Teenage boys at the wheel: State and local governments and undocumented residents

As states and localities have begun to thrust themselves into the newfound opening of local power on immigration matters, we see the type of scene that would occur when teenage drivers first take the wheel: launching hateful, reckless ideas, veering to the right because they don’t have a sense of the road, and getting drunk and running into people.

Recently we've seen a series of laws passed that take away human rights. An Arizona law allows harassment by police and local detention, an Alabama law excludes children from schools and revokes any modicum of fair work standards from adults, and laws in several states prohibit undocumented youth from attending public colleges. 

 We find this adolescent understanding of undocumented immigrants in this logic:

1)   We have ‘illegals’ invading!

2)   ‘Illegals’ are criminals!

3)   We should eliminate them however we can! Yee haw!

This unstudied approach neglects to consider things that are outside of their immediate purview.

1)   Governments, at the behest of big business, have carefully nurtured the roots of undocumented immigration in their transnational and international business and military dealings. 

2)   Undocumented immigrants are people, with families, and who possess human rights.

3)   Undocumented immigrants tend to have jobs that most native-born Americans shun. In the words of Stephen Colbert in his Congressional testimony, “Because apparently, even the invisible hand doesn’t want to pick beans.”

4)   The legal immigration system to the United States is a rusty bike with a chain that shrieks and jumps off the rungs every turn of the pedal. You get on again and again and make no progress towards your destination. It doesn’t allow you to go anywhere, despite everyone just telling you to jump on and go. 

5)   Many undocumented residents have lived in a place for a very long time, have carried their responsibilities of raising their families (with far fewer resources than other residents), have paid their taxes.

6)   Undocumented residents have much lower rates of crime than other residents. They are careful to be good neighbors lest it result in their deportation.

Alabama passed and implemented parts of the most inhumane and exclusionary of the recently passed laws recently.  Their policies stand in stark opposition to the recommendations of the Police Foundation, an independent, non-partisan, nonprofit foundation that researched local interventions. Today, the New York Times editorial board rightly denounced the“disgrace” of Alabama’s “xenophobia”.

Their car is speeding down Main Street at rush hour. Beware. 

Mission Alabama: Popular support

In June, Alabama passed America's harshest anti-undocumented immigrant (and generally anti-immigrant) law, and most parts were upheld in September by Federal District Court Judge Blackburn. This law forces schools to ask enrolling students about their immigration status, makes it illegal to help any undocumented immigrant with a ride, disbars any (existing) property ownership by undocumented immigrants, makes getting flu shots and getting garbage picked up difficult, and allows police to ask for proof of immigration status when there is "reasonable suspicion" the person is here illegally.


This law has already had a deep destabilizing effect on immigrant communities. Kids stopped going to school for fear of deportation. Some residents left their property in the hands of neighbors and friends. A judge last week postponed a provision that required mobile home residents to show immigration status for registration. 


Who is for and who is against this type of anti-family and anti-child policy? 

Who supports this hateful, discriminatory law? For the first time in 136 years, both houses of the Alabama legislature turned Republican, who quickly got to work and passed the most anti-immigrant law in the country. And after running with a tough anti-undocumented migrant stance, the Republican governor signed this law. People like this professor of law think it is "permissible and sensible" to collect stats on and criminalize families. And the president of an organization of judges estimates 80% of the state supports the law.

So families are under attack in Alabama! Who supports them? The bishops, the ACLU, the NAACP, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Justice Department has appealed to protect Congress' full powers to pass legislation on immigration matters.

In Montgomery, Alabama, a rally took place on Saturday, with the CEO of the NAACP and a few other national figures. Most of the figures put the protesters in the hundreds. A heinous policy gets passed, and a rally with national-level organizers gets only hundreds??? 

Yesterday afternoon, a low-level rally of maybe a thousand supporters of undocumented rights rallied through the streets of East Paris. After the rally, I discussed the American undocumented situation with a group of undocumented youth here yesterday, and they asked about the impact of American religiosity. Where are all the religious people to stand up for families?

 
Good question.