“Alabama tried a Donald Trump-style immigration law. It failed in a big way.” – Washington Post, Dave Weigel, 8/22/15.
Fact Check: Alabama passed a law in 2011 to crack down on illegal aliens in the state. It did not “fail in a big way.” Indeed it initially was quite successful in its primary goal, which was to encourage large numbers of illegal aliens to leave the state. They rightly anticipated problems if the law were enforced.
But most have now returned, thanks the Obama Administration, which sued Alabama and successfully struck down most of the law. Republican state representative Jim Carnes strongly supported the measure. He observed, “Our bill got eviscerated by the federal government. It was like 95 percent within the federal standards, but those standards weren’t being enforced. We enforced them, and it worked for several months until the feds did their thing.”
The pretext the administration used for suing Alabama was that it was illegally superseding federal immigration law—even though, as Rep. Carnes pointed out, its legislation closely followed federal standards. The truth is that the administration’s action was nothing but rank hypocrisy. It has never attempted to sue sanctuary cities and states which blatantly defy the federal law requiring them to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
The lawsuit against Alabama and similar legal actions against other states also reveal another hypocrisy. The administration justifies its refusal to enforce immigration laws against most illegal aliens on the grounds that it lacks resources to do so. Yet it does everything in its power to prevent states from offering their resources to help.
One of the charges illegal aliens advocates made when Alabama passed its law is that it would harm the state’s economy by depriving employers of a cheap-labor illegal workforce. Yet following passage of the law, the state’s unemployment rate went down, a development suggesting that Alabamians were taking jobs vacated by the departing illegal aliens. The Post article cites no figures to document its case about the law failing, just the opinions of illegal alien advocates.
Agricultural interests complained that they still couldn’t get enough workers. Often, however, they showed little interest in using an existing federal guest worker program, raising wages significantly to attract American workers, or investing in automation, which promises to be a future solution for genuine labor shortages.
Illegal alien advocates commonly maintain that all efforts to stop illegal immigration will fail. And that most certainly is what they want to happen.