Alabama Attacks Illegal Immigration

[Dfit00]

The wave of new legislation followed the lead of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law in April 2010. Legislatures in Utah, Indiana and Georgia passed bills that featured many of the same sanctions against illegal immigrants as Arizona.
But the most restrictive law came from Alabama. Gov. Robert Bentley called it “the strongest immigration law in the country,” and few would dispute the assertion.
Shortly after Gov. Bentley signed the bill into law, three separate lawsuits targeted it as unconstitutional. The Obama administration filed suit, claiming Alabama had usurped powers that rightfully belong to the federal government.
Until recent years, states had accepted with little question that the responsibility for immigration policy and border security belonged exclusively with the federal government. That changed after 2000, when the number of illegal immigrants in the United States reached an estimated 12 million.
Critics of the Alabama law called it “Arizona on steroids” because of its stringent and far-reaching measures. The law would:

Make it a crime for an illegal immigrant to solicit work.
Make it a crime to knowingly transport or harbor an illegal immigrant.
Allow individuals, companies or government entities to file discrimination lawsuits against companies that dismiss legal workers while hiring illegal immigrants.
Require public schools to check the immigration status of students.
Allows authorities to hold suspected illegal immigrants without bond.
Ban state courts from enforcing contracts involving illegal immigrants.
Make it a felony for an illegal immigrant to get drivers licenses or do business with the state.
Make it a misdemeanor offense for an illegal immigrant not to have immigration papers.
Ban illegal immigrants from attending public colleges and junior colleges.
Prohibit businesses from claiming tax deductions for wages paid to illegal immigrant employees.
Require federal verification of legal status in court proceedings.
Make it illegal for motorists to stop on streets or roads to hire temporary workers.
Supporters of the law hope it will create an intimidating climate for illegal immigrants and drive them from the state. The Republican lawmakers who sponsored the bill believe that as more illegal immigrants “self-deport” themselves from Alabama, more jobs will open up for U.S. citizens.

Alabama Immigration Law Cracks Down

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/u...held.html?scp=1&sq=Alabama immigration&st=cse

 

[Irvine511]

they took our jobs - YouTube

 

[Dfit00]

Jobs are created and destroyed based on innovation and development in diverse industries. Part of the argument is based on the fact that some Americans think that only illegal immigrants destroy jobs that should be somehow "reserved" for American citizens, but what about legal immigrants and other American citizens that are more competitive?

The real issue here is that the ones who complain are Americans that earn below $45K/year (The average income threshold). You will never see an American who earns $100K or more complain about such absurdity.

 

[cobl04]

they took our jobs - YouTube

I looooove this clip. DEY TOOK ERRR JERRR

 

[financeguy]

The real issue here is that the ones who complain are Americans that earn below $45K/year (The average income threshold). You will never see an American who earns $100K or more complain about such absurdity.

The average income of the bottom 90% of American households is $31k per year. The average is skewed because of a comparatively small number of very high earners.


It's the Inequality, Stupid | Mother Jones

 

[INDY500]

Alabama Attacks Illegal Immigration

Why is it illegal? Oh yeah, there's laws against it.

Alabama enforces the immigration laws. That's outrageous, what will this out-of-control rogue state do next? Balance their state budget?

 

[yolland]

New York Times, Oct. 5

How can there be a labor shortage when nearly one out of every 11 people in the nation are unemployed?

That’s the question John Harold asked himself last winter when he was trying to figure out how much help he would need to harvest the corn and onions on his 1,000-acre farm here in western Colorado. The simple-sounding plan that resulted—hire more local people and fewer foreign workers—left Mr. Harold and others who took a similar path adrift in a predicament worthy of Kafka.

Mr. Harold, a 71-year-old Vietnam War veteran who drifted here in the late ’60s, has participated for about a decade in a federal program called H-2A that allows seasonal foreign workers into the country to make up the gap where willing and able American workers are few in number. He typically has brought in about 90 people from Mexico each year from July through October. This year, though, with tough times lingering and a big jump in the minimum wage under the program, to nearly $10.50 an hour, Mr. Harold brought in only two-thirds of his usual contingent. The other positions, he figured, would be snapped up by jobless local residents wanting some extra summer cash.

“It didn’t take me six hours to realize I’d made a heck of a mistake,” Mr. Harold said, standing in his onion field on a recent afternoon as a crew of workers from Mexico cut the tops off yellow onions and bagged them. Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard. On the Harold farm, pickers walk the rows alongside a huge harvest vehicle called a mule train, plucking ears of corn and handing them up to workers on the mule who box them and lift the crates, each weighing 45 to 50 pounds. “It is not an easy job,” said Kerry Mattics, 49, another H-2A farmer here in Olathe, who brought in only a third of his usual Mexican crew of 12 workers for his 50-acre fruit and vegetable farm, then struggled to make it through the season.

The H-2A program, in particular, in trying to avoid displacing American citizens from jobs, strongly encourages farmers to hire locally if they can, with a requirement that they advertise in at least three states. That forces participants to take huge risks in guessing where a moving target might land—how many locals, how many foreigners—often with an entire season’s revenue at stake. Survival, not civic virtue, drives the equation, they say. “Farmers have to bear almost all the labor market risk because they must prove no one really was available, qualified or willing to work,” said Dawn D. Thilmany, a professor of agricultural economics at Colorado State University. “But the only way to offer proof is to literally have a field left unharvested.”

Mr. Harold’s experience is a repeated refrain where farm labor is seasonal and population sparse. And even many immigration hard-liners have come to agree that the dearth of Americans willing to work the fields requires some sort of rethinking, at least, of the H-2A program. Indeed, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, a conservative Republican, is pushing a bill that would greatly expand the number of foreign guest workers admitted to the country each year.

But the broader story of labor in agriculture, economists and historians said, is that through good times and bad and across socioeconomic lines, people who find better lives off the farm rarely return. Mr. Harold and other H-2A farmers said that most of the local residents who tried field work this summer, for example, were Hispanic, many of whom, they said, had probably immigrated in years past for agricultural work before taking better-paid jobs in construction or landscaping. Other farmers left in the lurch by local workers conceded that what they had to offer was a tough sell—full-time but temporary work.

 

[INDY500]

 

[Irvine511]

^ how awful.

 

[the iron horse]

Alabama Attacks Illegal Immigration

Why is it illegal? Oh yeah, there's laws against it.

Alabama enforces the immigration laws. That's outrageous, what will this out-of-control rogue state do next? Balance their state budget?

 

[Canadiens1131]

The problem is not that these laws make life harder for illegal immigrants.

The problem is that these laws make life harder for legal U.S. citizens who happen to have the misfortune of a little brown colour to their skin or the gall to send a little brown urchin of theirs to a good ol' white and black school.

 

[deep]

what this is going to do, is close down a lot of the farming in the state.

the farmers can not get anyone to pick their crops, and it is not a question of offering higher wages