Editorial: What kind of people are we?

al.com
By Mike Hollis
The Huntsville Times
Sunday, October 02, 2011, 7:15 AM

Regardless of the ultimate outcome of federal appeals over Alabama's new immigration law, one question is not so much what the U.S. Constitution allows but what kind of people we want to be.

There is no argument over whether 11 million or so people entered the country illegally and are still here.

Nor is there any argument that some illegal immigrants were criminals before they got here and have continued to break the law. There is nothing redeeming about the presence of those who have already committed a crime, and they should be deported as quickly as the opportunity arises.

But the question of how to handle those whose only offense is crossing into America has proven to be be much more difficult to answer.

Sponsors of the legislation setting up a crackdown said they were passing a jobs bill. And they did, along with a number of other measures designed to make life hard for undocumented workers and their families. The law goes beyond tough measures passed in other states, including Arizona and Georgia.

"This will create jobs for unemployed Alabama citizens," state Rep. Micky Hammon, R-Decatur, a sponsor of the bill, has said. "We want to discourage illegal immigrants from coming to Alabama and prevent those that are already here from putting down roots."

Hispanics moved here because they hoped to improve their lives by working long hours in menial jobs for below-market wages. By one measure they succeeded. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, about 95,000 undocumented immigrants worked in Alabama in 2009 and 2010, making up about 4.2 percent of the labor force.

If the law was intended as a "jobs bill," as its supporters say, its E-Verify section requiring employers to check the immigration status of employees, in addition to other job-related provisions, should have been sufficient.

But Alabama's Republican lawmakers, who champion limited government, were not content to stop there. The law they passed this spring would use seemingly every government tool available to send illegal immigrants fleeing.

Indeed, every one of Alabama's several thousand of sheriff's deputies and police officers would become proxy agents for the U.S. Border Patrol checking for immigration papers. Illegal immigrants would be banned from public colleges, period, and could be arrested for simply asking for work. If the law were upheld, good Samartians who help undocumented immigrants would become felons.

The strategy to "attack every area of an illegal alien's life," as Hammon has put it, suggests a grim, clenched-jaw ruthlessness far out of proportion to the issue.

We Alabamians generally are decent and charitable people who share generously when misfortune befalls others. But we can be led astray.

By Mike Hollis, for the editorial board. Email: mike.hollis@htimes.com.

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