Randy Amos was police chief in Abervile, Alabama during years on lots of immigrants moved to town People in town sometimes did not know what to make of them. I remember I would get calls like from people say you got to do something about these Mexicans next door I said well what are you these Mexicans doing? And they said well they're devil worshipers I said what do you mean a devil washer was over here killing goats and of course they would hear the cry of a goat when the throat was being cut And which is a bad sound I agree, but they eat the goat that was not a Satanic ritual they were going through yeah And so we go back to the caller and explain to them look these people are not worshipping Satan I'm sorry that you had to hear the goat cry, but it's not violating any laws or ordinances that we have in existence here in Abervile, Alabama From WBZ Chicago is this American life. I'm our glass.
This is our second episode about alberville, Alabama You don't need to have heard last week showed understand this one but just in case you missed it Here's our premise very quickly the current Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants to limit immigration to our country His use of an instrumental in shipping administration policy and as we explained in last week show his perspective comes from what he saw as a senator from Alabama When undocumented immigrants moved into poultry plants and other jobs around the state it towns like alberville In just 20 years, Albertville went from being 98% white to more than a fourth Latino Basically they were 15,000 people and then another 6,000 arrived mostly for jobs in the towns chicken processing plants There's no official lesson to this but the people who know the Latino community best said it more than half of Latino adults are living here illegally Maybe a lot more than half the past sessions is mostly spoken about the effects of those immigrants on jobs and wages So that we talked about in last week's show last week we stayed inside the chicken plants But 6,000 new residents non-white residents in this little white town that also up into things outside the plants The point where Albertville became the statewide symbol in Alabama of everything that is wrong with immigration One point one of the big national heavy hitters on the immigration issue Chris Coback flew in into quite the city of disaster zone He wrote quote I have been all over the country fighting this fight And I've seen the damage done by illegal immigration in cities of every size but arberville is in a class by itself Described a town of mobile home ghettos in the city budget quote thoroughly drained by illegal immigration The story of what really happened is so different from that It's a mix of small local stuff in neighborhoods and in traffic traffic is actually a big deal And the local stuff sort of colliding with big national political forces that blew into town like a hurricane And reshaped how Albertville saw itself for a while but only for a while And now with the distance of a few years is actually possible to figure out the truth of what those 6,000 newcomers did to Albertville whether crime rights and schools and property values It's possible to say what having an entirely cost taxpayers I'm gonna get to all that today my co-worker Miki, me and I have been a group of over a hundred people for this Miki is co-hosting these two hours with me stay with us Equine then to vendors and Christmas lights So in the early years back in the 90s as people slowly realized that newcomers have arrived and there are lots of them The problem with the newcomers isn't the stuff that you usually hear about when people talk about immigration It's not jobs or wages or the cost of taxpayers. It's other stuff. Maybe to neighbor stuff cars and yards and dead goats The first immigrants to move to town were single Mexican men living together in trailer parks They weren't in the neighborhoods yet. So unless you worked at a poultry plant your first meaningful encounter with one of the newcomers Was probably in your car the number of hit and runs more than doubled in Albertville once immigrants moved to town And everyone we met seemed to have a story of someone in their family getting into Iraq or Fenderbender Again, here's Randy Amos the police chief in Albertville back in the 90s and Benny Womack his successor First of all, they didn't they didn't drive very well and not familiar with the laws over here Put an extra load on our officers answering those calls They would sort of stop sounding on a red light that you I didn't have driver's license You know, and they wouldn't have insurance and it was a almost a common practice if they had a crash in their vehicles Not disabled they would run you know, you can understand that because they were in here in the US illegally Didn't want to be in contact with law enforcement I talked to a bunch of the guys who arrived in the early waves of Mexican workers about this They said yeah, it's true most of them didn't know what they were doing on the road.
