Looks like a federal court in Atlanta has blocked enforcement of two of the more odious provisions in Alabama’s immigration law.
A U.S. appeals court temporarily halted enforcement of Alabama laws making it a crime for unregistered immigrants to not have proper documentation and forcing schools in the state to track students’ immigration status.
The Atlanta-based court today temporarily blocked enforcement of those provisions, contained in legislation signed by Alabama Governor Robert Bentley in June. The court let stand the other immigration-law measures that the U.S. had also challenged.
Considering the school tracking provision was causing mass walkouts and terrified students, I can see why somebody might have wanted to reconsider the effect enforcement might have on families. Meanwhile, the measures that continue to be enforced are doing a bang up job of wrecking the state’s economy, costing thousands of jobs, and driving up food prices, which was pretty much what everyone opposed to the law said would happen if it passed.
Republicans apparently are very, very fond of job-killing regulations. Go figure. Still, the Atlanta appeals court made a strong statement. And this week a mass protest walkout in Alabama’s poultry plants shuttered operations on Wednesday and called attention to the law.
The work stoppage was aimed at demonstrating the economic contribution of Alabama’s Hispanic immigrants. It was unclear exactly how widespread the protests were, but a poultry company spokesman said officials were reporting unusually high absences at plants in northeast Alabama, where much of the state’s chicken industry is based.
In the northeast Alabama town of Albertville, numerous Hispanic-owned businesses along Main Street had the lights off and signs that said they wouldn’t be open. Mexican restaurants, a bank that caters to Hispanics, small grocery stores and supermarkets were all shuttered.
Jose Contreras owns a restaurant and store on Main Street. He said he was losing about $2,500 in revenue by shutting down.
“We closed because we need to open the eyes of the people who are operating this state,” said Contreras, originally from the Dominican Republic and a U.S. citizen. “It’s an example of if the law pushes too much, what will happen.”
Hello, consequences. How are you doing today?
deep cap
So uh… Aren’t the GOP and Libtards supposed to be opposed to regulations? Isn’t that was Ol’ Man McCain was bitching about earlier today?
Just sayin’.
Maude
I came back from a walk ans saw the headline, hoping that someone on BJ would post about this.
This has to stop.
My thought is that this is getting a bit like the Third Reich attitude toward non Aryans. That is extreme, but when a state targets a group of people and scares them, that is also extreme.
I hope the DOJ wins this in court.
joel hanes, sp4
To Republicans, outcomes don’t matter.
What’s essential is not to condone things that are Wrong.
Maintaining this moral posture is apparently worth any amount of suffering and destruction.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
It won’t matter a hill of beans to the folks who are splitting.
schrodinger's cat
A part of the GOP base hates all immigrants, especially if they are not white. They are just going after the undocumented ones now because that is the low hanging fruit.
LittlePig
@joel hanes, sp4: Moral Posturing is what conservatives do best, especially the vile crop of them we have here in the South.
Kinda like the HPV thing in Texas. Maintaining the public myth is more important than human suffering (and anyone watching Prohibition can tell you that calculus has been around this country for a long while)
Culture of Truth
You’ve just got to give it more time.
General Stuck
Shit. Let me introduce Mr. Fan.
LittlePig
Heard on NPR this morning that very few of the “native Alabamans” aka white folk last more than a few days when they “get the jobs REAL Americans have been denied”.
Conservative dude was “hey, it was great on paper, but now I’m going broke” (the classic GOP “Waitaminute! we’re talking about money?!”). “This law has got to be scaled back”.
Hit ’em in their soft spot: their wallets.
Zifnab
Walkouts? Protests?
Republican immigration laws have done more to organize immigrant labor in the last five years than Democrat unionizing efforts have accomplished in the South in the last fifty. :-p
Sweet irony.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@LittlePig: Ask the Vidalia onion growers!
Dougerhead
Activist judges!
Anoniminous
I’ll have my Schadenfreude deep fried, Southern style.
