HOUSE BILL 56: ITS ORIGINS AND IMPACT

In 2010, three years after our first round of interviews, Alabama Republicans took control of the state legislature. It was their first moment in power since Reconstruction. Scott Beason became Chairman of the Rules Committee, one of the most powerful positions in the state. He joined forces with Rep. Hammon to promote an anti-immigration bill that they framed as a job-saving measure and a law-and-order imperative. Although H.B. 56 was eventually named for these two conservative legislators, neither actually wrote the law. Its author was Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), who also penned the controversial 2010 Arizona immigration law (S.B. 1070). Why such a harsh crackdown in a state with such a small foreign-born population? The Alabama GOP’s call for urgency rested on the same claims as their Arizona counterparts.

First, they invoked the issue of states’ rights. Standing on the Alabama statehouse steps in 2008, Sen. Beason told a throng of supporters that powerful groups in Alabama and in Washington are “opposed to us doing anything about securing the border of Mexico, and they are very much opposed to us moving and acting on a state level. My position is that the federal government has failed at the border. It’s their job to protect us at the border, and once those people come across the border, it is no longer a federal issue, it is a state issue” (Klass Reference Klass2008). (The Supreme Court later rejected this interpretation of the Constitution in Arizona et al. v. United States (2012) in a 5-3 ruling.) Beason also condoned vigilante enforcement of what he regarded as a state prerogative. At a Cullman County Republican Party breakfast, he advised Republicans to “empty the clip and do what has to be done” (Rolley Reference Rolley2011) with respect to undocumented immigrants.

Second, they stressed jobs. Beason and his allies framed H.B. 56 as a jobs bill that would protect taxpayers and boost employment for native-born citizens. They stoked citizens’ fears with claims that immigrants were stealing native Alabamans’ jobs and draining scarce resources that would otherwise go to deserving, upstanding, and law-abiding citizens. Third, they cast Alabama as a demographic time-bomb, headed toward a disaster that would have dire implications for the GOP. Over bacon and eggs in Cullman County, Beason told fellow Republicans that “Democrats do not want to solve the illegal immigration problem because they know, this is a fact, when their children grow up and get the chance to vote, they vote for Democrats” (Rolley Reference Rolley2011).

On June 2, 2011 Alabama’s Republican-controlled state legislature passed a law that both critics and supporters agreed was the toughest immigration law in the country. H.B. 56 sailed through the House by 67-29, in a vote sharply polarized by race and partisanship. Only three Democrats voted for it (two White and one Black), and no Republicans voted against it. H.B. 56 passed in the Senate by 25-7, on a vote that broke down along similar lines. Only one GOP state senator voted against it (the Alabama GOP Senate is all White) while just five Democratic state senators voted for it (three Whites and two Blacks).

When H.B. 56 took effect, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) set up a telephone hotline for those with questions and concerns about the law. In the first weekend they received nearly 1,000 calls. A victim of domestic violence reported that a state employee had told her that Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) would be notified if she proceeded with an effort to obtain a protective order against her abuser. A judge advised a lawyer to report to ICE any of her clients who requested translation assistance, as such requests amounted to reasonable suspicion of undocumented status. An undocumented mother tried to obtain food stamps to feed her citizen children, but the social worker threatened to turn her in to the federal government for deportation. In Madison County and Decatur, public utilities announced that they would cut off water, gas, and sewage services to people who could not prove their legal status (Bauer Reference Bauer2011).

The predominantly Black Birmingham City Council made national news a few days later, when it unanimously condemned H.B. 56 and approved a resolution calling for a commission to search for a more humane solution to the issue of immigration. Black Councilman Jonathan Austin said of H.B. 56: “[I]t is hateful. It is mean-spirited and takes us back to an era that we worked hard to get over” (Bryant Reference Bryant2011). Councilwoman Valerie Abbot lamented, “Once again our state is in the forefront of doing something negative” (Bryant Reference Bryant2011). The mayor, a Black man with roots in the Civil Rights era, compared H.B. 56 to apartheid and Jim Crow segregation.

