Alabama vs. Arizona - Which law is worse for immigrants?

Now in a contest to see which state can drive the hispanics out the quickest, Alabama is winning.  See who is leaving and why.  Are they all illegals, or undocumented ( sin papeles )?  Are they working hard or are they lazy?  Will this open up new jobs for unemployed citizens - putting Americans back to work?  What is the effect on our economy? on individuals caught up in the histeria?

Pedro and his wife, both of whom are undocumented immigrants, decided to put all their belongings in the car and leave with their son for Arizona. Even with its SB 1070 immigration law, they expect Arizona to treat them better than Alabama under its law HB 56.
In a housing complex full of small homes in the city of Florence, two hours from Birmingham, relatives and friends said goodbye to Pedro and his family as they packed and checked the brakes of their car in preparation for the long ride.
Pedro, a construction worker from the state of Guerrero, Mexico, lived in Alabama for seven years. "If it weren't for the law, I'd stay here, but I have a brother there (in Arizona) who says that everything's okay now and there are plenty of jobs," he said.
Life in Alabama is impossible, he told me, and he wasn't confident that the attempts to block the law through the courts would succeed. And even if it did, the immigrant community faces too hostile an environment here to stay, he added.
"You can't drive anywhere; you can't go out because all it takes is seeing a policeman to scare you", Pedro said.
This strategy of wearing down the immigrant community through draconian laws like HB 56 -attrition through enforcement-- is exactly the point for those who have written and endorsed these laws.

Pedro's story echoed those we heard from other immigrants gathered at his house. Some wonder if they should follow his path out of the state or weather the storm here and see if anything changes.
The mosaic of situations reflects how HB 56 has affected everyone, with and without documents alike.
Some undocumented immigrants have native-born U.S. citizen children. Some have undocumented children, some of whom were brought to Alabama as babies. That describes Lizbeth, Pedro's niece, a 19-year-old "Dreamer" (a student who would be eligible for the DREAM Act) who was brought here when she was 2 months old. She married an undocumented young man, and had a baby. Some couples are mixed-status as well--such as Katie, a young woman who was born in Alabama, and her partner, Freddy, an undocumented immigrant who came to the U.S. at the age of eleven. They have three children--all of them native-born citizens--and another on the way. And so on.
The person who'd arrived most recently of those we talked to had been in Alabama for five years. Others have been here for ten, eleven, thirteen, sixteen, twenty. Some are renters; some own their own homes. Everyone has a job: in hotels, cleaning offices and stores, in food processing plants, in the fields doing farm labor, in construction.
But for those without documents HB 56 turns driving to work into Russian roulette. "You're playing it every time, but you have to go to work because it's your responsibility to do it. For my wife and my baby girl, because Pampers don't buy themselves," said Lizbeth's husband, who works in a sawmill.
"Every morning, I have to leave thinking that I've left my sleeping child, and this could be the last time I get to see her," he said
Pedro's sister embodies many immigrants' fear of doing basic tasks, like buying food or going to the doctor. "Yesterday made about four weeks since I last went to the store. My children are eating only corn flakes and fruit because I'm afraid to go out. The day before yesterday the children came down with a bad case of the flu, but I couldn't take them to see the pediatrician, because I'm afraid to go out," she said.

Lizbeth said that "if it's my turn to get taken away, well, it's my turn." "I work all day cleaning stores with my mother. I drive her. I leave my daughter with my aunt, and all I can think of is that if they arrest me, and if I can't come back to see her, it would break my heart. This law is tearing a lot of families apart. We're not here to hurt anyone. We need help to get rid of this law because it's not doing anything good for Alabama, it's hurting the economy," she added.
Katie, the Alabama native, believes that the law is racist. If immigrants are working, "let them work and take care of their families, don't close the door on them." She had a message for the politicians who support the law: "You're so awful! Hispanics are helping out a lot here in Alabama." "And I have a message for Obama. Please, help Hispanics. They helped you."
Lizbeth's husband said that "if the governor says he signed the law to open up jobs for Americans who could do the work immigrants have been doing, why has the economy started slumping so quickly? We're seeing a labor shortage all over the place and no one is coming out to shop in stores because everyone's leaving."

He works at the mill from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m., for $7.25 an hour. "I can't tell you how many Hispanics have lost fingers or hands. I also worked as a roofer, on houses that were sometimes 2, 3 stories. It's dangerous work, and in the summer, when the shingles are hot, it's very hard. If Americans can do the jobs that we've done, how come nobody's showing up to take the jobs we've left in the chicken farms and the fields?" he asked.

Journalist Gabriel Thompson wrote the book Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing The Jobs (Most) Americans Won't Do, in which he recounts his experiences doing the harsh labor immigrants take on for little money and under precarious conditions.

Thompson worked in a chicken processing plant in Russellville, Alabama, near Florence. In a recent article for ColorLines on HB 56 and how immigration had benefited Russellville, he wrote that "When I relocated to Russellville in 2008, I found that, as a citizen, it was exceedingly easy to 'steal' a job back...As I soon learned, the hard part wasn't getting the job; the hard part was keeping the job. During a single shift I could be asked to tear apart more than 7,000 chicken breasts by hand or carry and dump 30 tons of meat onto an assembly line."
Thompson wrote that immigration had helped Russellville in various ways, including stimulating the economy as consumers and business owners. The same can be said for other parts of the state.