LittlePig
@General Stuck: Oh good grief.
“The Lord’s Resistance Army, Hacking for Jesus. Sending people to the Lord a piece at a time”.
gene108
If President Obama and President Bush, Jr., before him, did their jobs and deported all the Mexicans, which is their Constitutional duty, Alabama wouldn’t have to take matters into their own hands.
Alabama should give itself the authority, the Federal government refuses to exert, and deport all the illegal aliens from its borders.
/right-wing-nuttery for you…they just can’t see the consequences of their actions…and/or they believe laws are sacrosanct and shouldn’t ever be changed…
Villago Delenda Est
Oh, look! Nativist regulations DO cost jobs! Not that you’ll ever get John McPlanecrash to ever concede that…
soonergrunt
Fucking consequences–how do they work?
LittlePig
@gene108:
Fixx0rd.
Villago Delenda Est
@joel hanes, sp4:
Except when it involves insider trading, selling bogus securities, engaging in title fraud, fraking, pollution in general, and similar white collar activities.
trollhattan
It’s all Mantequilla’s fault! (This week’s South Park episode.)
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/399562/work-mexican-work
Cat Lady
Why oh why didn’t we let them secede when we had the chance?
PeakVT
It will be interesting to see how much this splits the teabagger base from the GOP fat cats. Mmmm, popcorn…
@deep cap: Psst: it’s libertards. The people who post here are libtards.
Roger Moore
@joel hanes, sp4:
Only so long as most of the suffering and destruction falls on somebody else. If a Republican is doing something immoral, it’s important that the rules be bent or changed to let them continue to get away with it.
Anoniminous
@soonergrunt:
The initial consequence can be a 9 month gestation. For homo sap. sap., that is. Other species Mileages Will Vary.
ETA: I should edit the last sentence. However it will give an opening for the Apostrophe Police to express happiness and a sense of Self-Worth. Thus, I’ll leave it the way it was writ.
Roger Moore
@Cat Lady:
Because letting idiots secede whenever they get pissed off destroys the concept of democracy. Also, too, we had some sympathy for all the people who didn’t like slavery and oppression (e.g. the slaves) and wanted to help them out. I’m confident that nearly 100% of African Americans would agree that the Civil War was worth fighting.
jl
My understanding is that if we really want to respect the Holy Blissful Founders, then we get rid of laws restricting entry. I do believe that the ‘entry procedure’ of the varied ethnic assortment of my whitey ancestors was stepping off the boat in NYC, Philly, Baltimore, and SF. They didn’t need no stinking papers.
IIRC the original naturalization law in the 1790s said after you were here for two years, you went to local court and had some proceeding that convinced it that you had good character and hadn’t broken the law. Then they gave you citizenship papers.
Also IIRC, since there were so many newcomers who were not citizens, many local governments allowed non citizens to vote on local matters.
Dad gwarsh gummitall, I say let’s move back towards the Founders!
I will try to organize a Teabagger rally for this great cause. Their rallies seem to have petered out lately, but I am sure my proposal to get back to the Awesome Wisdom of the Founders will inspire them.
Scott
We ended Reconstruction too soon.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@LittlePig:
Lest this get blamed on specifically African savagery run amok, let it be noted that during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s the devoutly Catholic Carlist militia used to deal with captured atheists by pining them to the ground using railroad spikes or whatever else came readily to hand, driven thru the victim’s hands and feet in a mock-crucifiction, and them hacking their limbs off while chanting “All glory to Christ the King”.
Source: Antony Beevor, “The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)”.
Villago Delenda Est
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Yeah, but Juan Carlos got the last laugh on old Francisco. Played along with the fascist shit, then when the old fucker died, he cleared the table and opened up Spain to actual democracy.
Smart guy, that Juan Carlos. He fucked over the Falangists royally. (pun not intended but I’ll take credit for it anyway).
