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Beverly Hills, California, United States
Eli Kantor is a labor, employment and immigration law attorney. He has been practicing labor, employment and immigration law for more than 36 years. He has been featured in articles about labor, employment and immigration law in the L.A. Times, Business Week.com and Daily Variety. He is a regular columnist for the Daily Journal. Telephone (310)274-8216; eli@elikantorlaw.com. For more information, visit beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com and and beverlyhillsemploymentlaw.com

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Monday, October 31, 2011

Owning up to the Immigration Law

The Huntsville Times (Opinion): Governor Robert Bentley says he doesn't want to be remembered as the ugly face of the illegal immigration in America. Sorry, Guv, it's too late to unring that cracked bell. Before the dust settles you'll have about as much chance of disassociating yourself from Alabama and America's immigration fiasco as George Wallace did distancing his legacy from segregation.

When the full economic and social impact hits, your legacy is made. You will have earned immortality, if not immorality when you scratched your "X" on HB-56.

You didn't think of that when you stood with grinning mini-minions Beason and Hammon and basked in the power and the glory.

You say you "are confident you did the right thing." You chose your side. Stay there.

Here's betting that if you succeed in scraping this off the bottom of your shoe, Santa Claus will recuse his mercenary self for the season and allow Christ back in Christmas.

An estimated one-fourth of Alabama's immigrants have packed up and left for parts unknown - and many of them were here legally and were skilled business owners and employers. That should help us rebuild from the tornadoes, huh?

For some reason, even the legals feel unwelcome now. Go figure. Want a shocked look? Say "Hola" and hold the door for a Hispanic - like a well-raised southerner would for anyone.

If only Alabama's legislators had been smarter than 5th graders they could have gazed into a crystal football and foreseen that knee jerk anti-immigrant measures like HB-56 would have the strongest impact on the farmers. With untold numbers of farmers reporting losses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each, they are (surprise!) scrambling to find prison labor to replace the absent workers.

That will last until the first magnolia blossoms of Alabama womanhood gets raped, robbed and ravaged by a produce-picking inmate who makes a break for it.

It didn't take Nostradamus to predict that the poultry industry would decline swiftly. If you need proof, Hispanics in Alabama recently skipped work one Wednesday to protest the law; at least six poultry plants closed or dialed operations back.

A spokesman for Wayne Farms, a major poultry processor and employer in Alabama, watched the proverbial tumbleweeds blow through the parking lot. He's quoted as saying, "I don't think it's going to be just today," The plant normally employs 850 people.

Georgia Farmers could have told them the "send'm all back" approach will not work.

Georgia, which passed its law first, saw that the inevitable exodus of harvest-skilled, Hispanic migrant labor resulted in an estimated $140 million in losses during the spring and summer harvest, They, too, were so desperate that they resorted to using prison labor -with pitiful results because the workers were not as productive.

Even if they could pick the stuff as fast, why would they? Would you want to get out of that fresh air and sunshine and hurry back to the cage?

Are you ready for much higher grocery prices? When you open your checkbook at the checkouch, I mean checkout, get ready to write bigger numbers and remember the good ol' days when fruit and vegetables weren't luxuries. Remember Gov. Robert Bentley fondly as you write that check.

He will, after all, be the father of this mess countrywide.

It is easy to criticize without offering alternatives. Doubtless something needed to be done about the illegal immigrant situation - just not this.

Tune in next week for part 2, same bat place, same bat paper, when I propose one solution to the immigration circus that will benefit the economy, create jobs, win the war on drugs and greatly aid homeland security.

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