Last year, Arizona’s state legislature caused a national uproar when it passed a constitutionally dubious bill giving state and local law enforcement officers the power to police for illegal immigrants and essentially requiring all people who may look like immigrants to carry their immigration papers. Parts of that law are currently on hold as courts determine their constitutionality, but the copy-cat laws keep coming. Alabama’s governor has now signed the state’s own SB 1070 on steroids, or what its sponsor called “an Arizona bill with an Alabama twist”:
Under the new measure, police must detain someone they suspect of being in the country illegally if the person cannot produce proper documentation when stopped for any reason.
It also will be a crime to knowingly transport or harbor someone who is in the country illegally. The law imposes penalties on businesses that knowingly employ someone without legal resident status. A company's business license could be suspended or revoked.
The law requires Alabama businesses to use a database called E-Verify to confirm the immigration status of new employees.
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Alabama's law is unique in requiring public schools to determine, by review of birth certificates or sworn affidavits, the legal residency status of students.
In other words, not only are Alabama police now being roped into immigration enforcement – so are public schools and private businesses and even private citizens. The law enforcement provision is troubling: like Arizona’s law, it would seem to encourage racial profiling by police officers instructed to detain people who they suspect may be undocumented immigrants. But Alabama’s new “twist,” requiring schools to investigate the immigration status of their students is one of the most dramatic over-reaches included in the many anti-immigrant laws that have been making their way through state government’s since the passage of SB 1070.
It’s no surprise that the mind behind Alabama’s law is Kris Kobach, Kansas’s secretary of state, who was also behind Arizona’s law. Kobach was formerly the top lawyer at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of FAIR, the central group in the anti-immigrant movement, which has a long history of racially-charged attacks on immigrants. FAIR, formerly a fringe group, and the divisive and dehumanizing rhetoric it pushes have been enjoying a renewed national prominence in the vicious anti-immigrant movement that has begun to take hold among even the mainstream GOP. We reviewed the tactics of Kobach and his allies in a report last year on growing trends in anti-immigrant rhetoric.