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Cat Lady:
It certainly would have made the First World War a whole lot more interesting, if we still had a revanchist North and South US facing each other in 1914. Can’t see as how the Germans would have minded much.
catclub
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Could you repost the link to “the return of the new confederacy”
I tried to find the link and could not.
Thanks.
NonyNony
@Villago Delenda Est:
Villago – name the thing in that little quote that conservatives think is Wrong.
Most of those are Market Driven Activities and if you just Pray to the Invisible Hand Hard Enough He will solve them for you.
And fracking and pollution are good things because they Piss Off Liberals.
rikyrah
what about IF YOU AINT WHITE
don’t you understand?
that is the crux of these laws.
Villago Delenda Est
@NonyNony:
These assholes need to be beaten within an inch with a copy of The Wealth of Nations…a book with which they demonstrate no familiarity whatsoever.
The Dangerman
@LittlePig:
After kicking them in the Nads.
Perhaps I have that backwards.
Chris
It’s also an example of going Galt, which revealingly demonstrates who the people actually holding up the weight of the world on their shoulders are.
Montysano
Hello from Alabama, where local contractors, restaurant owners, etc. are suddenly in a pinch for workers. The construction industry is especially fucked, discovering that them Messicans were actually highly skilled craftsmen, and highly motivated to boot. Their American counterparts? Not so much.
And this: no more buying car tags by mail or online. Every Alabama car owner now has to show up at the court house in person, every year, to prove citizenship before they get their tag. What if you’re old or infirm and can’t stand in line for 6 hours? They’re still trying to figure that part out.
Fuckin’ morons.
Calouste
@Cat Lady:
The South would have invaded the North in no time flat to captured escaped slaves that made it accross the border.
Chris
@Cat Lady:
The nonwhite population from the south side of the Potomac probably isn’t too unhappy that we didn’t.
Chris
@Roger Moore:
Also, if we’d allowed them to secede and there had been two Americas, the British Empire would’ve played the two of us off against each other (the same way they loved to do to nations on the European continent) and therefore become the balance of power in the Americas, thus allowing them to reassert control of the continent. I’d not have been a fan of that either.
jl
Many of my ancestors were not ‘white’ when they stepped off the boat in the US, though they are considered ‘white’ now.
Funny how that works.
Just tell the anti immigrant bigots, many of whose ancesters were also not ‘white’ when they got here, that things will work out just fine if they will show a little patience.
Crashman
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Larry Turtledove wrote a book about that. US allies with Germany, Confederacy with Britain and France. Confeds are defeated, basically turn into Nazi’s after the war.
Chris
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Yeah, I wonder who would’ve been on which side. The South had historic and cultural ties to Britain while the North had an enormous German population, so we (the U.S.) might have ended up on the side of the Central Powers.
On the other hand, you’ve got democratic solidarity with France and Britain. Plus, no way to tell how U.S. and C.S. relations with Europe in general and Britain in particular would’ve changed in the meantime.
Canuckistani Tom
@Crashman:
Harry Turtledove, actually. And it wasn’t a book, it was an entire series
http://turtledove.wikia.com/wiki/Southern_Victory
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
What I think will eventually have to happen if the law is upheld is the state will have to require a minimum wage be paid for the amount of produce picked/building completed. Otherwise, it will take forever for this to settle via “market forces.”
Crashman
@Canuckistani Tom: Whoops, you’re right. Larry, Harry… Sound almost the same. Read the series a while ago so the details aren’t as sharp as they used to be.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
Bullshit.
The Alabama law is hateful and divisive, but the animus is clearly against illegal immigrants. Maybe we should have open borders, but clearly no one, especially no liberal or progressive politician, is going to go on record for this.
There ain’t no freaking thing as “undocumented.” There are people here who do not have the legal right to be here. Now, you can say that conservative bastards should be more empathetic, you can suggest that everyone just turn a blind eye and think of illegal immigrants as economic refugees. But if you want to seriously suggest that immigration laws are irrelevant or should be summarily ignored, you have to make a better case for it than the phony moral high horse that some here are riding.
