I believe the term in the world of text messaging would be “OMG!” As in “OMG! Liberals are whipping out the Bull Connor card in the illegal immigration debate now?”
Oh, indeed they are. Check out Wade Henderson’s remarks about HB 56 — Alabama’s law the state recently enacted to curb illegal immigration.
“This draconian initiative signed into law … by Gov. Robert Bentley is so oppressive that even Bull Connor himself would be impressed,” Henderson, the head of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, told the Los Angeles Times. He said the law “is designed to do nothing more than terrorize the state’s Latino community.”
Oh, really now? Here’s what the Alabama law does, according to the same Los Angeles Times:
“The Alabama legislation requires that police, in the course of a lawful ‘stop, detention or arrest,’ make a reasonable attempt to determine a person’s citizenship and immigration status, given a ‘reasonable suspicion’ that the person is an immigrant, unless doing so would hinder an investigation.
“It outlaws illegal immigrants from receiving any state or public benefits, bars them from enrolling in or attending public colleges, and prohibits them from applying for or soliciting work.
“It forbids the harboring and transport of illegal immigrants, and outlaws renting them property or ‘knowingly’ employing them for any work within the state. It also makes it a ‘discriminatory practice’ to fire, or decline to hire, a legal resident when an illegal one is on the payroll.
“The law criminalizes ‘dealing in false identification documents’ and, beginning April 1, will require every business in the state to verify employees’ immigration status using the federal E-verify system.
“It deems invalid any contract to which an illegal immigrant is a party if the legal party in the contract has ‘direct or constructive knowledge’ that the other person is in the country illegally. And it requires a citizenship check for people registering to vote.”
To show how far out in left field Henderson is, compare that law to what Eugene “Bull” Connor, the public safety commissioner of Birmingham in the early 1960s, is known to have done.
In 1961, he let his cops cut a deal with members of the Ku Klux Klan. When a group of civil rights activists known as “Freedom Riders” took a bus to Birmingham, Connor gave the Kluxers 15 minutes to assault and brutalize them before his officers intervened.
In 1963, Connor had his police officers turn police dogs loose on civil rights demonstrators, many of them children. He had his firemen turn high-pressure water hoses on the same demonstrators.
There is nothing in HB 56 that subjects Alabama’s Latino population to that kind of terror. No police dogs will be turned loose on the state’s Latinos; no fire hoses will be turned on them, and no one will be given free passes to beat them senseless.
Much closer to reality than Henderson is the National Immigration Forum’s Ali Noorani, who has a problem with an HB 56 provision that requires school districts to report any students suspected of being illegal immigrants.
“At the end of the day,” Noorani said in the LAT story, “for a teacher to be required to act as an immigration agent and ask a student for their immigration status will have a chilling effect on immigrant families.”
That, Mr. Noorani is precisely the point. A “chilling effect” is precisely what’s been missing regarding illegal immigration. We have 11 million or 12 million illegal immigrants in this country because they believe there are no consequences for breaking our immigration laws.
A “chilling effect” is sorely needed. Kudos to the state of Alabama for providing one.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
