Alabama immigration law on the ropes

From the Decatur [Alabama] daily two days ago:

One of the few remaining provisions of Alabama’s tattered immigration law is unenforceable after sustaining twin blows Thursday. …

Early Thursday, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson of Montgomery delivered the first punch.

Thompson previously granted a temporary restraining order preventing the state revenue commissioner and its local offices from requiring documentation of citizenship or immigration status as a condition of issuing annual decals for manufactured homes. The state revenue commissioner filed a motion asking Thompson to dissolve the order, but he responded by strengthening it.

Section 30 of the state immigration law, which criminalizes business transactions between undocumented immigrants and political subdivisions of the state, was the provision at issue in Thompson’s manufactured-home case.

The section requires state and local governmental agencies to verify immigration status through a federal database called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, or SAVE.

The problem for the state was that none of the county agencies that issue manufactured-home decals is enrolled in SAVE. As Thompson pointed out in his order, it makes no sense for counties to demand documentation when they do not even have the ability to access the database that would confirm or deny whether the customer is lawfully present in the state.

Thompson’s order was narrow but emphatic: “To be perfectly clear, the court intends that the defendants apply (the manufactured-home decal law) without any … reference to citizenship status; the question of citizenship or lawful immigration status is completely off the table.” …

The second punch came late Thursday, and it was not limited to manufactured homes or revenue commissioners.

In the only opinion he has issued on the immigration law since it was passed in June, state Attorney General Luther Strange issued a terse directive: Until they enroll in the SAVE program, neither the state nor its political subdivisions can implement Section 30’s documentation requirements “and should not require anyone to demonstrate their U.S. citizenship or lawful presence in the United States.”

So all that cities and counties have to do is enroll in SAVE and they can resume their immigration-control duties, right? Not so easy.

For starters, the process of enrolling in SAVE is cumbersome. The only agencies allowed to enroll are those that provide “a public benefit, license or activity authorized by law for which the verification of immigration status is appropriate.”

Once an agency applies, it can take “several weeks to complete this process, depending on the type of agency and the complexity of the legal authorities provided,” explains the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service, which charges a monthly fee to those it allows to enroll.

And now the kicker: The U.S. government, which has sued Alabama to invalidate the immigration law, has said on several occasions that it will do nothing to assist Alabama in implementing a law it deems unconstitutional.

So we have a state law that depends on federal assistance for enforcement, and a federal government that is not inclined to help.

The latest blow does not eviscerate the vaunted Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, but it comes close. Federal courts already have made preliminary rulings blocking enforcement of provisions that prevented undocumented immigrants from attending state colleges, made it a crime for them to work, made it a crime to harbor or transport them and required public schools to verify their immigration status.

If the state Legislature’s goal was to pass an enforceable law, it largely failed. If its goal was to keep lots of lawyers busy, though, it succeeded brilliantly.

There was, of course, the mandatory discussion section in the online version of this editorial. It was interesting to watch once one considers that it was two Alabama lawyers who knocked down most of what was left of the law. Both the federal judge and the Attorney General of the State are citizens of Alabama. And the Attorney General is a Republican. Nevertheless, the comments were the typical comments about the “socialist” federal government interfering in the rights of the great State of Alabama. The writers of the comments were even egging each other on to begin doing Google checks on the presence of legal “green card” aliens in this state and that we need to begin checking to see how many legal aliens there are here who are taking jobs away from good Alabama citizens. I wonder how long it will take for these folk to start talking about people like me, who have made it past the “green card” status and managed to become citizens? Welcome back to the 1950’s in Alabama.