A lesson not quite learned

IT IS sadly ironic that the same day a federal judge upholds major sections of a new Alabama immigration law--the most restrictive in the nation--the state also receives an "A" on its educational work in teaching civil rights history.

It's ironic because this comes at a time when the most retrogressive forces in Alabama claimed a victory, although it is unclear to me against whom.

On October 5, U.S. District Judge Sharon Blackburn denied a request to block Alabama's HB 56. The suit was filed by a coalition of groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, Southern Poverty Law Center and National Immigration Law Center.

Consequently, HB 56 now makes it legal, among other things, to detain somebody if there is "reasonable suspicion" that the person is in the country without proper documentation. The law also requires schools to collect information on the immigration status of students, and private businesses to enroll in the highly controversial and defective E-Verify system by April 1.

Blackburn blocked some provisions of HB 56, including one that makes it a crime to willfully harbor or conceal undocumented immigrants, or live with or drive someone who is an undocumented worker. Also, it is still not a crime under Alabama law for someone to ask a person to work as a day laborer.

Since September 28 when the federal judge decided on the case, thousands of immigrants, primarily Latinos, have left the state. Concerned parents have kept their children from attending school, revealing the fear and confusion growing among immigrant families in Alabama. Construction and landscape businesses and the forestry and agriculture industries have had to cope with the sudden dearth of labor. Farmers, especially, are desperate to recruit laborers to prevent crops from rotting on the vine.

Yet "the strongest immigration law in our country," as Gov. Robert Bentley called it, has, to many in the state and beyond, become Alabama's badge of honor.

The governor has something else to be proud of--a just released Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) report, titled "Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States 2011," gives Alabama an excellent grade for its instruction of civil rights history.

Now, as a teacher, I know well that giving a student a grade depends on how the rest of the class is doing. One student's grade is thus relative to the performances of the other students.

In this regard, the results of the SPLC study are troublesome at best. According to the report, a majority of the states fail when it comes to teaching about the civil rights movement. And the study states that a "Grade A means Alabama includes at least 60 percent of the recommended content and sets higher expectations for its students than other states."

But if Alabama, which just passed the most extreme anti-immigration bill in the country, gets an "A" in civil rights education, then what exactly have we as a society learned about civil rights?

ACCORDING TO the Alabama Course of Study (2004) for social studies cited in the SPLC study, seventh graders studying civics are required to "describe examples of conflict, cooperation and interdependence of groups, societies and nations, using past and current events." This suggested activity, we read in the report, is intended to trace "the political and social impact of the modern civil rights movement from 1954 to the present, including Alabama's role."

So, at age 13, students of the state should be able to make connections with other histories and movements, past and present, associated with the universal struggle for civil rights.

The lesson of the civil rights movement, or so I thought and learned during my schooling in Italy, was one of solidarity. To me, it was about bringing our humanity into politics.

Sure, African Americans were the protagonists of that struggle, but its guiding principles were to be extended to other fights for social justice in the U.S., as well as elsewhere. It was a message that resonated in South Africa, where a few, enlightened individuals coalesced around the charismatic leader Nelson Mandela, in prison from 1963 until 1990, and built a movement that eventually led to the end of the apartheid.

But it was a message also taken up by César Chávez in this country in the struggle to improve farmworkers' conditions. In the last few years of his suddenly interrupted existence, Martin Luther King Jr. himself expanded his message of racial justice to include the fight against social inequality and poverty in America.

So I thought, foolish me, that the most powerful, enduring lesson of the civil rights movement had to do with bringing our humanity into policymaking: fighting to eradicate poverty, not rewarding the wealthiest for "creating jobs" or the financial gurus of the world "to save our economy from collapsing."

Nearly one in six people lives in poverty, according to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau. In Alabama, one in five lives in poverty. And the Pew Hispanic Center reports that there are over 6 million Hispanic children living in poverty. The current economic recession seems to have hit the Latino community the hardest: their kids are now the largest group of children living below the poverty line in the U.S.

The controversy is real, and it's not just a matter of who has the authority to regulate immigration matters. All parties agree that the nation is in dire need of comprehensive immigration reform, although several conservatives claim that states like "The Beautiful" are just filling a void: most recently, there was the statement by Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard, who denounced the U.S. Department of Justice's latest attempt to block HB 56 and said that "the Obama administration has been is all talk and no action on dealing with this nation's illegal immigration problem."

IN THE last few years, however, the federal government has been extremely active in enforcing immigration law through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) bureau. Its attempts have helped create a culture that criminalizes immigrants.

ICE now has 69 agreements in 24 states with law enforcement agencies under the 287(g) program, which authorizes the federal government to enter into arrangements with state authorities and allow local police to cross-designate officers to enforce immigration law.

Another controversial program, launched in October 2008, is Secure Communities, which is supposed to detect non-citizens who are in custody. Not only are detainees' fingerprints run through federal criminal databases, but they are also checked against Homeland Security immigration databases. ICE can deport undocumented immigrants as a result of this operation.

