08/29/11 According to the Associated Press, Judge Blackburn has blocked enforcement of the Alabama's anti-immigrant law.
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08/29/11 In rural Alabama lies Cullman County, recognized as the "state's top agricultural community." David Palmer of The Cullman Times interviewed two farmers who express concern over Alabama's new anti-immigration law, which is scheduled to take effect in three days on September 1st. Both farmers come to the same consensus. To put it succinctly: this new law stinks.
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08/29/11 After a long, hot summer of protests and lawsuits, Alabama's tough new immigration law is scheduled to begin taking effect this week.
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08/02/11 The Department of Justice is putting a stop to the madness in Alabama, and is challenging the state's very anti-immigrant law, HB 56. From the press release yesterday: "Today's action makes clear that setting immigration policy and enforcing immigration laws is a national responsibility that cannot be addressed through a patchwork of state immigration laws," said Attorney General Eric Holder.
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07/26/11 Representative Lamar Smith and Rep. Elton Gallegly have really outdone themselves this time.
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07/21/11 People are reacting to Alabama's anti-immigrant bill, even though most parts of it won't take effect until September 1st. Undocumented immigrants are fleeing the state, and it's kind of very similar to what has already happened in Georgia.
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07/20/11 The Senate sponsor of the legislation that would strip President Obama of prosecutorial discretion (the HALT Act) is none other than the Senator with the most direct and personal knowledge of discretion: David Vitter.
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07/20/11 Alabama, which is 2.8 percent Latino, has a race problem again. Dark people are on the verge of taking over and like George Wallace and Bull Connor before them, today's politicos in Alabama aren't having it. "Anything short of shooting them," one politician has said from Alabama. From another: "Empty the clip and do what has to be done."
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07/15/11 According to the ACLU, Rep. Lamar Smith's deceptively named "Keep Our Communities Safe Act" bill "would in fact lead to the detention of thousands more immigrants for years without first having a hearing before a judge."
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07/14/11 Breaking news: a Republican has said something crazy. It must be Wednesday. Today, we're bringing you news from Alabama, where sitting U.S. Congressman Morris "Mo" Brooks (R-AL) is under fire for comments made to an Alabama television station, WHNT: "As your congressman on the House floor, I will do anything short of shooting [immigrants]."
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07/08/11 In an 11 am press conference in Montgomery, Alabama today, the American Civil Liberties Union, along with the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Immigration Law Center, the Asian American Justice Center and the Asian Law Caucus have filed a class action lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of HB 56, Alabama's anti-immigrant law that Alabama Gov. Robert J. Bentley signed into law.
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07/06/11 Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) continues to insist that his forced E-Verify legislation would be a good thing for the U.S. economy and U.S. job seekers. However, Smith's fellow conservatives and leading libertarians disagree.
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06/30/11 Last week, just hours before Mandeep and her mother were scheduled to be deported to India, we learned that immigration officials changed their minds and canceled the deportation. At the last minute, she was given a one year stay of deportation. This was no doubt thank to the thousands of supporters who took action to keep her at home in California.
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06/28/11 Ten years after it was first introduced, the DREAM Act got its first ever hearing in the Senate today, giving hundreds of DREAMers in the audience and around the country some measure of renewed hope as Senate Democrats took up the issue once again.
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06/28/11 This morning's Senate DREAM Act hearing featured Ola Kaso, a DREAM Act student with a 4.4 GPA from Detroit, Michigan. Though she was brought to the United States when she was just four years old, just last month she found herself fighting deportation to a country she barely knows.
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06/24/11 Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) is promoting his E-Verify program as a "jobs" bill that will ease unemployed Americans' woes. It's telling that the first GOP "jobs plan" introduced this year would send unemployed manufacturing workers in Ohio or Michigan to the fields to pick fruit and vegetables. It's best described as a 21st Century Grapes of Wrath.
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06/20/11 The Smith-Grassley push to make the ineffective and burdensome E-Verify program mandatory nationwide continues to generate significant opposition from a broad range of observers, from the editorial board of La Opinion, the largest Spanish-language daily in the U.S., to the Service Employees International Union, to respected columnist Andres Oppenheimer. Interestingly, the Smith plan is also garnering strong opposition from the extreme right of the GOP.
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06/15/11 Yesterday, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) each introduced their own versions of mandatory E-Verify legislation. Freshman senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) is an original cosponsor of the Grassley bill. Marco Rubio might have stayed out of the immigration debate in Florida but he definitely isn't staying out of the national debate. After E-verify failed in Florida because of opposition from the business and Latino communities Marco Rubio is now throwing his support behind a bill that would nationalize and make mandatory that same program.
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06/15/11 Last week, we wrote about how the state of Georgia is facing a labor shortage after passing a harsh anti-immigration law that has chased many of its agricultural workers out. Nearly half of the 132 Georgia businesses polled in a private survey said they were experiencing a shortage of workers, and had a combined total of 11,000 jobs they could not fill.
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06/14/11 The Los Angeles Times published a rebuttal to yesterday's glowing, but deficient in facts, op-ed on E-Verify from Representatives Lamar Smith and Elton Gallegly. Today, Raul A. Reyes actually uses facts to deconstruct the Smith/Gallegly spin on a program that would cause massive job losses -- and has the potential to wipe out the agriculture industry.
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06/13/11 Arguing that he is only looking to keep communities safer and combat undocumented immigration, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Lamar Smith (R-Texas) is pushing through two problematic bills with serious ramifications for due process of the law and for workers, including citizens and permanent residents.
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06/10/11 Alabama Governor Robert Bentley (R) signed into law a new "papers, please" immigration bill that is a new low point for state-based immigration policy, an unfortunate reminder of Alabama and the South's tortured racial history, and another wake-up call to Washington to fix the broken immigration system.
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06/08/11 Last month, Georgia passed one of the harshest new immigration laws in the country. Today, the AJC reports that nearly half of the 132 Georgia businesses polled in a private survey this month say they are experiencing agricultural labor shortages.
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06/07/11 As if Arizona, with its SB 1070 law that cost $750 million and turned the state into a pariah wasn't enough. As if Georgia, with a new immigration law that criminalized all individuals who harbored or transported undocumented immigrants wasn't enough. As if Indiana's not one, but two new anti-immigration laws weren't enough.
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06/03/11 The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Southern Poverty Law Center, and several other groups are taking Georgia's new "show-me-your-papers" law to court, filing a federal lawsuit yesterday to halt provisions that would allow local law enforcement to check for immigration papers and require many businesses to do the same with employees.
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05/27/11 The Secure Communities program has been feeling the heat lately. After Illinois Governor, Pat Quinn, decided to pull out of the program, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (CA) called for an investigation into questionable ICE practices regarding the program (ie: that DHS lied by saying that communities could opt out when they really couldn't), more officials have been coming out in its opposition.
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05/24/11 Over the next couple weeks and months, we're expecting the anti-immigrant legislation, E-Verify, to start moving in the U.S. House. It's sponsored by Representatives Lamar Smith (TX), Elton Gallegly (CA) and Steve King (IA), who hope this legislation will lead to mass deportation. Fortunately, a strong coalition is building to fight E-Verify. And, it includes a united front from the labor movement
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