from the beginning, but that it couldn’t succeed due to the meddling of the federal government. Since the states — as shown in Alabama, Arizona andGeorgia — aren’t allowed to enforce the laws, then it’s up to the federal government to do the job.

Maybe that’s why 30,000 people showed up last week in Mobile to listen to a presidential candidate who promises to do just that.

http://dailycaller.com/2015/08/26/al...it-was-gutted/

I really wish there was a way we could end the funding streams for these horrible publications like Politico and the Washington Post. All they do is craft harmful lies and smear campaigns designed to harm and weaken America while supporting the costly and deadly illegal alien invasion of America. Who the heck is paying the paychecks at these communist and socialist propaganda firms?

W

Here's the Washington Post article referenced in the daily caller article which actually quotes local Alabama officials as explaining that the failure of the law was that it was gutted because of Obama's Justice Department legal threats and antics against them. They also explain and the Post's reports that up to then, the law was working well for citizens and businesses were grumbling but doing fine. But to answer your question, these articles like this are usually planted articles by public relations experts hired by these phony 501 C 3 "charity" tax frauds like National Council of La Raza and then big newspapers like the NYT and Wash Post and others use that article as a basis for writing their own.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...297_story.html

Politics

Alabama tried a Donald Trump-style immigration law. It failed in a big way.

Trump draws one of the largest crowds of the campaign at Alabama stadium

Republican front-runner Donald Trump rallied thousands of supporters in 40,000-seat Ladd-Peebles Stadium in Mobile, Ala.

By David Weigel August 22

ROBERTSDALE, Ala. — Kim and Renee Byrd had wanted to see Donald Trump’s speech in Mobile, but there were vegetables to sell. The Byrds are third-generation farmers, and the traffic along Route 90, toward the Gulf of Mexico, brings in travelers who want fresh honey, fresh peaches, fresh okra. Driving 45 minutes to Mobile was asking a little much, even if the next president of the United States was calling.

“He runs an empire,” Renee Byrd, 44, said of Trump. “That’s what the country needs, someone who runs an empire.”

The Byrds say they think the nation needs someone who is realistic about immigration, too. Officially, less than 10 percent of Robertsdale residents are Hispanic. According to Kim Byrd, 45, that does not account for the trailer parks “saturated with Mexicans” or for “all the convenience stores” bought by immigrants with mysterious tax breaks.

“They all work under the table and make [loads] of money,” said Renee Byrd. “The poor white people who work around here are all screwed.”

A mile down the road, a lunchtime crowd was arriving at a Mexican restaurant called El Rodeo. The Latino wait staff took orders in English and Spanish from customers who would not care to see Trump even if he were speaking in their living rooms.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump talked about his success in the polls to a crowd of more than 35,000 people on Friday during a “pep rally” held at the Ladd-Peebles Stadium in Mobile, Ala. (AP)

“He’s no good,” carpenter Miguel Chabac, 27, said through an interpreter. “I think he’s a person who doesn’t value our work.”

Chabac and his friends had plenty of experience with people like that. Alabama, which hosted the largest rally of Trump’s presidential campaign Friday night, had been a test kitchen for Trump-style crackdowns on undocumented workers — and it had not gone well.

In 2011, a new Republican legislature and governor enacted HB 56, the Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act. Chief sponsor Micky Hammon warned the undocumented population that he would “make it difficult for them to live here, so they will deport themselves.” Renting a house or giving a job to an “illegal” became a crime. Police were empowered to demand proof of citizenship from anyone who looked as if he or she might lack it. School administrators were instructed to do the same to children.

The backlash was massive — a legal assault that chipped away at the law, and a political campaign that made Republicans own its consequences. Business groups blamed the tough measures for scaring away capital and for an exodus of workers that hurt the state’s agriculture industry. After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, strategists in his own party blamed his support for the Alabama attrition policy. Those critics included Donald Trump.

“He had a crazy policy of self-deportation, which was maniacal,” Trump told reporter Ronald Kessler after the election. “It sounded as bad as it was.”

Asked about the law, Alabama voters rarely say that it worked. Large farms spent millions training new workers. The Byrds conceded that the agriculture sector suffered after some immigrants fled the state. “Most of them left and didn’t come back,” said Terry Darring-Rogers, who works at a Mobile law firm specializing in immigration.