Here's Claudio Who's in our first episode? He's speaking through an interpreter Light was I didn't know what that line meant Drive around like without knowing absolutely anything totally like idiots Was Was that hard to figure out to learn all the rules They came from really rural places where some of the guys told me they got around a donkey or a horse didn't drive cars Of the dozens people we talked to one of people with most interesting and complicated perspectives on the conflict between the Latino newcomers and white people in town Is Jeannie Currington? She was a city council member small business owner kind of town booster who opened the town's recycling center and they worked there for free for years Just to get it off the ground and she was one of the locals who stood between the two communities as a go between Between one side to the other and when things eventually got pretty heated between the two sides She was one of the main voices in Albertville urging tolerance and understanding Though she started with some of the same feelings that other people had back in the 90s When Mexican workers were first arriving in Albertville she owned and ran the town's travel agency on Main Street Which in those pre-internet days people would come into book flights home to Mexico And she's very frank when she talks about whether it was like for her I mean I remember when they started coming in because it was so It kind of made you nervous that you should would come in multiples They didn't come alone. I guess they were afraid as that's right of us as we were afraid of them And there was just three women in the office.
So it was kind of you know Not nerving most of them kind of looked a little rough really it It it it it would be like if I was in a room with any minority I just not used to that's just not my everyday, you know, you just always are a little concerned and everything because she just unknown You know any new only thing you hear is a bad thing. So, you know kind of a nurture But she got used to being in a room with a minority and that feeling changed for her a lot of these early customers became regulars And when the first Latino businessman moved on to Main Street with a little grocery store on our same block They ended up checking in with each other almost every day. This is him Jose Contreras Well, you know when I just have a chance that you know, I can just go over there and just say hi and blah blah blah And you know makes some jokes Jose is always making jokes. It's his go-to move in lots of situations He's from the Dominican Republic in Florida and Georgia He came to Albertville in the 90s because he heard Mexicans were moving into town and he saw an opportunity Guys would line up in front of a store on payday because he cash their checks and because he spoke English and because he's a swarm friendly guy He became the de facto community leader for the Latino transplants the person they go to for advice and had an advocate everything from housing to where to play soccer Jose loves sports he dokes that he and Jeanne bonded because they're both outsiders because she's not born in an Albertville she born in Crossville just just like 10 minutes away Yeah, she said you're definitely like the first you know, Latino friend that she ever had yes I think so yeah, because she's a lady that she's in there And I don't know what is the word that I come up to my mom.
She's a high-class lady, you know She's more open-minded because she has trouble Was she the white person in town who you knew the best? Oh, yeah She's the only one that I can trust Jose explained to me a whole other way to look at people who are living here legally and what they go through Be bunking all sorts of stuff and so she went off reading and researching on her own and found herself suddenly this translator to the white people in town It somehow we just always come up, you know, it would come up about, you know People being here illegal and I would try to explain well our government makes it really hard for them to become legal So they have to go through so many steps and I try to explain, you know, even though they may be illegal somehow They've got a social security number and they're paying taxes. I felt like I was always defending them I just felt like I don't know. I guess I just had a sense in my gut that they're here to stay By 1996 and 97 with so many hundreds of people moving to town housing's tight the workers are moving from the trailer parks They're the rental houses in the neighborhoods around town.
That's an impact into single-family homes Some also start moving the families up from Mexico quick picture of the town Our reveal is nice. There's a quaint little historic section in Main Street Tennessee Rivers nearby. It's pretty green There's four-line highway with all the regular strip on stuff and fast food Most of the town is one-story houses with shutters neatly mowed lawns a little red flags for the high school bay on all over the place For the locals anything in the residential areas that deviated from that look was not so welcome And so after the traffic accidents this becomes the next big deal in town Gina gives a driving tour and explain why this graded on people so much if you look right here Just as an example things like this would be what people would see and be very upset with and just describe this this yard Well, you have a car parked right in the front yard You can see where they've destroyed the grass that's been on it because of all their traffic on it You see garbage cans sitting right in the front door trash scattered on the yard here. You see this next house You've got one two three four five six cars sitting in it years ago There'd be lots of people living in one house there'd be noise landlords wouldn't keep up the property people moved in and out They were there to make money not settling into the neighborhood and these were people from the countryside in Mexico We're a perfectly kept front lawn was not a thing Residents were scared it would drive down property values But for Albertville overall with thousands of people moving to town and a limited amount of housing property values went up faster than for the state as a whole We drove by one house painted a bright line green another bright blue there were houses in town with Christmas lights You're round.