There is a variation of this strong anti illegal immigrant currently bubbling up here in California, where Governor Brown signed Dream Act legislation, permitting illegal immigrant children to qualify for the same student loans as California residents. The simpleminded binary opposition is between Americans, and “illegals.”
And yeah, you can obviously point to a time when there were no immigration laws, and a time when immigration laws were overtly racist.
But today, here and now, we have the residue of idiots refusing to deal with the hard question of immigration with the result that people are being scapegoated, targeted unfairly and, as is often the case, exploited.
And the inability of the president and the Congress is also generating an unhealthy states-rights backlash.
But those who want to reduce this to conservative dislike of immigrants are fooling themselves big time.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@catclub:
I aim to please: The New Confederacy rising
h/t to James Fallows.
It says a lot of things we’ve already discussed on this blog at length, but in a nice concise package.
redoubt
@joel hanes, sp4: This is Alabama. A state where the Republican party solved the problem of the voters having the temerity of choosing a Democrat for governor by first scheming the voting machines to ensure he wouldn’t be reelected, then putting the man in jail.
If they’ll do that, absolutely they’ll do this.
Brachiator
@Calouste:
What is more likely is that the North would have signed a treaty obligating them to return slaves, or paid reparations. The South, as a sovereign nation, would have also demanded the right of Southerners to travel freely in the North with their slaves.
The lives of black people in the South would continue to be a living hell. The North would have fatally compromised any notions of equal rights, and might even have more strongly imitated the segregated South. Any movement towards civil rights would have been stifled in order to placate the South and not upset delicate sensibilities.
Meanwhile, the South may have tried to annex Cuba or Northen Mexico to turn those areas into slave states. The North, tired out from war, would have sat on its hands.
Joseph Nobles
I was born and raised in Alabama, and this BS is just par for the damn course down there. I’m reading a book from the University of Alabama Press about the Klan in Alabama from 1915-1949, and it’s just depressing as hell. A great companion book for Ken Burn’s “Prohibition,” because the Klan turned out to be all about enforcing Prohibition. Alcohol was a little too Catholic to put up with, don’t you know?
Anyway, the Klan back then was not some rural, podunk thing. It was marching goosestep with every other National Preparedness society around WWI, and it seems to me you were far more likely to see an American flag at a Klan rally than a Confederate one. After all, they were all about “One Hundred Percent Americanism,” and Jews, Catholics, trade unionists, Communists, blacks, and immigrants legal or otherwise need not apply. And that was an opinion quite well entertained by any white Protestant organization, evangelical or mainstream.
You know, I heard a story about how George W. Bush lost an election in Texas and determined never to get out-Texased again, by God. That’s what comes to mind when I read about the Klan in the 1920’s. It was like the first reaction to losing the Civil War was for the South to not ever be out-America’ed again.
And so here we are again, with Alabama jumping right out in front of every anti-immigrant law it can. The place just doesn’t ever change. Like Faulkner said, the past is not dead; it isn’t even past.
catclub
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I read it.
very good, but too combative if you wanted someone on the p.d. side to take a closer look at it.
Thanks again.
Mara Holbrook
Hey, I live in Alabama, and it’s damn depressing. We moved here from Washington DC five years ago in order for my husband to stay employed. Not much choice involved, a steady paycheck and continued health insurance are strong motivators.
The people here are sweet and sincere, but the politics suck. Voting democratic is an exercise in futility. We despise Senators Shelby and Sessions.
I haven’t a clue why this immigration legislation was suddenly so damned important. They certainly never explained what the big problems were that needed to be addressed, other than somehow “aliens” were costing the state money. That’s about all it takes to pass legislation around here.
A lot of people are upset, but we are vastly outnumbered. There’s a couple of letters in the paper every day now, urging further draconian measures. The most popular being to deny unemployment and get those lazy folks off the dole and out in the fields doing honest work.
