Some supporters of Alabama’s controversial immigration law, HB 56, are having second thoughts. Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, speaking in front of over 600 businessmen and lawmakers at the Birmingham Business Alliance (BBA) in mid-November, admitted the law needed to be simplified and said he is already collecting suggestions for amendments from businesses and law enforcement groups. But the governor still held some ground, saying “we’re going to keep the essence of this bill that has already been upheld in federal court.” In early December, Governor Bentley got what he asked for: Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange sent a memo to Alabama lawmakers suggesting a series of changes to the law to address some of the “unintended consequences.”

A series of developments in Alabama have helped convince many of the state’s residents, including some lawmakers that strongly supported the bill at passage, that HB 56’s provisions may be too harsh and difficult to enforce. Perhaps the most salient worry is that the law’s effect on the immigrant labor force might hurt Alabama’s business environment, which like many other states, is still reeling from the recession.

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According to The “New American” Fortune 500 report published by the Partnership for a New American Economy, over 40 percent of the 2010 Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Companies like Colgate-Palmolive, Pfizer, Google, Sara Lee and Procter & Gamble—all household American brands—together employ more than 10 million people worldwide.

Creating a friendly environment for entrepreneurs, in this case immigrant entrepreneurs, is a way to promote innovation, growth, and new businesses. Last September, Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg, long-time supporter of comprehensive immigration reform, stressed the economic importance of having a welcoming visa system that attracts and retains entrepreneurs. Making reference to the other English-speaking countries, Mayor Bloomberg said competing nations “have visa programs designed to attract entrepreneurs who come to create jobs. All these countries know that smart visa policies alone can’t guarantee that their economies will successfully weather every economic storm. But they do know that there’s no chance they’ll stay competitive unless they can attract top talent from around the world, and that certainly goes for the United States.”

Unfortunately, entrepreneurs coming to the U.S. to take advantage of the business infrastructure face several challenges in getting an appropriate visa to stay in the country, invest, and start a company. The most common visas are treaty investor (E-2), intracompany transferee (L1-A), temporary professional worker (H1-B) and immigrant investor (EB-5) or “one million dollar visa.” The last requires the investor to invest $1 million in the U.S. in order to get a green card. In many cases, the visa application processes can take several years and end up being quite expensive (around $20,000), all of which discourages innovators and redirect them to other countries.

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Last week the Applied Research Center (ARC) published Shattered Families: The Perilous Intersection of Immigration Enforcement and the Child Welfare System, which shows that there are 5,100 children currently living in foster care because their parents have been detained or deported. High levels of deportation (400,000 persons have been deported in the U.S. in 2011 alone) combined with weak child welfare policies are contributing to the separation thousands of families, in some cases permanently. At least “15,000 more children will face these threats to reunification in the next five years”, according to the ARC report.

Information obtained by ARC through the Freedom of Information Act showed that during the first six months of 2011, 46,000 parents of U.S.-citizen children were removed from the country—almost half the number of deported parents of U.S.-citizen children that were deported over a 10 year period, between 1997 and 2007. Today, 14.6 million people in the U.S. live in a mixed-status home where at least one member of the family is undocumented and is at risk of being detained and deported.
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Comments made by Cecilia Muñoz, the White House director of intergovernmental affairs, could create problems for President Obama’s 2012 re-election bid—specifically his efforts to support among the Hispanic community that helped elect him in 2008. Muñoz was appointed by President Obama in 2009 to “help put government back in the hands of the people it serves.” But despite serving as former senior vice-president of the National Council of La Raza (1988-2009), immigrant activist groups are calling her resignation because she defended the Secure Communities (S-COMM) program during an appearance on the PBD documentary “Lost in Detention” last week.
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