It should be self-evident, but
not in Alabama.
It has come to our attention that the requirements of Alabama’s H.B. 56 may chill or discourage student participation in, or lead to the exclusion of school-age children from, public education programs based on their or their parents’ race, national origin, or actual or perceived immigration status, or based on their homeless or foster care status and consequent lack of documentation.
As you know, in Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982), the Supreme Court held that a State may not deny a child equal access to public education based on his or her immigration status. Noting the “pivotal role of education” in our society, id. at 221, the Court concluded that denying innocent children the benefit of schooling provided to other students within the district was unconstitutional.
In their zeal to punish the innocent children of the state's low-cost labor force, it seems Alabama isn't just hurting those kids. It's kind of screwed itself.
A sponsor of Alabama's tough new immigration law told desperate tomato farmers Monday that he won't change the law, even though they told him that their crops are rotting in the field and they are at risk of losing their farms.
Republican state Sen. Scott Beason of Gardendale met with about 50 growers, workers, brokers and business people Monday at a tomato packing shed on Chandler Mountain in northeast Alabama. They complained that the new law, which went into effect Thursday, scared off many of their migrant workers at harvest time [...]
"This law will be in effect this entire growing season," Beason told the farmers. He said he would talk to his congressman about the need for a federal temporary worker program that would help the farmers next season.
"There won't be no next growing season," farmer Wayne Smith said.
"Does America know how much this is going to affect them? They'll find out when they go to the grocery store. Prices on produce will double," he said.
And if you think that legal Americans will take up these jobs, they won't. Those "illegal" Latinos do the shittiest, most back-breaking work imaginable. It's not even that no one else wants to do it, it's that they can't.
Rampant xenophobia has gripped the GOP, to the point that they relish punishing young, innocent kids. But what they lack in common decency, they might make up in naked economic self-interest and start pushing for a different approach to immigration. Doubtful, I know—Alabama is solidly GOP despite historically bringing up the bottom in the nation's economic statistics. But who knows, miracles do something happen.