Chris
@Joseph Nobles:
From what I know of the topic, it sounds like the Ku Klux Klan had a similar position in the South (and rural Midwest and West eventually) to that held by the mob in the urban North – it was a part of society that wasn’t officially legit but very well tolerated anyway, connected at every level, and often serving as unofficial muscle for the rich and powerful in exchange for their continued favor. (I think labor-busting was almost as high as black-people-lynching on their to-do list).
Is that an accurate impression? Also, can I ask what book it is you’re reading? I’m always interested in knowing more…
TG Chicago
They also like vote-killing regulations.
Ash Can
@Brachiator: IF this were not simply a case of conservative dislike of immigrants, the law would not be nearly as draconian and out-and-out punishing as it is. It would focus on simplifying and streamlining documentation, and would focus its action in locations and businesses with concentrations of undocumented workers. (And yes, “undocumented” is a perfectly good term for them. They don’t have their papers. Deal with it.) The law would also at least attempt to put pressure on the federal government to reform immigration in general, with a particular focus on granting good, productive people legal status swiftly and easily.
But it doesn’t. It cuts off the state’s agricultural industry to spite its face, inflames suspicion of all immigrants legal or not, divides communities, and strikes at the most vulnerable players in this game, the children of the immigrants. How effective. How high-minded.
Yes, this sure as hell does boil down to conservative dislike of immigrants.
trollhattan
@Joseph Nobles:
I finished “Prohibition” last night and I tell you, couldn’t believe how often the hair on the back of my neck stood up at the obvious parallels to the present. In episode 3 was a very crisp photo of the Klan marching in a “Dry” parade (or was it a Hoover parade?) carrying a US flag so huge it covered the entire street.
That the Drys were ultimately defeated by their inflexibility–losing the 18th Amendment entirely rather than having it modified–was just one obvious parallel with today’s Republicans. God, Hoover was a complete ass.
What a great series that proved to be.
Jay C
@Calouste:
Actually, they didn’t have to: they just gamed the legal system to get Northerners to do it for them.
dcdl
This would be one reason my family will not be doing any road trips across the country anytime soon. My husband is a legal citizen, but does not carry his freaking papers everywhere. Of course he wasn’t legal until he came of age and took his citizenship test. He looks Mexican (dark skin must equate illegal Mexican) and was pulled over regularly when he was driving a ’92 Pontiac. He finally got rid of that car and got a pickup truck. I pointed out that now he looks like a illegal immigrant driving a landscaping truck and he said “oh God, no.”
Also, it was a pretty sad day when my boys came home from school one day and said that they don’t like dark people. I pointed out that their father is dark skinned and Papa has dark skin. They were like “oh”. Very frustrating and made me sad. I’m blue eyed, blonde, turn red as soon as I see sun and didn’t understand racial profiling until I met and married my husband and had kids. I didn’t understand how kids could be racist and say mean things. Now I know and it isn’t pretty.
catclub
@Joseph Nobles: “You know, I heard a story about how George W. Bush lost an election in Texas and determined never to get out-Texased again, by God”
You may have heard it about George W Bush, but I heard it as a quote from George C Wallace (of Alabama). The operative word was not ‘out-Texased’.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@catclub:
I think that is a very fair assessment. Let me know if you find something that would work better in terms of persuasion rather than analysis.
catclub
from http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2000-03/wallace.html
>>>
One of the particularly insightful comments in the film comes from Seymore Trammell, Wallace’s former finance director. Trammell recalls a talk with Wallace after the defeat: “He said, ‘Seymore, do you know why I lost that governor’s race?’ I said, ‘I’m not sure, Judge. What do you think?’ He said, ‘Seymore, I was out-niggered by John Patterson. And I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be out-niggered again.'”
