NWSA Confronts Anti-Immigration Law in Georgia

Abstract

news and views NWS A Confronts Anti-Immigration Law in Georgia Karla Mantilla Working for social justice is rarely a straightforward, unproblematic pro cess. It often entails finding a way to reconcile passionately held political convictions with a multitude of outside intervening practicalities. The National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) has had to struggle with just such a challenge recently when the state in which the organization planned to hold its annual conference, Georgia, passed a law targeting immigrants. With their annual conference scheduled for November 10-13 in Atlanta, NWSA had to decide whether to participate in a boycott of the state—the kind of tough choice that several academic organizations have recently had to face when locations for their annual meetings have also become sites of controversy. In 2010, for example, the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association were faced with similar decisions about whether to participate in a boycott of the state of California, where they had previously scheduled their annual meetings, due to the state's passage of anti-gay Proposition 8, which barred gay marriage in California. Both organizations made the decision to go forward with their meetings as previously planned but added programming to their conferences to affirm their opposition to the anti-gay legislation. The newly passed Georgia law mimics anti-immigrant legislation recently passed in Arizona. The Arizona law, the first such far-reaching measure in the country, requires immigrants to carry immigrant registra tion documents at all times and obligates the police to ascertain immigra tion status during detentions or arrests when there is a "reasonable suspicion" that the person may be an undocumented immigrant, all of which can lead to racial profiling and unfair targeting of foreign-born people. 468 News and Views 469 The Georgia bill, HB 87, was signed into law by the Georgia state gover nor on May 13. It authorizes law enforcement officers to check immigra tion status in the course of various routine activities, including traffic stops; establishes criminal penalties for people who encourage an undocumented person to come into the state or who transport or harbor undocumented people once they arrive in the state; and requires employers to use a flawed database to evaluate employee's immigration status. The mandated use of the database, E-Verify, because its data have a low level of accuracy, will likely result in many foreign-born legal workers wrongfully being deprived of their right to work. The portion of the law prohibiting the transport of undocumented people has no exemption for ambulance drivers or public transportation employees; and the prohibition against harboring undocu mented people has no exemption for universities, where undocumented students might reside, or for nonemergency medical care units. In addition to the racial profiling that this law will bring about, law enforcement offi cials have raised concerns that it undermines public trust in the communi ties in which they work, severely hampering their ability to provide adequate protection to those communities. Activist groups in Georgia immediately called for an international travel, tourism, and convention boycott of the state, requesting that organ izations join in the boycott both as a demonstration of solidarity and as an attempt to pressure the state through economic means to rescind the law. The activist group Somos Georgia/We Are Georgia, committed to immi grant, racial, and economic justice (http://www.wearegeorgia.org), organ ized the boycott efforts. They have partnered with Southerners on New Ground (SONG, http://www.southernersonnewground.org), founded to advance lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer multi-racial, multi issued education and organizing in order to "combat the Right's strategies of fragmentation and division"; and the National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON, http://ndlon.org), whose mission is to improve the lives of day laborers in the United States and to mobilize day laborers in order to protect and expand their civil, labor, and human rights. Before the anti-immigrant legislation was enacted, NWSA's president, Bonnie Thornton Dill, brought the issue to the attention of NWSA's exec utive committee at a March 2011 meeting. The committee members 470 News and Views agreed that if the legislation passed, NWSA would have to...