Although he later conceded that the bill needed slight “tweaks,” Governor Bentley rejected the City of Birmingham’s proposal for a study commission. A number of challenges from the U.S. Department of Justice and immigrant advocacy organizations temporarily enjoined but only partially succeeded in beating back some of the law’s harshest provisions. Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn left much of the law intact in her September 28, 2011 ruling. She allowed those sections of the law to be implemented that require police to check the immigration status of anyone suspected to be in the country without authorization, and she upheld the section making it a felony for an undocumented immigrant to enter into a contract with a government entity. She also allowed the mandate that schools check and report on the legal status of their students. The following Monday after her ruling, 2,285 Latino students—out of 34,000 in the state—did not show up for school (Lee Reference Lee2011). HICA plaintiffs and the U.S. Department of Justice quickly appealed the ruling, and Judge Blackburn granted injunctions pending appeal. Two weeks later, the U.S. Court of Appeals halted the provisions requiring schools to gather citizenship data and making it illegal for an alien not to carry documentation. But the damage was done: by February about 13% of Latino students had dropped out of school altogether (Baxter Reference Baxter2012).

In early 2012, Republican legislators presented a modified bill, H.B. 658, to address unintended consequences of H.B. 56, clarifying the types of documents that could serve as official identification and retreating from the strictest measures against subcontractors who unknowingly hire undocumented immigrants. The new law left intact the most onerous aspects of the original one and added a new provision authorizing the use of state funds to create a database of undocumented immigrants. H.B. 658 passed both Houses, again on stark partisan lines, and Gov. Bentley signed it into law in May.

According to two statewide surveys conducted in Alabama around this time, a majority of Alabamans supported H.B. 56. A Pulse Opinion Research poll, conducted March 6, 2012 on behalf of the anti-immigration group FAIR (N=500), found that 75% of residents in the state supported “enforcing laws against illegal immigration” (52% strongly supported and 23% somewhat supported), while only 24% opposed it. Just 28% agreed with “the Obama administration that immigration is a federal matter and Alabama should not try to enforce laws against illegal immigration” (Pulse Opinion Research 2012). The other poll, conducted by the left-leaning organization Anzalone Liszt Research (ALR) among 500 likely voters between February 1 and 6, 2012, also registered support for H.B. 56. According to the ALR poll, only 13% of likely Alabama voters said the “law is not working, and should be entirely repealed,” while 55% said the law needs “minor changes” and 19% said the law needs no changes (Anzalone Liszt Research 2012). Neither poll reported the results by race or ethnicity.

A few months later, in June 2012, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling on Arizona’s S.B. 1070 that had implications for Alabama. The Court blocked three out of four provisions of the Arizona law and affirmed that the U.S. Constitution grants exclusive authority over immigration matters to the federal government. However, the Court left intact the “papers please” provision, so Arizona state law enforcement can still check on the immigration status of anyone suspected of being in the country without documentation. That September, the Eleventh Circuit Court reaffirmed a similar provision in Alabama. Critics claimed that both decisions amounted to state-sanctioned racial profiling (Brooks Reference Brooks2012). The Circuit Court left open a sliver of hope for the forces opposed to H.B. 56, however, in its suggestion that future Constitutionally-based challenges might succeed if the statute were not narrowly applied. ^{Footnote 2}

RECEIVING COMMUNITIES: BLACKS AND IMMIGRANTS IN THE SOUTH

The standard theories of assimilation, segmented incorporation, and racial/ethnic disadvantage tend to place the spotlight on newcomers. As a result, the lion’s share of research on immigrant incorporation focuses on the immigrants themselves. Recent work, however, has turned attention to the receiving communities—the places where newcomers settle—for answers to important questions about immigrant integration. Some states and localities actively promote integration through immigrant-friendly policies, while others crack down on immigrants through laws designed to run them out of town. Explaining this variation is a central preoccupation of the literature on receiving communities.

We contribute to this enterprise by showing that harsh anti-immigrant laws can trigger dramatic responses in receiving communities, shifting opinion in particular among African Americans toward support of immigrants. In our Birmingham case study, H.B. 56 caused members of the city’s Black elite to find similarities between the immigrants’ plight and the Civil Rights Movement. H.B. 56 influenced them to change their stances on immigration issues and inspired them to invoke Black history in their objections to the law’s draconian measures.

As recently as the 1990s, Latinos were politically disadvantaged in cities with Black majorities or pluralities (McClain and Karnig, Reference McClain and Karnig1990; McClain and Tauber, Reference McClain and Tauber1998). Latinos also struggled politically when Black elite coalitions were entrenched in power (Browning et al., Reference Browning, Marshall, Tabb, Browning, Marshall and Tabb1990; Giles and Evans, Reference Giles and Evans1986; McClain and Karnig, Reference McClain and Karnig1990). In a comparison of three cities—Memphis, Durham, and Little Rock—Black leaders were found to be least concerned about immigration in Memphis, the city with the most Blacks, and most concerned about immigration in Little Rock, the city with fewest Blacks (Lyle et al., Reference Lyle, McClain, Perez, Carew, Walton, Watts, Lackey, Clealand and Nunnally2009). In our interviews in 2007, Birmingham Blacks dominated politics, and the city’s Black leaders largely fit this model: they were, for the most part, unconcerned about immigration. By 2013, however, newspaper reports show that Black elites in Birmingham had become markedly invested in immigrant rights. Our interviews suggest that the passage of H.B. 56 was a primary reason for this change.

