Sen. Wes Kitchens, R-Arab, speaks on the floor of the Alabama Senate on May 8, 2024 at the Alabama Statehouse in Montgomery, Alabama. Kitchens is sponsoring an anti-immigrant bill that critics said uses language similar to language found in the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)
Pity the poor state lawmaker.
They work hard on a law to punish Alabamians showing kindness to the vulnerable — normal, everyday stuff in the Legislature — and inadvertently revive the Fugitive Slave Act.
Wednesdays, am I right?
Republican Sen. Wes Kitchens of Arab said he didn’t intend SB 53 to reflect the language of that infamous antebellum law, which authorized kidnapping and threatened fines and imprisonment to those who helped enslaved people flee to freedom.
Whatever Kitchens’ intent, though, it’s hard to miss the parallels, as Jerome Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center pointed out at a public hearing on that bill and other legislation targeting Alabama’s immigrant communities.
Section 7 of the Fugitive Slave Act made it a crime to “harbor or conceal such fugitive, so as to prevent the discovery and arrest of such person, after notice or knowledge of the fact that such person was a ‘fugitive from service or labor.’”
SB 53 as filed makes it a crime to conceal, harbor or shield “from detection an illegal alien if he or she knows or reasonably should have known that the other individual is an illegal alien.”
There are 175 years separating the proposed law from the notorious one, but they seem to share similar goals. Like making people flinch before extending their hands to a suffering human being. Making churches and nonprofits hesitate to the help someone — even a child — who lacks legal status.
Criminalizing compassion.
There are other terrible bills in the package. SB 77, sponsored by Sen. April Weaver, R-Alabaster, imposes a $7.50 fee on money sent overseas by immigrants and a 1.5% fee on transfers over $500.
Per al.com, that’s more than a timber land trust owned by Gov. Kay Ivey paid per acre in taxes ($1.25) in 2018. So under this bill, the state would charge a higher rate on money to support struggling families overseas than on timber barons who face fewer daily challenges to their existence in Alabama.
It’s not enough that we’re during the power of the state against immigrants. Now we have to reach overseas to punish their loved ones.
This is the same myopia that leaves Alabama’s feet riddled with bullet holes. Immigrants in Alabama are critical to the economy, especially agriculture and construction. They’re vital to the future of an aging state. Immigrants per capita commit fewer crimes than the population at large and pay taxes that support services they can’t access.
Supporters of these bills will insist that illegal immigration is a problem in Alabama. Alabama’s foreign-born population is 4% of total population. It’s 14.3% in the country as a whole. So no, it isn’t.
Ah, but you see, that doesn’t matter because every state is a border state, according to Sen. Katie Britt. I’m glad Alabama students are improving on national standardized tests. They might be able to teach our lawmakers geography.
None of this makes a dent in anti-immigrant rhetoric, of course. The worst people in the world will blast stories of immigrant crime on the worst “news” sites in the world and demand that a whole class of people get punished for the actions of a single individual. I don’t see a similar demand for white men like myself to be punished for the actions of Thomas Matthew Crooks.
And that gives the game away. It’s not about public safety. Or public services. It’s about control.
Our legislators want to keep a small, vulnerable and useful group of human beings in a state of terror. They want them clutching their children tight, their eyes fixed on the door in fear of a police raid.
They want to keep them fearful of speaking out when an employer abuses or harasses them. And they will use the full weight of the government to keep them afraid.
It’s not slavery. Slavery was a defining horror for Black Americans that continues to twist our state and nation in terrible ways.
But the ways we justify it are similar. We dehumanize men, women and children. We insist that criminality is their default setting.
The slaveholder James Henry Hammond, an actual criminal, made that argument in 1845. Enslaved people, he insisted, must stay enslaved. Treating them like human beings would create chaos.
“Our scattered dwellings would be plundered, perhaps fired and the inmates murdered,” he wrote. “How long do you suppose that we could bear these things? How long would it be before we should sleep with rifles at our bedsides, and never move without one in our hand?”
Legislators aren’t making arguments for slavery.
But they’re denying the humanity of our fellow Alabamians and invoking the same baseless fears to make people second-guess the evidence before their eyes and the feelings in their hearts.
They may not replicate the worst scenes of our nation’s past. But they’re invoking that oppressive spirit. And threatening those who see immigrants as people, not problems.
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.