The Politics of Expulsion: A Short History of Alabama’s Anti-Immigrant Law, HB 56

Abstract

IN JUNE 2011, THE REPUBLICANCONTROLLED Alabama legislature passed a tough immigration law, known as House Bill 56 (or HB 56) that endorsed a policy of expulsion of undocumented immigrants from the state. One of several state antiimmigrant laws enacted around the same time, HB 56 targeted Latinos, hoping to make life so difficult for them that they would “selfdeport.” The U.S. Congress has persistently failed to pass some type of immigration reform to deal with the twentyfirstcentury surge of Mexican and Central American border crossers. Democrats insisted on a “path to citizenship” for undocumented workers, but Republicans wanted tighter border controls and a means of reducing the number of illegal immigrants, mostly Latinos, in the United States. The impasse in Congress opened the door for states to take action. Tea Party Republicanism surged during the 2010 midterm elections, putting Republican politicians in control of many southern state legislatures. Nativist fears of large numbers of ethnically different newcomers, especially over job competition and unwanted cultural change, sometimes referred to as “cultural dilution,” provided political cover for politicians who sought to control and regulate immigration within state borders, but also to push illegal immigrants out. Conservative Republicans, according to historianjournalist Mike Davis, had been promoting antiimmigrant policies since the 1990s. As Davis noted in his book, No One Is Illegal (2006), “the Far Right has sought to mobilize against immigrants (and a guestworker program) on the grounds that it ‘dilutes American culture’ and ‘burdens’ the social welfare system. This racist component is omnipresent in the media and interlocks neatly with the more acceptable economic alarmism.” The intensity of the political war over immigration only got worse as the first decade of the twentyfirst century ended. In the severity of its 2011 immigration law, Alabama became the “poster boy” for recent American nativism. The state’s harsh, aggressive, and discriminatory antiimmigrant policy also brought back memories from a halfcentury earlier, when statesponsored racial discrimination targeted African Americans.