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Alabama’s immigration law has ruinous impact

Miami Herald – October 23, 2011

Alabama is seeing the catastrophic results of its anti- immigrant law.

Other states would do well to learn the disastrous lesson. Like the Arizona law HB 1070 before it, Alabama’s HB 56 was propelled into law by widespread misconceptions and fears about the place of undocumented immigrants in society today. The law allows law-enforcement personnel to stop anyone they suspect may be here illegally. And while others states debate the merits of allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain a driver’s license, HB 56 makes it a felony to even try to get one.

A federal appeals court has blocked some parts of this law, but not the whole thing.

Meanwhile, crops rot in the fields. News reports indicate that much of the migrant labor force is moving out of Alabama, and Americans aren’t picking up the slack. Low wages and exhausting work simply don’t appeal to unemployed Americans, whose bottom line is often flipping burgers or the equivalent for minimum wage.

There is a reason that farm work so heavily employs undocumented workers. It doesn’t pay well, it doesn’t have benefits and equivalently exhausting jobs that do employ Americans typically pay much higher wages.

But Americans want their food cheap, and the bottom line is that farmers simply can’t afford to pay better wages or offer better hours without a complete overhaul of the system. These jobs appeal to the undocumented among us because they are easy jobs to get without papers.

It will take hard lessons like the ones we are seeing right now in Alabama to show some people just how vital a part of our society undocumented immigrants are, and how little we are prepared to continue without them.

Jose Miguel Leyva is a freelance writer and novelist living in El Paso, Texas.

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