Read more from this source: The Huffington Post

Becoming Legal: An Immigrant's Path to Citizenship

A short course on immigration in the USA:

1.  Anti-immigrant sentiment is nothing new nor limited to our current affairs or just the U.S.:  all over the world immigrants are shunned and the outside ethnic group is always seen as inferior.  Just a few which come to mind:  Shiite and Sunni,  Japanese and Chinese, Kurds and Turks, Slavs and Croats, Romanians in Spain ( the Spanish gov. recently was offering them money to go back to Romania, if they promised to stay there for 5 yrs ! ), Catholic Irish vs. English Protestants, the Algerians in France etc.  In the US we have historically found groups that were easy to discriminate against:  Native Americans, Italians, Germans, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Africans, and now Latinos.

    2. There is always an element of "otherness" commonly based on religion or skin color or language in the "outside" group.

    3.  Those in a position of influence ( talk show hosts, politicians, religious leaders, and in some cases even teachers) tend to take sides.  Those who exacerbate the dislike of the scapegoat, usually focus on the "otherness" and try to foment fear of the unknown.  Most people naturally have certain fears of that which is outside their comfort zone, their realm of familiarity.  So, this is an easy way to persuade the populace of the demons in "those people."   We hear terms like "the axis of evil," and "They are either for us, or against us." or "They are taking away our jobs."  This is a common one in our current financially stressful world.

    4.  With the passage of time, at least in the US, our "social mind-set" or popular image softens toward many of our formerly disliked groups.  Think of the changes we have seen in attitudes in our lifetime toward, say, African Americans, Japanese, and the Vietnamese.  These changes come slowly, with influence makers and moms in sneakers speaking out. 

    5.  Seeing the above pattern repeat itself several times in our lives, we now are much more skeptical of accepting the initial demagoguery.

    6.  Based on our own experiences and observations, we have found the hispanics we have met here in the US and Latin America, mostly genuine, generous, hard-working people, who are trying to make the best of their lives.  The newly emigrated are leaving poverty, violence and corruption, looking for a new beginning, a second chance.  When we recently read in an internet forum a comment from a woman who described herself as a conservative, born again Christian who thought that all Mexicans should be deported, what came to mind was that the essence of both Christianity and immigration is a second chance, a new beginning, an opportunity to start fresh.  She obviously saw life differently from us.

    7.  Attempts to force immigrants out of our communities have repeatedly proven unworkable.  The resulting economic impact is disastrous to those on both sides of the tracks.  The citizen farmers and small business owners find themselves without customers and workers.  The immigrants, both legal and illegal, have their lives and families thrown into chaos.  For some, this may be the goal.  For us, it is unfathomable.

    8.  So, indeed, we would favor changing our laws to provide a path to citizenship.  Perhaps fines may be a part of the equation, but few will be able to pay them.  If it is found that back taxes are owed, certainly employers would be required to pay their portions, along with penalties and interest.  We think that it will be nearly impossible to find small business employers who have relied in the past on undocumented workers, now willing to step up and pay these back taxes, fines and interest.  Hence, "making up for the past" is a difficult part of the solution.  Criminal records should be examined and not allowed for violent crimes.  Service to the country (USA) in the form of work in the Peace Corps, Americorps etc would be a good thing.  Basic English proficiency should be required, as well as knowledge of our governmental system.  We see this not as amnesty.  Rather it represents a means of earning a way into our system.  In the early days of our country, many people earned their way in - as indentured servants.  When they could not pay for their passage across the ocean, they "borrowed" the money from a landowner already living in this country, then worked for that owner for five to seven years without pay.  Hence, working to achieve legal status and citizenship in the US is nothing new.

Why Does America Welcome Immigrants

Matthew Spalding, Ph. D., has given us a very well thought out description of why America welcomes immigrants.

By the very nature of the principles upon which it was founded, the United States—more than any other nation in history—beckons to its shores the downtrodden, the persecuted, and all those “yearning to breathe free.” It embraces those who come to this country honestly, armed with their work ethic, in search of the promises and opportunities of the American Dream. Why does America welcome immigrants?

The key to the uniquely successful story of American immigration is its deliberate and self-confident policy of patriotic assimilation: America welcomes newcomers while insisting that they learn and embrace its civic culture and political institutions, thereby form­ing one nation from many peoples—e pluribus unum. While there are differences of opinion about the number of immigrants the nation should accept and the process by which they should become citizens, there has always been widespread, bipartisan agreement that those who come here should become Americans.
The overwhelming result of this policy of assimilation, throughout American history, has been a strengthening of our social capital, the continuing expansion of our economy, and the constant renewal of our national purpose. America has been good for immigrants, and immigrants have been good for America.
Rather than assuming that civic allegiance rests on an ancient claim to divine right, or ethnic or religious identity, the American Founders began with equal rights and consent. As the Declaration of Independence states: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” All men—not just all Americans—are equal, because all possess fundamental rights that exist by nature.

Legitimate government is instituted to secure these fundamental rights, deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed. “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs,” as Jefferson put it, “nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”[1] This new form of civic obligation creates not sovereigns and subjects, but equal citizens who rule in turn. The requirement of consent and the practice of self-government creates the conditions of citizenship.

Other excerpts of this article will be posted later.  To see the complete article click::  The Heritage Foundation