Daniel Hopkins (Reference Hopkins2011) has argued that national developments are crucial in the process of local politicization: “The effects of local context—that is, living in heavily immigrant neighborhoods or in rapidly changing ones—will hinge on the visibility of immigration as a national issue….The local context is not inherently political, but must be made so” (pp. 501-502). Although we agree that local contexts must be made political, in Birmingham we found that the strongest proximate activator was a drastic change in state-level (as opposed to national-level) immigration policy. The passage of H.B. 56 marked a turning point, after which the city’s Black elites both paid more attention to the immigrants in their local community of Birmingham and moved to the Left in their opinions on immigration policy.

When H.B. 56 was enacted, Birmingham City Council President Roderick Royal made a national name for himself as a champion of immigrant rights by advocating for a path to citizenship. Facing questions about his tireless advocacy on immigration in a city that is almost 75% Black and predominantly native-born, Councilman Royal, who is himself an African American, defended his stance. He said that his mostly Black constituents often ask, “What’s in it for me?” His answer: “The catch is that it’s always good to do right. In fact, Birmingham has a very small Hispanic population. I would be just fine politically if I said nothing. But that’s not the right thing to do. The right thing…is to provide an equal opportunity to everyone who comes to the State of Alabama and the City of Birmingham. The next step is to get a plan together to integrate people into society” (Americas Society/Council of the Americas 2011). The Birmingham City Council’s unanimous repudiation of H.B. 56 on grounds of fairness and equality equally reflects the way in which changing attitudes among political leaders can affect immigrant integration (Alvarado and Jaret, Reference Alvarado and Jaret2009; Jones-Correa Reference Jones-Correa2011; Rodriguez Reference Rodriguez2012).

In his work on immigration, Nestor Rodriguez (Reference Rodriguez2012) identifies four possible directions for intergroup relations in the South, in light of the many restrictions there on Latino immigrants. We consider the two scenarios most significant in the context of Birmingham. In the first, curbs on immigration “may lessen the perception among African Americans of Latinos as economic competitors” (Rodriguez Reference Rodriguez2012, p. 31). This aligns with the message that Alabama’s GOP strove to impart to Blacks in that state: fewer immigrants means more jobs for Blacks. In practice, however, there is little evidence to suggest that the GOP’s efforts to frame H.B. 56 as a “jobs bill” that would help Black Alabamans met with success among Blacks. Alabama’s Black elite, at least, chose instead to embrace a competing perspective, that H.B. 56 is a throwback to the days of state-sanctioned segregation. In Rodriguez’s second scenario, Latinos may “turn inward for survival, lessening contact or the potential for contact, with other groups” (Rodriguez Reference Rodriguez2012, p. 31). Indeed, H.B. 56 did encourage many immigrants in Alabama not only to turn inward but also to remove themselves from the state entirely: the objective in passing the law was to isolate and frighten immigrants and thus force them to ‘self-deport’ (Waslin Reference Waslin2012). Evidence abounds of individual immigrant withdrawal in the aftermath of H.B. 56 (Baxter Reference Baxter2012; Brooks Reference Brooks2012; Waslin Reference Waslin2012). Thus Rodriguez’s second scenario seems to fit the situation in Alabama after the passage of the law. Yet the situation is made more complex by the many protests mounted against the law, both by immigrants themselves and by their supporters, many of whom were Black.

2007 AND 2013 INTERVIEWS WITH BIRMINGHAM’S BLACK ELITES

Our event data from 2006-2013 indicate that, as Alabama Republicans moved to the Right on immigration as the champions of H.B. 56, Black leaders in Birmingham moved to the Left. Our interview data, collected in 2007 and 2013, suggest reasons that the media do not readily provide. In a sense, H.B. 56 created favorable conditions for a natural experiment. Our efforts to locate the thirty-five members of Birmingham’s Black elite who had been interviewed in 2007 revealed that five participants had relocated to another city, two had died, and one was in prison. Of the remaining twenty-seven leaders eligible for follow-up interviews, we were able to contact and interview ten of them, yielding a 37% response rate. This small sample size makes our interviews only suggestive. However, the ten interviewees were strikingly similar in their commentary on the effects of H.B. 56, both on their own thinking and on the Birmingham community. Moreover, the media and social science research are rarely able to report specific changes in attitudes among elites. Our research, although limited, is able to do exactly this.