>>>
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: First of all I never said that the undocumented are not violating any laws, they clearly are. Illegal immigration has actually gone down since the economy turned south. The Obama administration has been quite zealous in deporting the undocumented workers and has deported more than any previous administration. Still state after state is passing draconian anti-immigrant laws treating the undocumented as subhuman.
Agreed for now the focus is on illegal immigrants but if you like at sites like FAIR and NumbersUSA, you will see that the animus is against all immigrants. The people behind these organizations have helped draft many of these odious laws. I think during one of the Republican debates, there was an ad run by some interest group against all immigration. Period.
Its the same strategy, as in the abortion debate, go after partial birth abortion, when your ultimate goal is to get rid of all contraception, especially for women
catclub
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: If I were to re-write that for folks on the P.d side to consider,
I would turn some of the statements into questions:
The article: “Today, the currents of victimization, separatism and fatalism coursing through p.d. have spread beyond the true believers to dramatically reshape the GOP.”
Instead,
Are you engaging in victimization, separatism and fatalism?
next I would ask if such fatalism implies that the Holy Spirit does not supply the tools necessary for the creation of the Kingdom of heaven, now, on this earth. Fatalism impies that instead, are you just going to wait for armageddon. Which tools are lacking? Why do you think the holy spirit is not making them available?
(speaking of combative, but in their language)
Brachiator
@Ash Can:
Bullshit. There are no papers that they could possibly have that would be meaningful. People are in the country illegally. They have reasons and should never be demonized, but I tire of the intellectual dishonesty that avoids acknowledging and dealing with the issue.
This is laughable, but you have hit on the central hypocrisy here. Businesses want to exploit illegal immigrants. It keeps their wage costs down. And no one is willing to increase the federal budget to process documentation more quickly. On the other hand, no one is willing to talk about what the reals costs would be to expand document processing or how to deal with the large numbers involved without some sort of amnesty. And amnesty is a political hot potato.
Point noted. I didn’t mean to direct this comment at you, but at those who want to ignore the law violations.
I like Obama, but their enforcement has been little more than lame window dressing. And few at any level of government go after employers, especially those who exploit illegal immigrants.
Again, it is anti-illegal immigrant, not anti-immigrant. And “undocumented” is a weasel word. But apart from this, you are correct. And the larger issue is that the inability to deal with illegal immigration is causing a new wedge issue to defy the federal government and to usurp its authority.
Down the road, maybe, but for now the rage is pretty clearly focused on illegal immigrants. And it is ugly enough here. However, some of this claim is also part of an perhaps understandable, but wrongheaded attempt by some liberals and progressives to acknowledge that there is any such thing as illegal immigration. And this only makes the problem worse.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@catclub:
I wish you luck.
I’m afraid I just don’t have the mental agility to constructively engage p.d. folks on their own terms. I keep getting stuck at “If we were meant to interpret the Bible literally as you insist, why during His Ministry did Jesus make a point of so frequently teaching using parables, which are the exact opposite of literal instructions? Seems to me he was clearly telling us not to be too literal in our understanding of scripture, and he used the Pharisees as striking example of why we shouldn’t do it that way and the perils of obstinately doing so anyway.”
schrodinger's cat
Undocumented, I think describes the situation more precisely, present without authorized immigration documents. I find the word illegal dehumanizing. Breaking traffic laws doesn’t make you an illegal driver. Breaking immigration laws should not make you illegal immigrant.
He hasn’t gone after the employers but has deported more undocumented, you can put in a non weasel word of your choice, than Bush or any other President.
I don’t know whether people have any idea of how difficult the employment based immigration process is, in this country. It is not as easy as going to the DMV to get your license.
schrodinger's cat
Do you know that the first person who was detained using the new Alabama law was here legally. It is inevitable that some legal immigrants and even some citizens may be perceived to be Latino could mistakenly be at the receiving end of this zeal to persecute “illegals”.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
IIRC, being an illegal immigrant is not a criminal law violation. It’s a civil law violation, like a speeding ticket.
