A state’s right to make race through local policy: Hispanics, immigrants and the shifting colour line

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes legislative debate over Alabama’s Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act (HB56). Taxpayers and citizens are colorblind legal categories, but the debate associated “Hispanics” with a history of racism in and beyond the state. I use three methods to analyze the debate. Content analysis identify explicit references to “Hispanics”. Second, I analyze legislators’ values, attitudes and beliefs. Finally, I use discourse analysis to understand how Black and white legislators raised different concerns as they remembered their own experiences and the state’s racial history. These analyses indicate that legislators crafted a relational conception of responsibility that distinguished who should be in Alabama and, by extension, who had a right to citizenship and national inclusion. These debates trace to long-standing struggles between states and the federal government to determine citizenship. I conclude HB 56 reproduces legal definitions of difference that promote racial exclusion.