She was like that's just not what people here are used to it's like that's not our culture to do that But when non-white people move into a white neighborhood nearly anywhere, you know You'll hear this like messy yards too many people want house too many cars They're noisy There's loud music like that kind of stuff and then often that's code words for you know people just don't want non-white people moving in Hey, that's true. Yes, some of it is prejudice. You're gonna look at the house and You think I've got a wife and a five-year-old kid That looks pretty trashy with all these houses there all these cars there that doesn't look safe for my family while I'm gonna work That's the prejudice part. That's the precious part It's really easy to show up in any small town anywhere and look at how people react to change and decide it all belongs in this bucket of prejudice But now people it's hard to parse out just how much was prejudice and how much was just people dealing with something new?
That was real also we're getting into these conversations with people would ask us to take it seriously Like they really were more hit and runs some streets really did look different than they used to One guy who worked at the local paper. He's finally lived in town for generations Put it this way for place which I didn't see much change There's just a lot to take in a very short period of time people look different And the houses differently and speak it from language and just seem to come out of nowhere People did not know how to deal with it Immigration economist George Brokos named a book after this great quote about immigration of course about immigrants arriving in the country Somebody said we wanted workers who got people instead meaning real people where the wrong ways of life They might not match up with how people live in the new country. It's never easy That's what happened in Abbucil. The next thing people notice totally plays into all sorts of ugly stereotypes People see Spanish names on the police blooder, which was printed in the local newspaper the Sand Mountain Reporter These were usually write-ups about driving without a license DUI's public intoxication small stuff and Then years into all of this people started seeing major crimes appear in the paper committed by Latino man around Abbruville A man was shot in dismember just outside of town five pounds of math for season a drug raid five brothels were busted in the trailer parks around town Chief of Police Benny Womack says brothels were something the town had never seen before the Hispanic community was getting all the attention About crime and that sort of thing It becomes a big issue for the citizens Emigrant crime of course is one of those big topics where liberals and conservatives square off with the arguments that are at this point very familiar to Many of us the liberals point out that most studies on immigrant crime show the people who immigrate to this country are less likely to commit crimes than native born Americans America first or said that even one crime committed by somebody who's not in the country legally there's a crime too many We shouldn't stand for it.
That's president's view and he set up a federal office that documents these crimes So putting the rhetoric aside how exactly did this play out in this one small town in Alabama? But in the period when the immigrants arrived 1990 to 2010 there was an explosion of all kinds of crime in town numbers kind of stunning a Restory drug possession quintupled property crime rates more than tripled. That's burglary death part that Bad and crimes almost quadruple in the last few years They fell them back to where they started but I talked to Don Siggers There's the commander of the Drug Enforcement Unit for the County Alberville zone Marshall County and was an Albert Police officer from 1997 to 2007 right in the middle of the period that we're talking about I asked him about all that extra crime I must have the drug arrest Latinos No, no absolutely not Most of the math possession cases or I would say 90 something percent Caucasian and what about the property crime cases in town? That's that would be Caucasian Expanding these kinds of property crime rates are just a side effect of drug use and drug crime people stealing either habits You know that happens not just an abel not just a Marshall County or Alabama, but all over the country the way please describe it There was an epidemic of meth use around out reveal started around the time the immigrants arrived There's all over the country back then and related to their arrival around out reveal there was mostly home cook math Then state law made it difficult to get the ingredients or home cook math and Mexican drug cartels stepped in using Alberville as a base To supply a swath of northern Alabama Siggers says today that every math arrest they make they can trace back to Mexican distributors But it says that if there were no Latino population in Alberville It very well might be just as much drug and property crime in town.