In both 2007 and 2013, we asked participants to provide open-ended responses to a series of questions as well as answers to four closed-ended, Likert-scale questions. The data were digitally recorded and transcribed into text to facilitate thematic analyses of the content using Atlas.ti qualitative software. The participants in 2013 completed a truncated version of the 2007 questionnaire, with the addition of specific questions related to H.B. 56. In these follow-up interviews we sought to ascertain the views of our participants with respect to the primary grievances articulated by the Alabama GOP in Section 2 of H.B. 56:

• • Undocumented immigrants are causing a drain on public resources.

• • Public agencies encourage illegal immigration when they provide social resources or welfare without verifying citizenship.

• • Undocumented Latino immigrants should be deported and should not be provided with a path to citizenship.

Participants who provided answers in support of these sentiments were considered to be conservative on immigration and were coded as being on the “Right” politically. Those who disagreed with these claims were considered to be liberal on immigration and coded as being on the “Left” politically. The “Moderate” category captured sentiments in between. An example of a Likert item in the survey instrument follows:

In this case, we coded response “a” as “Left,” responses “b” and “c” as “Moderate,” and response “d” as “Right.”

In our 2007 interviews, Birmingham’s Black elite did not readily connect the movement for immigrant rights with the state’s ugly racial past. When we asked: “Some people have compared the struggles of today’s non-citizen, undocumented immigrants to the historic Black struggle against second-class citizenship. Is this an apt comparison?” the reply of African American Professor George Munchus III was typical of most respondents: “Black people were brought here primarily as slaves to work…[while] most Hispanics, I submit, are coming here seeking opportunities to improve their quality of life” (Munchus Reference Munchus2007). In 2013, however, Prof. Munchus responded to our follow-up question on this topic as follows: “I see the link [between immigrant rights and civil rights] and am proud the Birmingham City Council did [too]” (Munchus Reference Munchus2013). He declared that he wanted H.B. 56 rescinded “because the law is racist on its face” (Munchus Reference Munchus2013).

In a similar pattern, Councilman Steven Hoyt had responded to our question in 2007 by saying: “There’s no comparison. Nobody’s ever rolled up, you know, sat at a traffic light and rolled up their windows and locked their doors because you were Latino, okay. So there’s no comparison. But they do it every day because you’re Black. And even Latinos are able to get loans quicker than Blacks now, and we [Blacks] have…built this country” (Hoyt Reference Hoyt2007). In 2013, Councilman Hoyt was more attuned to discrimination against immigrants. He also made it clear that H.B. 56 had triggered his perception of the possible parallels between Latino and Black experience. He proposed that the bill was “designed to oppress a particular population. I think we [Blacks] can’t really embrace H.B. 56 [given that] it was just fifty years ago that we were subjected to the same kinds of stuff that this law proposes” (Hoyt Reference Hoyt2013). Councilman Hoyt also reported having attended two local immigrant rights rallies, at Linn Park and Kelly Ingram Park, since 2007.

In another of our 2007 interviews, Raymond Goolsby had told us that immigrant rights and civil rights were “totally different struggles” (Goolsby Reference Goolsby2007). In 2013, he saw a “loose connection” (Goolsby Reference Goolsby2013) particularly in terms of law enforcement. In a more marked shift, in 2007 James Ephraim had said that comparing the struggles of Blacks and immigrants was like “comparing apples and oranges” because African Americans had been brought to America against their will (Ephraim Reference Ephraim2007); in 2013, however, Mr. Ephraim thought H.B. 56 should be repealed because “we need to support people and not put hardships on people already coming out of hardships” (Ephraim Reference Ephraim2013). Akilah Dulin, who in 2007 had said the comparison between immigrant rights and civil rights was “not even close” (Dulin Reference Dulin2007), told us in 2013 that she wanted H.B. 56 abolished because the law is “really discriminatory” and it is wrong to “treat people poorly and make it so harsh where they can’t eat or feed themselves or their families” (Dulin Reference Dulin2013). All told, in our 2013 interviews with ten of Birmingham’s Black leaders, every single respondent strongly supported repealing H.B. 56.

Tables 1A-C indicate the 2013 responses of our interviewees to the three questions we find most pertinent for this analysis.

