And so the average HispanicLatino is watching the evening news.   Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law is front and center.  The upshot is that from this day forward, if you are HispanicLatino, you are automatically suspected to be a criminal — a little more than a runaway slave back in the time.  It does not matter if you are an attorney from Miami coming to close a real estate deal in Birmingham or an optometrist from San Antonio in for a conference or a student from Seattle changing planes at the airport or a hotel worker recently relocated from Chicago.  If your skin is brown and you’re in town, you are a target.  It is that simple.

How exactly should HispanicLatinos feel about this?  First, any HispanicLatino who supports these laws would be well-advised to stay away from Alabama.  Dreamlands have a way of collapsing.  Having been the only HispanicLatino in line at the driver’s license bureau a few years ago and having been the only one asked to prove his citizenship, my younger brother, who before that moment had never cared about politics and had hardly voted, is a changed person.  Imagine how the blood of a HispanicLatino veteran would curdle with rage at being confronted by anyone about his or her citizenship status.

As more local and state governments enact Alabama-style laws, they are increasing the probability that each HispanicLatino will face such a moment if they have not experienced it already.  It is a moment of truth that will shape America’s future.  Are we seriously thinking that, having taken its cue from Arizona, Alabama is the way forward to how the country deals with immigrants who are in the country illegally?  When it separates all HispanicLatinos from the whole and makes HispanicLatinos feel more separate within themselves?  Does watching HispanicLatino immigrants flee Alabama make the rest of HispanicLatinos in the country feel any better about themselves?

When it defended its citizens’ “right” to own slaves – and took up treasonous arms in rebellion to do so – Alabama invoked the Bible but had little inkling of how civil conflcit would harm the state.  Through the years as a result of a war, it lagged behind socially and economically so that today Alabama is barely more than Mississippi.  Today the descendants of those gone-with-the-wind ironically invoke the same Constitution they once trashed to target HispanicLatinos.  The result will be just as harmful, for in the years ahead, when America needs to be the most united and unified, states like Alabama will have caused disunion again.

In a day when the nation will try to survive global demograhic competition that is putting hundreds of millions of hands to work to outproudce the country, shouldn’t we be welcoming immigrants and educating all of them – and educating everyone else in the country –  instead of making suspects of an ever-growing HispanicLatino population?

And shouldn’t average HispanicLatinos unperturbed as Arizona and now Alabama swirl around them stop and consider how quickly their résumés already are being deleted from the computer screen in human resources departments – and how quicker still will be those of their children in the future?

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