Does the math would just come in through Atlanta So whether he's paying population was here or not Atlanta steel the hub and we're located three hours from Atlanta the drugs will still come in here Cyberville is in this strange situation where most of the immigrant residents are not involved in drug trafficking or organized crime The police say they actually took them off about crimes and if the immigrants had never moved to town They might have drug trafficking a crime really might not have been very different in Alberville That is not the conclusion people are drawing from what they read the newspaper For the first decade and a half that Latino families were moving to Alberville Probably the best place to track how longtime residents were feeling about the changes was in the local paper the sand on reporter They had letters to the editor and a column called speak out where any I rate resident could call an answering machine and leave an anonymous message That would then get printed in the paper people complain pretty much anytime the city spent money on Latino residents And then an equal number of their neighbors would call the complainers bigots and tell them to go read their Bibles Which didn't stop anyone it's like every week every week people just get all these illegals out of here Take it in the welfare using them taking our jobs don't crime all these like every week every week every week This is Ricky Ibarra one of the first Latino graduates of Alberville High School part of the generation of kids who grew up speaking English And his parents moved to town to work in the poultry plants. He says he older the team of people. They don't read the newspaper But like the college student high school students Like we're more to what's going on, you know, yeah, so You would want to read it, you know, you would just just to see what what the atmosphere was It was pretty bad it sounds like but it was bad because you read it or at least to me I would read it and I mean I used to work, you know, companies, you know, just surrounded sometimes I was the only mixing there, you know So you should have me feeling like I wonder if they're thinking the same thing, you know Which I mean that was bad because I mean some of the people I used to work with you know, they're pretty and pretty good with me But you know we just mess up like the whole day because you would see that early in the morning and then it just had you thinking thoughts It brings us back to March 2006 President Bush tries to get Congress to create a path citizenship for undocumented immigrants There's a way for marches around the country and support of that. Good evening The issue of immigration stirs intense emotions and in recent weeks Americans have seen those emotions on display on the streets of major cities Crowds have rallied and supported those in our country illegally Breaking a bunch of other Latino residents who've been living in town for a while and spoke English started talking about whether they should organize a margin Alberts for immigrants.
They tried to enlist Jose Contreras the guy with the grocery store in Main Street who they were buddies live Here's Jose. I say are you crazy? You're gonna be all in jail? And he said why why is it because you have to ask for permission?
Are you sure that let me find out I can find out and I called Jeanne Jeanne of course his friend on the City Council who owned the travel agency at this point Albert was around 20% Latino The population has been growing for 15 years, but there's been no official outreach from the city There's no Latino resident on the City Council So this was the back channel way things would get done Jose would talk to Jeanne about things going on in the community Jeanne would take it to the people running the city and so he brought it to my attention and Then I went to the mayor and the City Council president at that time and They kind of just laughed and they didn't think it was you know nobody's gonna show up So needless to say everybody was a little bit shocked when there was about 5,000 people 5,000 marchers before through the streets of Albertville blocking off Elena traffic white people were shocked Latino people were shocked the organizers were shocked Oh, yeah, we were laughing. I was laughing. We were like, I don't know what we did Do you need to snap shots? You took the crowds a long calm procession all the people?
Yes, they all wore white shirts, but they all if you notice that they all were carried American flag Yeah, and talking about you know being But we love the USA. Yes, the organizers told people not to bring Mexican flags People picked up literal on the route Jose and his friend Louise reimburse the police department for their officers over time during the March again Here's Ricky. It was actually the biggest crowd in Alabama even bigger than Birmingham and I mean do you think the smarts do you get freaked out Some people in town just see in such a I mean, I think that's what it did You know really because they were more stunned think it did freak the people out of the community again Jeanne It was a shock. I mean it was like holy cow, you know, I've never seen this many people You know, they'd see them around town, but never and that mass of the number, you know, it was just kind of hard to For our town to kind of absorb So it's like a wake-up call.
Yeah, then you know, we're afraid they're gonna take over their town Why did you take these pictures? Well, I guess I feel like at that time it was a moment of history And as a historical moment, what does it represent? Change Coming up, why some of the people in the March came to regret it. That's a minute.
