Tough new Alabama immigration law divides community

A sweeping new Alabama immigration law is generating sharp controversy and unease with many likening it to a return to the state’s brutal Jim Crow laws.

Among the strict immigration measures passed last month, undocumented immigrants are banned from enrolling in or attending college, applying for work, and landlords are restricted from renting property to illegal aliens. The law even goes so far as to require school districts to check the immigration status of children.

The bill has drawn fierce criticism from immigration advocates, churches, and civil liberties groups.

Mary Bauer, legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said, “This law revisits the state’s painful racial past and tramples the rights of all Alabama residents. It should never become the law of the land.”

“I think what happened in the ’60s may be a stimulus for the action that you have seen many of the churches taking on this,” said Chriss H. Doss, an attorney and ordained Southern Baptist minister.

Meanwhile, Reverend Dr. Ellin Jimmerson, a preacher and activist filmmaker, was particularly concerned about the law’s effect on children.

“The idea of parents having to provide information on their own children — and you do have parents who are here legally but their children are not — is just a bad idea,” she said.

Critics of the bill are also deeply concerned about Alabama’s participation in a federal guest worker program that allows employers to sponsor foreign workers and in some cases pay them an unspecified and unreported wage.

“What you’ve got is a captive worker who has to do and put up with anything you dish out,” Jimmerson said.

Proponents of the bill say that these claims are unfounded and that immigrants have no need to worry.

Jeff Helm, a spokesman for the Alabama Farmers Federation, said, “Farmers are law-abiding citizens. They want to do what is right.”

Helm added, “But they are concerned, one, that even the workers who are here legally would flee the state out of concern for what the law means. And, two, farmers [want assurance] that if they follow the law, but there’s some breakdown in the system, that they won’t suffer criminal repercussions. … We believe these issues are better handled at the federal level.”

In defense of the bill, Todd Stacy, a spokesman for Mike Hubbard, the speaker of the Alabama House, said, “For illegal immigrants to now be leaving the state shows they know Alabama is serious about enforcing its laws.”

“Documented, legal residents of this country have no reason to leave on account of this law, and I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that’s the case,” he added.

The law is currently being contested in a lawsuit filed by a large coalition of groups including the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Asian Law Caucus, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Immigration Law Center. In addition the leaders of the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, the Lutheran Church and the Roman Catholic Church all have criticized the law as contrary to the bible’s teachings.