Latinos across
Alabama staged a “sick-out” to protest a harsh anti-immigrant law, shutting
down construction sites, chicken processing plants and Latino-owned businesses.
The Oct. 12 protest caused a drop in sales as Latino shoppers stayed away from
stores. Children from immigrant families stayed home from school.
The work
stoppage was felt the most in northeast Alabama, where the state’s $2.7 billion
poultry industry is located. The parking lot was virtually empty at a Wayne
Farms poultry plant, which employs about 850 people in Albertville.
Spanish-language
radio stations and Facebook users helped spread the word about the sick-out.
The Alabama
protest was similar, if on a smaller scale, to the “Day Without an Immigrant”
actions on May 1, 2006. On that day, hundreds of thousands of Latino workers
with their families, friends and supporters took off work and mounted huge
marches around the country to beat back the Sensenbrenner anti-immigrant bill
in Congress.
Alabama, where
civil rights activists once fought some of the bitterest battles against Jim
Crow segregation, now has the harshest “Juan Crow” immigration laws in the
nation.
In late
September, a federal judge upheld most sections of Alabama’s new immigration
law, causing many immigrant families to pull their children out of school and
move elsewhere. On Oct. 14, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals trimmed some of
the most grotesque portions of the bill, but upheld others, including the
section that allows police to detain people
indefinitely if they suspect them of being undocumented immigrants.
Patterned on
similar laws in Georgia and Arizona, HB 56 was passed by a Republican
supermajority in Alabama, and signed this summer by Gov. Robert
Bentley.
One section of
the law requires state and local law enforcement to try to verify a person’s
immigration status during routine traffic stops or arrests, if “a reasonable
suspicion” exists that the person is in the country illegally. This opens the
door to racist profiling on the basis of a person’s appearance.
Another section nullifies contracts entered
into by undocumented immigrants. Still another forbids any transaction between
an undocumented immigrant and any state agency. This has already led to the
denial of a Montgomery man’s application for water and sewage service,
according to The New York Times.
Across the state, pregnant women have stopped
going to hospitals out of fear that their immigration status will be checked.
Additionally, HB 56 requires proof of
citizenship when applying for a driver’s license or license plate.
One of the
most controversial sections of the bill mandated schools to check the
citizenship status of incoming students. Advocates of the law claimed its
purpose was to track the resources used to educate undocumented children, not
to deny them an education. However, many parents feared it would be used to
check their own status.
After federal
Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn upheld these school immigration checks, some
2,000 Latino students, about 7 percent all Latinos in the school system, were
immediately absent. Many packed up their belongings and left, leaving behind
homes where they had lived for years. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals finally
blocked the provision asking schools to track immigration status, but the
damage had already been done.
A final decision
on Alabama’s immigration law, which is considered the toughest in the nation,
won’t be made for months, according to the Associated Press.
Farmers,
contractors and home builders say the law has already been devastating, leaving
crops rotting in fields and causing critical labor shortages. Taken together,
these measures are pushing even documented immigrant workers out of the state,
fearful for their undocumented family members.
In a time of
severe economic depression, with funding for precious social services like
education the first on the chopping block, this law illustrates the
irrationality of capitalism. Racist politicians push a measure that hemorrhages
money policing immigrant communities while diverting money from the very
programs they claim to be saving.
Alabama’s HB
56, like its predecessors in Arizona, Utah, Indiana and Georgia, victimizes
those least to blame for the economic crisis. In reality, these measures are
meant to intimidate undocumented workers, scaring them into accepting
second-class status as a source of cheap labor, arresting and deporting them if
they seek to lead normal lives in the communities in which they work and live.
We must
continue to fight racist scapegoating. Full rights for immigrants now!
