The "New" [Old] South: At a Civil Rights Crossroads
An excellently written blog post titled Sweet Home Alabama? Immigration and Civil Rights in the “New South,“ popped up today on HuffPost by Kevin R. Johnson, a professor at UC Davis Law.
Johnson doesn’t get into the details of Alabama’s harsh immigration law, but he illustrates similarities between the state’s intolerance to undocumented immigrants and Latinos today and to African-Americans in the 1960s.
It should be troubling that Alabama, ground zero in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, gave birth to the harshest immigration law to date. Many famous incidents in that state — from Birmingham Police Chief Bull Connor unleashing fire hoses on peaceful civil rights marchers to Governor George Wallace proclaiming “segregation now, segregation forever” in his 1963 inaugural address — remain indelibly imprinted on the national imagination. As in the days when segregationists championed “states’ rights,” we again hear objections to the intervention of the federal government as it attempts to defend immigrants’ civil rights through lawsuits challenging state immigration laws. Alabama now risks going down in history for its intolerance toward undocumented immigrants and Latinos as well as African-Americans.
Additionally, Johnson posits that we are at a civil rights crossroads and we must start making some decision about how we want to treat immigrants. Our ambivalence will only breed more turmoil.
…In my estimation, the United States, much as it was in the 1960s, is at a civil rights crossroads. Millions of immigrants and undocumented immigrants live in the United States. Employers value their labor. Consumers gain from lower prices. The economy as a whole benefits. But legally, the nation has been at best ambivalent about how to treat immigrants, especially undocumented ones, in the eyes of the law. Most fundamentally, what rights do they possess? We as a nation must address these civil rights questions. Until then, we can expect more turmoil in the states and, consequently, continued threats to the civil rights of immigrants and U.S. citizens of particular national origins.
Read his entire post here, or read his law review article, full of great primary secondary source citations, here.