DOING BUSINESS IN ALABAMA CAN BE A REAL PAIN

…NASA Marshall Space Center, Huntsville, Alabama

Will a revised Alabama immigration law continue to have "unintended consequences”?

I remember very well, when as a business executive I had to visit customers located in Huntsville, Alabama.  

Now, getting to Huntsville is not one of the easiest places to get to from the West Coast.  Most likely, you would first have to fly to Dallas or to Atlanta, then you would have to wait a couple of hours to catch a small “Fred’s, Crash & Burn Airlines” turbo-prop plane to Huntsville.  Once arriving there, the nicest place to stay back then was what today would be generously called a Holiday Inn Express.

So, why was there any real business worth calling on in Huntsville? 

 

Well, some decades ago the US government decided to spread around the business of the US Space Program and a number of major contracts were awarded to some local Huntsville businesses in support of NASA and the then new Space Shuttle Program.

Therefore, major electronic and avionic suppliers had to make Huntsville a “go-to” location for their marketing and sales personnel for some very lucrative state-of-the-art NASA projects.

Now, for those of us that made those trips, it was an excellent way of introducing those of us coming from more metropolitan Western venues to the southern hospitality of the real Deep South.

However, if you visited Alabama in the middle of the Summer, you were also introduced to heat and humidity more like a Turkish Steam Bath, and to mosquitos that appeared to be the size of small hummingbirds.

But yes, there were great opportunities for doing highly profitable business in this less than hospitable climate.

Now, where I’m going with this is that a couple of months ago, another business visitor made his first trip to Alabama.  But he also ran into an issue that someone new to the area today could find as a very big problem.

In this case, it was a European businessman that was paying a visit to his company’s manufacturing plant near Tuscaloosa, Alabama.  But this time the foreign visitor was pulled over by an Alabama Highway Patrol Officer for driving a rental car without a license plate.

When the Alabama Patrolman asked the driver for his driver’s license, the only ID the driver had to offer was his rental agreement and his German Driver’s License.

Now, in most states, the officer would probably have taken the man’s info and the rental car info and he might also have issued the man a citation.  But that’s not what they do in Alabama. 

 

Due to a strict new state law that requires the police to look into the immigration status of people detained for routine traffic violations, they do things differently in Alabama.  Therefore, because the man couldn’t prove, right there and then, that he had the right to be in the US, he was arrested, handcuffed and hauled off to the local police station.

The problem with this particular situation is that the arrested man turned out to be a visiting executive from the Mercedes-Benz corporate headquarters in Germany.  As opposed to being a possible illegal immigrant who busses dishes at a local diner, or picks oranges at a local grove, it was a representative of a company that has a billion dollar manufacturing facility near Tuscaloosa. 

Needless to say, the Alabama State Patrol and the Alabama Republicans that passed the new strict immigration law had some serious egg on their face.

“I was really embarrassed and overwhelmed,” said state Senator Gerald Dial. “Mercedes has done more to change the image of Alabama than just about anything else. We don’t want to upset those people.”

In the week after the arrest, six Alabama Republicans came forward to say the state legislature should rewrite portions of HB56, the new immigration statute that caused the arrest.

In a state with very high levels of poverty and unemployment, due to this event and the new strict immigration law, other foreign firms have since said that they are reconsidering locating their factories in the state. 

 

In addition, due to that same law, the farmers are now finding it difficult to find the necessary workers to work on the local farms.  It is estimated that the law will not only increase the local food prices, but it could also allow tens of millions of dollars of crops to just rot in the fields.

That executive from Mercedes-Benz got busted, but that was not what the law was intended to do.  However, will they change the law to a new and improved version that doesn't have such "unintended consequences”?

I wouldn’t bet on that.  Alabama is a deep Red state, and getting a strict immigration law changed might be a difficult vote for a dedicated Southern Republican legislature.

Copyright G.Ater  2015