The Anniston Star (Opinion by Wayne Flynt): In the last days of September when I most enjoy Chandler Mountain tomatoes, I stopped at two markets where I usually buy them, and they had only tomatoes from Tennessee and North Carolina. The pickup trucks filled with Sand Mountain tomatoes parked along U.S. 280 last year were gone.
I hate plastic-tasting tomatoes from Florida, California and Mexico, so I go on a tomato fast from the first frost on Chandler and Sand mountains in October until the first Baldwin County tomatoes appear in late June. Upon asking farmer friends what happened, they identified the culprit as the Alabama Legislature’s new immigration bill.
I was not surprised. Turning a problem over to the Legislature to solve is like placing a 2-year-old in charge of a preschool. Here is a list of problems our Legislature did not solve: a racist constitution conceived in the violence and political corruption of Reconstruction; reapportionment of the Legislature every 10 years as required in that document; taxes that take a higher percentage of income from the poor than from the rich; perpetually under-funded public schools; an inhumane mental-health system; extending the right to vote to women and African-Americans; and keeping Jefferson County financially solvent.
One Alabama-born federal judge described such inaction as the “punt Bama syndrome,” where legislators unwilling to solve the state’s problems pass them off to federal courts.
Of course, anyone with walking-around sense knows that American immigration policy is broken. Historically, we have tolerated some level of illegal immigration from Ireland, Italy, China or elsewhere. If such immigrants worked hard at menial jobs, committed no crimes and conducted themselves respectably, Congress periodically granted them amnesty. The result was a steady infusion of hard-working, risk-taking newcomers.
After 9/11 all that changed, and something needs to be done. But expecting Alabama’s Legislature to fix a national problem is like going fishing in your bathtub. Don’t cook the hushpuppies first. Notable moments when our Legislature was a national trend-setter include 1955, when we led the “massive resistance” movement against desegregation, and December 1860, when we were in the vanguard of secession.
Why is our state history relevant to immigration? How long do you think it will take national and international media to connect the dots that run from the co-sponsor of the immigration law to his comments about African-American “aborigines” who run Greene County?
In addition to forcing 2 percent of our bottom-level labor force to move to Tennessee and North Carolina to harvest tomatoes that will bankrupt some small Alabama farmers, here are some other reasons to repeal the new law.
Alabama Republicans who run the Legislature claim to venerate the Founding Fathers. Well, those wise men, reacting to the anarchy after the American Revolution, wrote a Constitution that denied states’ authority over immigration policy for exactly the reasons revealed in the Chandler Mountain tomato situation: 50 different state immigration laws will create chaos.
Republicans also spent decades rightly condemning Democratic legislators for passing “unfunded mandates” (laws requiring some agency to pay for services but appropriating no money). In this case, the Legislature, which funds less than half of the recommended state troopers, requires understaffed police agencies to enforce the new law without more employees or money to train existing ones. Under-funded, overworked school staffs had budgets cut and are now required to document citizenship. Alabama license holders must stand in long lines at under-funded courthouses to prove that they are American citizens. Industrial recruiters must compete with Tennessee and North Carolina for new international industries in an atmosphere that reminds foreign companies of what happened here in the 1950s and 1960s.
Alabama Republicans also claim to be pro-business. Tell that to Chandler Mountain tomato farmers, Alabama poultry plants, construction and roofing businesses, hotel, lawn and garden firms and a host of other businesses that rely, whether rightly or wrongly, on low-wage illegal immigrants. Is Alabama better off if we export those businesses to other states with less draconian immigration laws or import that work from out-of-state, driving up prices?
As a former Republican-turned-Democrat-now-Independent, I don’t think this debate is about politics; it is also about fear, mean-spiritedness and dislike for people of different colors, languages and origins. It is also about people who like Chandler Mountain tomato sandwiches on the first clear, cold day of October.
Wayne Flynt is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of history at Auburn University.
Read more: Anniston Star - Meddling laws and tomatoes How Legislature erred yet again.
I hate plastic-tasting tomatoes from Florida, California and Mexico, so I go on a tomato fast from the first frost on Chandler and Sand mountains in October until the first Baldwin County tomatoes appear in late June. Upon asking farmer friends what happened, they identified the culprit as the Alabama Legislature’s new immigration bill.
I was not surprised. Turning a problem over to the Legislature to solve is like placing a 2-year-old in charge of a preschool. Here is a list of problems our Legislature did not solve: a racist constitution conceived in the violence and political corruption of Reconstruction; reapportionment of the Legislature every 10 years as required in that document; taxes that take a higher percentage of income from the poor than from the rich; perpetually under-funded public schools; an inhumane mental-health system; extending the right to vote to women and African-Americans; and keeping Jefferson County financially solvent.
One Alabama-born federal judge described such inaction as the “punt Bama syndrome,” where legislators unwilling to solve the state’s problems pass them off to federal courts.
Of course, anyone with walking-around sense knows that American immigration policy is broken. Historically, we have tolerated some level of illegal immigration from Ireland, Italy, China or elsewhere. If such immigrants worked hard at menial jobs, committed no crimes and conducted themselves respectably, Congress periodically granted them amnesty. The result was a steady infusion of hard-working, risk-taking newcomers.
After 9/11 all that changed, and something needs to be done. But expecting Alabama’s Legislature to fix a national problem is like going fishing in your bathtub. Don’t cook the hushpuppies first. Notable moments when our Legislature was a national trend-setter include 1955, when we led the “massive resistance” movement against desegregation, and December 1860, when we were in the vanguard of secession.
Why is our state history relevant to immigration? How long do you think it will take national and international media to connect the dots that run from the co-sponsor of the immigration law to his comments about African-American “aborigines” who run Greene County?
In addition to forcing 2 percent of our bottom-level labor force to move to Tennessee and North Carolina to harvest tomatoes that will bankrupt some small Alabama farmers, here are some other reasons to repeal the new law.
Alabama Republicans who run the Legislature claim to venerate the Founding Fathers. Well, those wise men, reacting to the anarchy after the American Revolution, wrote a Constitution that denied states’ authority over immigration policy for exactly the reasons revealed in the Chandler Mountain tomato situation: 50 different state immigration laws will create chaos.
Republicans also spent decades rightly condemning Democratic legislators for passing “unfunded mandates” (laws requiring some agency to pay for services but appropriating no money). In this case, the Legislature, which funds less than half of the recommended state troopers, requires understaffed police agencies to enforce the new law without more employees or money to train existing ones. Under-funded, overworked school staffs had budgets cut and are now required to document citizenship. Alabama license holders must stand in long lines at under-funded courthouses to prove that they are American citizens. Industrial recruiters must compete with Tennessee and North Carolina for new international industries in an atmosphere that reminds foreign companies of what happened here in the 1950s and 1960s.
Alabama Republicans also claim to be pro-business. Tell that to Chandler Mountain tomato farmers, Alabama poultry plants, construction and roofing businesses, hotel, lawn and garden firms and a host of other businesses that rely, whether rightly or wrongly, on low-wage illegal immigrants. Is Alabama better off if we export those businesses to other states with less draconian immigration laws or import that work from out-of-state, driving up prices?
As a former Republican-turned-Democrat-now-Independent, I don’t think this debate is about politics; it is also about fear, mean-spiritedness and dislike for people of different colors, languages and origins. It is also about people who like Chandler Mountain tomato sandwiches on the first clear, cold day of October.
Wayne Flynt is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of history at Auburn University.
Read more: Anniston Star - Meddling laws and tomatoes How Legislature erred yet again.
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