Secure Communities' stated mission is to aid in the removal of "dangerous criminal aliens." However, according to the National Immigration Forum, the program has failed in this--on the contrary, its victims have been undocumented immigrants who are guilty of minor offenses or none at all. More than half of the detainee population hs never been convicted of any crime, according to DHS data.

According to a National Immigration Forum report published in July, Secure Communities has led to an increase in discriminatory police practices--and, once again, further confusion regarding the roles and responsibilities of local, state and federal agencies.

Most significantly, Secure Communities and similar programs result in decreasing community trust in police, which is already low among Latino immigrants. Therefore, fewer immigrants, fearing deportation or retaliation, collaborate with law enforcement, even when they are crime victims and should, instead, be protected.

These programs do not promote public safety. What they do, and they seem to do effectively, is help spread prejudice and racism. Further pushing undocumented immigrants into illegality makes them more likely to commit crimes, not less. In the attempt to address the widespread perception that immigrants pose a danger to society, conservatives are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. They are making immigrants more prone to become criminal, just like "tough on crime" policies have made African Americans more likely to enter the vicious cycle of repetitive incarceration.

And the fact is that it doesn't look like it's going to get any better.

As of June 2011, Secure Communities was active in 1,400 jurisdictions. Although initially, counties could decide not to join (the opt-out option), "DHS is on track to expand this program to all law enforcement jurisdictions nationwide by 2013," we read on the ICE website. Thirteen counties in Alabama joined the program in April. All counties are participating already in Florida.

The special report by the Immigration Policy Center on extended detentions of immigrants ("Locked up Without End") tackles these issues by questioning Rep. Lamar Smith's (R-Texas) proposed "Keep Our Communities Safe Act of 2011." In arguing against expanded detentions for immigrants, study author Michael Tan points out that we already have legislation in place that addresses issues of public safety: Non-citizens are subject to the same criminal laws that apply to citizens; the USA PATRIOT Act, which mandates "detention for suspected terrorists," already addresses possible threads to national security; and public health measures like quarantine laws apply to U.S. citizens and immigrants alike.

Yet discursively and institutionally, we as a society have begun to associate the notion of undocumented individuals with criminals. So it's not just a matter of federal vs. state and local jurisdictions. It is, once again, about the type of society we want to build.

There are, once again, divergent visions of the world that are being acted out here. On the one hand, there's the vision that wants people to be classified by status, income, nationality, sexual orientation and color of their skin; on the other hand, there's the vision of the world with "no countries" where "all the people [are] living life in peace." The latter is today struggling to make itself heard in the corporate-controlled political and media environment we live in.

ACCORDING TO the National Immigration Law Center, between 1996 and 2007, the average number of immigrants in detention centers tripled. Abuses have been routinely reported in detention facilities in the U.S., Australia and England.

Yet detainees should still have the right to due process. In 1886, the U.S. Supreme Court extended this provision of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to "all persons within the United States, including aliens, whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary or permanent."

Thousands of immigrants spend months in detention centers waiting to be deported or, occasionally, to be granted a visa--according to data released by ICE in 2009, the average is 81 days, but some have spent years in detention facilities. These places are populated by survivors of torture, victims of human trafficking, asylum seekers, and families with children.

Immigrants have been stripped of more and more of their rights in the last few years. The "Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act" of 1996 expanded the statutory definition of "aggravated felony" and made the changes retroactive. This term now applies to more than 50 classes of crimes, many of which are neither "aggravated" nor "felonies."

Thus, grounds for deportation have expanded to include a broad range of minor offenses. Since 1988, any non-citizen who has committed an "aggravated felony" has to be detained without having the right to bond hearings.

To add insult to injury, when detention centers are publicly funded, ICE reports that they cost taxpayers $5.5 million per day. The administration requested the record amount of $2 billion for the 2012 budget for detention facilities.

Private detention centers are a massive reality in England already, and are expanding in the United States. Tougher immigration laws are a business opportunity. As we now know, the American Legislative Exchange Council--a nonprofit organization whose members include representatives of the Corrections Corporation of America; Geo Group, the second-largest private prison company in the U.S.; as well as several state legislators--were pivotal to the drafting of Arizona SB 1070.

The New York Times recently reported on the global reality of detention centers where immigrants from all over are regularly abused. Multinational security companies now control privatized detention centers in Britain, United States and Australia.

The creation of a detention-industrial complex is the racist, profit-driven response to global migrations that have been often triggered by the devastating effects of economic globalization. As National Hispanic Heritage Month is coming to a close, let us not forget that in the U.S., it is low-income Latinos who are primarily affected by these anti-immigration policies.

In the effort to redress policies that imply that unauthorized immigrants are a danger to communities, we should remember that studies have shown that immigrants are less likely than citizens to commit crimes.

Rather than being persecuted and publicly vilified, this group of human beings should be protected, regardless of their immigration status. Rather than paying lip service to the civil rights movement and its heroes, we should not forget the ultimate meaning of Martin Luther King Jr.'s radical message of solidarity: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."