Oops.
Opponents of Alabama's strict immigration law are declaring victory Tuesday, as the state agreed not to pursue key provisions of a measure critics had called an endorsement of racial profiling. Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the state's appeal of a federal court's ruling that gutted the law.
Rush Limbaugh must be crying in his Tea, weeping while reading this:
Provisions in the law that are now permanently blocked:
- Requiring schools to verify the immigration status of newly enrolled K-12 students.
- Criminalizing the solicitation of work by unauthorized immigrants.
- A provision that made it a crime to provide a ride to undocumented immigrants or to rent to them.
- A provision that infringed on the ability of individuals to contract with someone who was undocumented.
- A provision that criminalized failing to register one's immigration status.
Lots of organizations challenged this disgusting Alabama law, passed in 2011, including the ACLU, the Justice Department and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Oh, an the icing on the five-layered cake:
As part of the settlement, Alabama will reportedly pay some $350,000 to cover the opposing coalition's legal costs. Final resolution of the case is pending a court review.
This, unfortunately, is not victory. This is a good defense, plain and simple. They keep passing these laws, and some of them get shot down, but some of them stick. Arizona is a case in point. Until and unless an immigration bill is passed that prevents human beings from being considered sub-human, criminal and exploitable, this process will continue and new, clever ways of persecuting the undocumented will be figured out.
Still, for the moment, we can enjoy as Alabama is forced to admit the unconstitutionality of its hateful statute.