Vol. 72/No. 8      February 25, 2008

The flight from Oklahoma began in October, a month before a new law known as House Bill 1804 took effect. The law makes it a crime to transport, harbor, hide, rent housing to, or employ undocumented immigrants. It also gives state police the powers of immigration cops, and requires local and state cops and county jails to verify people’s legal status. Tulsa’s Hispanic Chamber of Commerce estimates that 15,000-25,000 immigrants have left the area.

Oscar Jeovani Fernández, 36, is one of them. “I was working there in September, but they passed a law that allows the local police to act like immigration agents,” he told the Houston Chronicle. “I came here 25 days after they passed the law—I wasn’t going to let them experiment on me.” Fernández, who made about $600 a week working construction in Tulsa, said he’s lucky if he can get $150 a week as a day laborer in Houston.

On January 1, Tennessee joined Arizona in adopting legislation that levies significant sanctions against employers who “knowingly” hire undocumented workers. In both states employers caught doing so more than once can lose their business licenses.

Leticia Alvarez, an organizer for the Tennessee Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said in an interview that cops in nearby Nashville and other areas of the state are also directly linked to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through a federal program known as 287(g). The program “allows local cops to arrest and investigate people for violation of immigration laws,” she explained. “Since this program was put into effect in Nashville last year, 2,800 have been deported.”

“Since then,” said Eliu Maldonado, pastor of Ebenezer Christian Church of Springfield, Tennessee, “the local police, whenever they pick anyone up, they arrest them and fingerprint them, and send their names off to the ICE, no matter the offense. Once you get stopped, you get arrested, your car is towed, and you get put in jail.

“One of our church members was stopped just because he looked Hispanic,” said Maldonado. “Now he is in jail in Louisiana looking at deportation. They are really abusing their powers.” An estimated 1,000 immigrants have left Springfield, a town of 17,000, after a series of ICE raids in December.

The exodus has also caused concern among bosses who depend on undocumented immigrants for their profits.

“Thirty percent of our Hispanic labor force left Tulsa,” Greg Simmons, owner of Simmons Homes, Tulsa’s largest home builder, told the Chronicle. “It was a huge hit, and it was almost overnight.”

In Tennessee, business owners and managers attended a January 20 public information session in Nashville on the new law.

“It’s trade show time in our industry and I would say this is the topic of conversation,” Andy Hall told the Tennessean. He is a greenhouse manager at a nursery. “Folks are worried,” he said.
 
 
Related articles:
Socialist candidate: ‘Immigration laws benefit the bosses’
Connecticut immigration law draws protest  
 
 
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