Alabama Immigration Law: Update!

Alabama's immigration law is proving too strict and too costly

ALABAMA’S immigration law, boasted Micky Hammon, an Alabama legislator and one of its co-authors, “attacks every aspect of an illegal immigrant’s life. They will not stay in Alabama…This bill is designed to make it difficult for them to live here so they will deport themselves.” It is not, however, designed to introduce visiting executives from Mercedes-Benz, which employs thousands at its factory in the state, to the pleasures of Alabama’s jails. But that is what happened to Detlev Hager, who was caught in November driving in Tuscaloosa with only German ID on him.

Alabama’s immigration law is the nation’s toughest. It requires police to check the immigration status of anyone they detain, stop or arrest and have a “reasonable suspicion” of being in the country illegally. It bars illegal immigrants from working, soliciting work, attending public universities or entering into “a business transaction” with the state. It invalidates any contract to which an illegal immigrant was party. It prohibits people from renting apartments to illegal immigrants, taking them in their cars or giving them shelter, and it requires officials in state schools to determine whether pupils are legal or illegal.

As enacted, however, the law has not turned out quite as its backers planned. In September a federal judge struck down four provisions, including the prohibition on illegal immigrants working, the section forbidding citizens from concealing, harbouring or transporting them, and the part that makes hiring or retaining an illegal immigrant actionable. In October an appellate court blocked the law’s directive requiring schools to determine their pupils’ immigration status, as well as the section making it a crime for illegal immigrants not to have proper identification. And in December a district judge struck down the section forbidding illegal immigrants from doing business with the state.

The law’s authors shrewdly included a severability clause, ensuring that if a court strikes down or prohibits one part of the law, the rest remains in effect. So it has, and Mr Hammon’s fond hope—that illegal immigrants will leave—seems to have come true. Anecdotal reports suggest that thousands of Latinos, legal as well as illegal, have left Alabama. Farmers complain of rotting crops and building companies of rising costs, both because there are too few workers. Samuel Addy, an economist at the University of Alabama, estimates the law’s total cost—taking into account productivity declines, increased enforcement cost, and declines in aggregate consumer spending and tax revenue since so many workers have left—in the billions.

Then there are the less quantifiable costs. They may be there illegally, but undocumented immigrants are still people; a Human Rights Watch report tells of families fleeing in darkness, of crime victims too scared to go to the police, of workers being cheated out of wages. And then there are innocents like Mr Hager, who was kept in custody until a colleague could produce his passport and driving licence. Foreign companies have flocked to Alabama in recent years; they employ over 54,000 Alabamans. How many more will want to come if their employees risk being treated like Mr Hager, or worse?

[http://www.economist.com/node/21543541]