A tough new Alabama law targets illegal immigrants and sends families fleeing

[The Northerner]

Foley, Ala. — Trailer by trailer, yard sale by yard sale, and pew by empty pew, a poor but tightknit immigrant community on Alabama’s breezy Gulf Coast is rapidly disintegrating.

This time it is not a tornado or hurricane uprooting families and scattering them to the winds. It is a new state law, largely upheld last week by a federal district judge, that seeks to drive illegal immigrants from the state by curtailing many of their rights, punishing anyone who knowingly employs, houses or assists them, and requiring schools and police to verify immigrants’ legal status.

Other states, including Arizona, Georgia and Colorado, have passed similar laws in the past several years in a growing trend by state legislatures to crack down on illegal immigration within their borders in the absence of comprehensive federal action. But Alabama’s new law is the toughest passed so far, and it is the only one to withstand federal lawsuits and other legal challenges, allowing it to take virtually full effect.

Across Alabama, news of the court ruling has swiftly spread panic and chaos among trailer parks and working-class areas where legal and illegal immigrant families from Mexico and Central America — as many as 150,000 people, by some estimates — live and work at jobs their bosses say local residents largely refuse to do.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-tough-new-alabama-law-targets-illegal-immigrants-and-sends-families-fleeing/2011/10/07/gIQAtZuPWL_story.html

[OHdem10]

1. This is the intention. The same thing happened in Arizona.

They either went to other states or back to Mexico.
I remember a TV Clip of officials in Arizona being
very glad and saw this as a good thing.