Table 1A. Categorized Responses of Leaders at Follow Up

Table 1B. Categorized Responses of Leaders at Follow Up

Table 1C. Categorized Responses of Leaders at Follow Up

As a group, the positions of our interviewees did not change between 2007 and 2013 on the first question, “What do you think about policies that extend eligibility for government social services to undocumented immigrants? Do you support such measures?” Both times, four of the interviewees did not support such measures, three took in-between positions, and three supported the measures. Within the group, however, one of the interviewees moved from Right to Moderate while another moved from Moderate to Right, balancing the move of the first. In addition, the “politician” moved from Left to Moderate, but the most important change came from Steven Hoyt, a City Councilman, who moved all the way from Right (no support) to Left (full support).

Those who did not support social services for immigrants in both rounds seemed to be hesitant to allocate scarce public dollars to immigrants. Many preferred to devote such resources to needy citizens as opposed to those whom they saw as voluntarily risking success or failure by coming to the United States. In 2007, Kenyatta Knight, an attorney, told us that extending social services to undocumented immigrants would increase the probability of “higher taxes…[which will] therefore create more demands for public services” (Knight Reference Knight2007). Others agreed, assuming that public services for undocumented immigrants would ultimately translate into higher taxes on citizens and subsequently create even more economic burden.

We saw greater changes over time with regard to a pathway to citizenship for immigrants, the subject of our second question (Table 1B). On this question none of the respondents in the follow-up interviews of 2013 shifted Right. The attorney and one of the pastors stayed in favor of deporting the immigrants; the politician, banker, one professor, and the other pastor stayed in favor of a path to citizenship; and the second professor stayed Moderate. However, the businessman and the human resource director both moved from Moderate to all-out support for citizenship, and City Councilman Hoyt once again moved all the way from opposition to full support.

Most telling for our story were the responses to the question that asked whether the struggles of today’s immigrants could be compared to the Black struggles in the Civil Rights Movement (Table 1C). Many of our ten respondents were involved in the Civil Rights Movement themselves as participants or eyewitnesses. In 2007, a majority of them believed that it was an inappropriate comparison, with only one person considering it apt. In 2013, by contrast, only four considered the comparison inappropriate. One of these, the attorney, argued that it is not “respectful of the Black American struggle to be often lumped in with other struggles such as immigration” (Knight Reference Knight2013). She added: “The Black struggle is so undeniably mentally suppressive, we have been brainwashed into this inferiority mentality that we accept and expect to be last. We were forced to come to America against our will; we had no choice. Every law created was rooted in the hatred of Blacks by the White American community, and [laws] are today continually created to target Black America. All other struggles, such as H.B. 56, are a result of choices” (Knight Reference Knight2013). Four respondents in 2013, however, considered the comparison a good one. Most importantly, City Councilman Hoyt, as on the previous two questions, moved all the way from opposition to support.

Overall, our data reveal a shift among these members of Birmingham’s Black elite in favor of immigrants, particularly on the question of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and in seeing a comparison with the Civil Rights struggle.

Event data from 2006 to 2013, tabulated from newspaper reports, support these findings, indicating heightened Black attention to the plight of immigrants in Alabama over the course of this period (Table 2). Beginning with a 2011 march in Montgomery, Black leaders not only attended but also participated at the forefront of public action supporting immigrants. That year saw a pro-immigrant rally in Birmingham co-sponsored by the NAACP as well as a rally in the predominantly Black Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church. On November 21, 2011, thousands of Alabamans from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds packed into the historic and predominantly Black Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to sing “We Shall Overcome” and launch the “Alabama United: One Family, One Alabama” campaign against H.B. 56. The venue and the rhetoric signaled an embrace of the immigrant rights cause by powerful Black clergy in Birmingham.

Table 2. Alabama Immigration Demonstrations, April 2006 - May 2013*

* Thanks to Jackie Altamarino for compiling this table from newspaper sources.

Also in 2011, the predominantly Black Southern Baptist Convention approved a resolution to denounce bigotry and harassment toward any and all groups and called for a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants (Reeves Reference Reeves2011). On December 17, the NAACP and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, among others, led a march of 2,500 people on the governor’s mansion protesting H.B. 56. Perhaps most tellingly, with regard to the use of Black symbols and history in the fight for immigrant rights, demonstrators in March 2012 and again in March 2013 deliberately marched along the same streets where Civil Rights activists had clashed with police in the 1960s, rallying at a park under a statue of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Activists at these and other demonstrations regularly invoked Civil Rights Movement tactics, strategies, and songs.