I get annoyed with the folks who like to pretend that being here illegally violates the same kind of criminal law as stealing a car.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
What? There are citizens and legal residents. And then there are those unfortunate people who are present and living in the US without a legal right to be here. What would breaking immigration laws make a person? A grapefruit?
It is not a matter of an absence of documentation. It’s a matter of the right to be a legal resident.
This still does not address the larger issue. And as an aside, although I have no problem with deporting illegal immigrants who have committed a crime, I generally do not favor deporting a person just because of their immigration status. So, I don’t necessarily applaud Obama’s record here, which doesn’t really acknowledge or address the larger issue.
I don’t know what this has to do with anything. Are you saying that just because it is stupidly difficult to become a legal resident, then people have a right to come to the country? Would you also say that people who can’t get a driver’s license should just hit the road anyway, because they are simply undocumented drivers?
This is still not the same thing as saying that the boneheads in Alabama and elsewhere are ipso facto against all immigrants.
It’s too easy and lazy to do this. And you ignore those who I think are still wrongheaded, but who perceive that illegal immigrants are getting an advantage that legal immigrants and those trying to “play by the rules” are supposedly not getting.
As an aside, the crazy thing is that for some legal and tax purposes, the United States consists of the US, Canada and Mexico. And there have been times when workers more or less freely traveled between the US and Mexico. And nobody was much concerned about either status or documents. But that is not where we are now.
Still, the bottom line is that criticizing the stupidity or the supposed bigotry of people in Alabama is not really solving the problem. And again, if you want to advocate open borders or amnesty, just say so. It may not get you anywhere, but it is much more honest than trying to rationalize how this is just an immigration problem, as opposed to an illegal immigration problem.
Kyle
@joel hanes, sp4:
Fixed it for you. Repuke ideology in a nutshell.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Of course, I never said that being an illegal immigrant was a criminal law violation. Not even close to the point.
But I disagree with the analogy of getting a speeding ticket. A closer analogy would be driving without a license.
And you do have this (which popped up around attacks on Governor Christie for being too moderate over the issue of illegal immigration)
And I also noted that I am not in favor of the simplistic call for deportation. And I think that the original Alabama law, that focused on children, was particularly despicable.
I also noted that I find opposition to the Governor Brown’s signing of the Dream Act to be stupid and wrong headed. Over the past few weeks, I have listened to people call talk radio and declare that they would have no problem throwing all illegal immigrant children out of school. This is both shameful and despicable.
I got no easy answer for the the immigration issue. But the issue has been simmering for years. I just don’t have time for people who want to finger point at Alabama or Arizona or California, but who either expect the status quo to continue
or want to pretend that there is no problem other than conservative bigotry.
Joseph Nobles
@catclub: Oh, come to think of it, I’ve heard that about Wallace, too.
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator:
What is the reason then why Congress won’t touch immigration reform?
First of all I never said that, if you read my first comment I have qualified it by saying that some in the GOP base. In fact many corporate Republicans are even more favorable to immigration of the skilled type than Democrats are.
The point I am making is that these laws while ostensibly targeted at undocumented/illegal immigrants are to going to
make life difficult for legal immigrants too, since the burden of proof here rests on you to prove your status. It is like being guilty until proven innocent. These laws have a potential of being abused.
These laws are also unfair to many citizens who may look like someone’s mental image of illegal immigrant. There have been cases of citizens languishing in deportee prisons because they didn’t have a birth certificate to prove that they were citizens.
The problem of illegal immigration is a manufactured controversy in my opinion because the ones who complain about it most often have no interest in solving the problem, except build walls and deport the so called illegal immigrants.
schrodinger's cat
I am not advocating open borders either. I think the people here who have been working in the US for years, in difficult jobs have been law abiding and tax paying residents should not
be demonized and treated as subhuman. They should get a chance to make their status legal ( I am not advocating outright permanent residency either) by going through a process that could involve fines and such.