Private: Alabama Should Act Now to Remedy Failure of Anti-Immigrant Law HB 56

By Tomas Lopez, Law Fellow, Southern Poverty Law Center. Mr. Lopez will be the featured speaker at a March 21 event on the state of Ala.’s anti-immigrant law.

Next month, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Arizona v. United States, the case challenging Arizona’s SB 1070, the “attrition through enforcement” law that seeks to drive undocumented immigrants from the state.

Many people will pay attention, but few will do so more closely than those of us in Alabama. Here, SB 1070’s ideas metastasized into HB 56— a law that goes even further than Arizona’s in making the state simply inhospitable for undocumented immigrants. The law acutely harms the state’s most vulnerable people, its economy, and its reputation. Alabama’s experience exposes the reality of the anti-immigrant laws now at issue in Arizona and elsewhere: they largely fail to deliver on their promises and instead render needless damage and suffering.

I’m a part of a team at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which along with our co-counsel and allies, is challenging HB 56’s constitutionality. There is a lot for us to challenge. Alabama’s law reaches both more broadly and more deeply than its counterparts from other states. Like SB 1070, HB 56 criminalizes the failure to carry alien registration papers and authorizes law enforcement officers to verify the immigration status of any individuals stopped. However, it also includes provisions that:

• Prohibit and criminalize “business transactions” between undocumented immigrants and state agencies;
• Instruct courts to regard any contract to which an undocumented person is a party as unenforceable;
• Denies bail to detained undocumented immigrants; and
• Requires schools to inquire into the immigration status of every newly enrolled student and his or her parents.

The law’s co-sponsor, State Representative Micky Hammon, told the press that HB 56’s goal is to “attack every aspect” of an undocumented immigrant’s life so as to force them to leave the state. While SB 1070 largely consisted of provisions related to law enforcement, HB 56 goes further. It engages a wide swath of the state apparatus into driving undocumented immigrants and their families out of the state, and through its contract enforcement provision even encourages private discrimination.

In carrying out Hammon’s goal, the law has exacted a terrible human cost. Parents have withheld their children from school, families live in uncertainty, and many individuals are avoiding law enforcement altogether rather than report a crime. The cost extends beyond undocumented immigrants; HB 56 also harms the many spouses and children in mixed status families, and Latino Alabamians more generally. SPLC details some ofthose stories in a recent report, Alabama’s Shame. In Decatur, Alabama, an employer refused to pay a woman for work she performed. He told her she had no recourse because she was undocumented—and revealed a gun in the process. Near Birmingham, a man without anAlabama driver’s license couldn’t get running water in his home. For 40 days, he filled two jugs with water from neighbors or a local Walmart until advocates intervened to help him connect his service.

In addition to the human toll, costs to the state’s economy and reputation are growing. Local farmers complain their crops, without a labor force to harvest them, are rotting in the fields. Two international business executives, instrumental in the state’s fast-growing automobile industry, were detained by police because of HB 56. Just a couple of weeks ago, an organization of physicians moved its convention, which would a have produced $700,000 for the local economy, away from Mobile. A University of Alabama professor estimates the state stands to lose millions in revenue because of the law and its broader impacts. The law’s supporters say it has contributed to the state’s falling unemployment rate, but data suggests the state’s job growth is in areas not known to hire large numbers of undocumented labor.

Before I came to Alabama, I worked in Arizona. With the Bacon Immigration Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona, Rogers College of Law, I co-authored a report on the ways that SB 1070 affected young people and their families. One of the things we found was that for all of the people who left Arizona, others not only stayed but were committed to doing so. Even to the extent that “attrition through enforcement” is effective by causing some people to leave a state after such a law is enacted, it does not resolve failed federal immigration policies the way it purports to. Instead, as we see now in Alabama, overreaching anti-immigrant laws only promote fear and hostility and undermine the state’s well-being, while doing nothing to address failed policies. Therefore, even by the HB 56 supporter's standards, the law has been an utter failure.

Earlier this month, we argued our challenge to Alabama’s law, HICA v. Bentley, before the Eleventh Circuit. The court also heard arguments in the federal government’s challenge to HB 56, United States v. Alabama, and our challenge to Georgia’s anti-immigrant law, GLAHR v. Deal. While the panel informed us they will wait on the Supreme Court’s Arizona decision before issuing an opinion on HB 56, on March 8 it enjoined two more provisions of HB 56, pending that final decision: Section 27, invalidating contracts involving undocumented immigrants, and Section 30, criminalizing “business transactions” between undocumented immigrants and the state. This is a good thing for Alabama and its people; a lasting ruling would be even better.

The best possible outcome would be for Alabama’s legislature to simply repeal HB 56. Even in such a scenario, though, Alabama’s experience still speaks to the perils of states becoming involved in immigration enforcement. We argue that laws like HB 56 and SB 1070 are preempted both because immigration is fundamentally an area of federal authority; that these state laws directly conflict with the scheme Congress has created, and because Congress has already occupied the field of immigration. On top of all of these problems, HB 56 has also led to confusion, inconvenience, and a diversion of state resources to handle both the law’s administration and its legal defense.

Alabama’s situation is one where both the Constitution and common sense lead to the same solution. HB 56 inflicts human, economic, and reputational pain while it flouts the body of federal law it claims to be supporting. Even as we await the courts’ opinions on anti-immigrant laws, most immediately in Arizona, we already know that they have failed.

Immigration