Gordon Hanson Quoted On State-by-State Immigration Enforcement
For Florida, Alabama's Immigration Enforcement Has Unintended Consequences
11/09/2011
Ralph De La Cruz,
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting
After experiencing domestic out-migration for the first time in its history, Florida may finally be attracting folks from other states to move here.
More snowbirds from New York? Disenchanted Beltway residents?
Nope.
Laborers from Alabama.
For more than a month, news outlets have been reporting an influx of undocumented workers moving to Florida from Alabama as a result of a newly passed state law that is the harshest immigration enforcement measure in the country. Entire communities packed up overnight and moved on.
The law requires police officers to check the immigration status of anyone they pull over, detain or arrest if they suspect that person might be here without papers. If they can’t produce papers, they’re taken in.
It also makes educators accumulate immigration information on students, which has had a chilling effect on Hispanic schoolchildren of Alabama — even if they are American-born and perfectly entitled to public education. That’s because many families are “mixed,” which means the children were born in the United States (and are citizens) while their parents are undocumented and not here legally. The first schoolday after the law went into effect, 2,000 Hispanic children were missing from their classes.
Click here to read the full article.
Related Links
Gordon Hanson is director of the Center on Emerging and Pacific Economies and professor of economics at UC San Diego, where he holds faculty positions in the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the Department of Economics. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a co-editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics. Prior to joining UCSD in 2001, he was on the economics faculty at the University of Michigan (1998-2001) and at the University of Texas (1992-1998).
Related Stories
