This has to help efforts to get more work for the Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama. Think Progress is reporting that Alabama's finest arrested a German Mercedes-Benz executive under Alabama's odious immigration law for not having papers:
Tuscaloosa Police Chief Steven Anderson told The Associated Press an officer stopped a rental vehicle for not having a tag Wednesday night and asked the driver for his license. The man only had a German identification card, so he was arrested and taken to police headquarters, Anderson said.
The 46-year-old executive was charged with violating the immigration law for not having proper identification, but he was released after an associate retrieved his passport, visa and German driver’s license from the hotel where he was staying, Anderson said.
The length of his detainment and the status of his court case weren’t immediately known.
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In October, the New York Times speculated in an editorial that despite best efforts to recruit foreign automakers to Alabama, the state was now “infamous as a regional capital of xenophobia.”
And if the immigration law scared away a manufacturer like Mercedes, which employs about 2,800 Alabamians, or Hyundai, which announced an expansion at its Montgomery, Alabama plant in May, would only compound the state’s economic woes.
The unfortunate arrest of a visiting Mercedes executive only underscores the damage Alabama’s harmful anti-immigrant law will continue to do to the state’s economy — and its reputation.
From a diary I did last week quoting Richard Trumka (AFL-CIO) and Martin Luther King III:
The passage of Alabama's anti-immigrant legislation, HB 56, invokes inhumanity reminiscent of the Jim Crow South. And the police state it has created is equally cruel.
If the law stands, children will be denied admission to public schools if they can't prove their citizenship, and schools will be turned into enforcement operations. Poor people of color will be ripped from their families if they are caught in public without their papers in order. Samaritans and people of conscience who employ, harbor or help undocumented workers will be severely punished.
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For all the differences that divide us, we are in this together. In these harsh economic times, we are more than ever wearing the "single garment of destiny" of which King wrote in his "Letter From Birmingham Jail."
When communities suffer discrimination and degradation, we all suffer. When some citizens are denied fair treatment, we are all denied. When any group of workers can be underpaid and overworked, all workers are victimized. When families are threatened if they dare organize or speak out, America is threatened.
http://www.dailykos.com/...