The debate seemed to be over — nice try, lesson learned — until the summer of Trump. He’s run as a standard-bearer for tough, clinical immigration reform that includes mass deportation. Trump has also kick-started a debate about “birthright citizenship,” which is granted to any child born in the United States under the 14th Amendment.

“We could tell him a hundred of the things that went wrong in Alabama, and he wouldn’t listen,” said Frank Barragan, Mobile’s regional organizer in the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice. “But our biggest concern is not really Donald Trump. Our concern is that the other candidates are jumping on that bandwagon.”

By speaking so plainly, Trump ushered in a new discussion about who deserved to be in the country, no matter who might be offended by “politically incorrect” talk. Supporters of Alabama’s reforms, after years of retreat and apology, welcome the opportunity to defend themselves. They can challenge, at last, the conventional wisdom that the bill did not work.

“Our bill got eviscerated by the federal government,” said Jim *Carns, a Republican state representative who came to Mobile to endorse Trump. “It was like 95 percent within the federal standards, but those standards weren’t being enforced. We enforced them, and it worked for several months until the feds did their thing.”

The voters and legislators who rallied Friday argued that the theory of HB 56 — ending any incentives for people to work illegally in the United States — remained sound. Secretary of State Jim Merrill, who attended Trump’s event but endorsed no candidate, said that Alabamans were welcoming to foreign workers but wanted them to get real visas and work through the citizenship process.

“Illegals have stepped up and they’ve said, ‘We’ll do that work,’ ” Merrill said. “But some of those jobs used to be performed by people in the lower economic strata of our communities. We want to make sure that every American who wants to work has a job.”

To Republicans, the lesson of HB 56 was no longer that it failed. The lesson was that it had not been permitted to work, stymied by the Obama administration. That theory took shape in the displays in some Robertsdale stores, where a sign declaring compliance with *E-Verify was posted above an even larger ad from the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

“If you have the right to work, don’t let anyone take it away,” read the ad. “No employer can deny you a job or fire you because of your national origin or citizenship status.”

Trump’s fans were letting themselves imagine what Alabama might have looked like had then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. not declared war on HB 56 — and what the whole country might look like if a president took the law nationally. They saw, in the *tycoon-candidate, someone who would not be bowed by complaints from the business community.

“We’re seeing an invasion, which is exactly what the Chamber of Commerce wants,” said Dean Young, a conservative activist and HB 56 supporter who nearly won a 2012 special election for southern Alabama’s seat in Congress. “I’m told by a lot of the business people that actually live here that HB 56 did help. I trust them, because if we don’t stop the flow of illegal immigrants into this country, we’re going to lose it.”

Still, even the people who wanted to take Alabama’s immigration experiment to the national level had some qualms about the implementation. After the rally, retirees Philip and Roberta Payne debated how much of HB 56 needed to change in order to become federal policy.

“They need to do it gradually,” said Roberta Payne, 75. “I’ve heard someone say, get rid of the bad ones — the ones that are killing, maiming, robbing, stealing. You make it slow and easy. You’ve got to find out who the people are and how long they’ve been there. You can’t just send the people back.”

Her husband, 71, sounded convinced, but he brought the issue back to its core. “How much do we spend on illegals in this country?” he asked. “It’s billions of dollars.”

Trump, who did not specifically discuss the Alabama law in his speech, took credit for at least focusing the debate on the cost of immigration. He took credit for forcing his rivals to discuss “birthright citizenship” and to go on record that it was a problem when undocumented workers crossed the border to have children.

“You know, he put out a memo, you cannot use ‘anchor baby,’ ” said Trump, referring to former Florida governor Jeb Bush. “Now that I’m using it, he’s using it! Politicians.”

Across southern Alabama, even as people debated how far immigration law should go, many conservatives vehemently agreed with Trump.

“You shouldn’t be able to come here,” said Kim Byrd, “if you just want to have a damn baby.”

MR GHEEN & JUDY
TRUMP HAS SO MANY IN ALABAMA'S THAT IT WAS JUST GOOD TO SEE I WATCH IT THEY ALL WAS VERY HAPPY TO SEE TRUMP
& WHAT HE GOING TO DO .