Alabama immigration battle recalls civil rights past- POLITICO.com
The epicenter of the fight over the nation’s patchwork of immigration laws is not Arizona, which shares a border with Mexico and became a common site for boycotts. Nor was it any of the four states that were next to pass their own crackdowns.
No, the case that’s likely to be the first sorted out by the U.S. Supreme Court comes from this Deep South state, where the nation’s strictest immigration law has resurrected ugly images from Alabama’s days as the nation’s battleground for civil rights a half-century ago.
And Alabama’s jump to the forefront says as much about the country’s evolving demographics as it does the nation’s collective memory of the state’s sometimes violent path to desegregation.
With the failure of Congress in recent years to pass comprehensive federal immigration legislation, Arizona, Georgia, Utah, South Carolina and Indiana have passed their own. But supporters and opponents alike agree none contained provisions as strict as those passed in Alabama, among them one that required schools to check students’ immigration status. That provision, which has been temporarily blocked, would allow the Supreme Court to decide if a K-12 education must be provided to illegal immigrants.
Its stature as the strictest in the nation, along with the inevitable comparisons of today’s Hispanics with African-Americans of the 1950s and `60s, makes it a near certainty the law will be a test case for the high court.
“It really offers the Supreme Court a broad canvas to reshape what being an immigrant in the United States means,” said Foster Maer, an attorney with Latino Justice in New York, which is challenging the law.
Alabama was well-suited to be the nation’s civil rights battleground because of its harsh segregation laws, large black population, and the presence of a charismatic young minister named Martin Luther King Jr., who led a boycott of segregated buses in 1955.
Opponents say the new law’s schools provision conjures images of Gov. George Wallace’s stand in the schoolhouse door to block integration…