It's got a bubble radio when our program continues This American life from our class It's our second program about out of Alabama the town that went from nearly all white to more than a fourth Latino in two decades My coast today is Mickey meek. We arrived at act three of our program at three backlash So after the March now that the locals had realized just how many Latino families had moved into town a long period of backlash kicks off It's the first it's modest the city council passes a few new ordinances and starts enforcing a few old ones So I've been to quit up the way things look around town Oh, by the way, if we hold a march you now need to apply 10 days in advance They also try to get the federal government to deport people the police partner with ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement said at any time they have someone in jail They suspect is undocumented they call ICE and the first year 300 people are turned over into ICE custody and the city asked the feds to get out of the police officers the power to do immigration arrests Police Chief Benny Wilmack said most people in town didn't understand that his officers couldn't enforce federal immigration law See the citizens and probably still don't Know why a police officer or local police officer can't do something about that problem That's where I was getting black Why don't you do something in your cop? Sometimes even if you explain it to them, they don't understand If any wanted his cops to make immigration arrests they had to get special authorization and training under a federal program called 287g The city applied for it their congressman and their senator Jeff Sessions went to bat for them a handful of officers It's intriguing with ICE and any kept requesting 287g authorization and a detention facility to hold immigration by leaders But it all fell apart federal priorities changed and they never ended up getting the authorization They wanted while this was going on in town this interesting thing happened The anti-immigration forces on the national scene scored a huge victory against the president of the United States President Bush and a bipartisan group of senators They killed off Bush's proposed path to legal status in 2007 and then with the went-of-the-back So they headed out into a period of energized experimentation in Arizona, Georgia and Alabama They started raising the flag on the issue around the state conservative group called the Eagle Forum held public meetings in Mobile Montgomery Huntsville Tuscaloosa Birmingham state legislators sounded the alarm about how undocumented immigrants were trained on taxpayers and they drove down wages and snow jobs Joe Hubbard was a state representative from Montgomery the Democrat who noticed how his Republican colleagues seem to be strategizing from a new playbook He says before this your state legislature was as local a politician as you got You know, he was the guy that you talked to about schools He was the guy that you talked to about funding for that road project you need I think that from 2004 to 2006 and ultimately in 2010 you saw efforts by the Alabama Republican Party to nationalize local elections and To talk about what's going on in DC the congressional Democrats Nancy Pelosi on and on I think there was polling that showed immigration which heretofore has been a national issue could make for good state political father The person leading the charge in Alabama was a Republican state senator Scott Beeson as he stumped the state calling for action He got accused of trying to rile up voters over something that was a non-problem in Alabama Alabama's not Arizona or Texas. They just didn't have that many immigrants documented or undocumented It was just 3% of the population only a handful of states had fewer But Beeson had an answer at the ready a lot of people said let's don't deal with this issue because we don't have a big population We did so why would you deal with it?
But what I looked out and saw was the states that did not deal with it decades ago Eventually became paralyzed because the population had grown so big Businesses were addicted to the labor, so we were trying to nip it in the bud and when you were talking about this around the state Did you feel like it was popular? Do you feel like people were on your side? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
What was the polling? It was overwhelming Beeson's an environmental consultant turned tea party politician a chatty guy and his first big win was convincing the legislature to create a special Commission which he co-chaired the Alabama Patriotic Immigration Commission to hold hearings around the state on the issue Albertville inserts itself into this discussion more than any other city in the state of Alabama People were saying Albertville's a place you need to check out it just kind of bubble to the top Scott Beeson says and there's no doubt It's true that the person who pushed out for go to the top was a longtime Albertville resident named Teresa Ferguson No, Teresa. Well, my Republicans in the state no Teresa I mean in a lot of that is from her efforts of saying hey come look and see what is going on here How would you describe Teresa Ferguson? Oh, she's great lady I would say one of her gifts is the ability to reach out to elected officials and I think she really cares about her community and She's one of the nicest people I've ever met another whole cake I mean, there's plenty mower if it doesn't be interviews that we did in people's homes in Alabama This is the only one that started with an Italian cream layer cake Sir by her interviewee to be so Ferguson Teresa's in her 60s It runs a pearl jewelry business from her house whatever sons a big political strategist and Teresa is so connected in the world of Alabama politics I doing her interview had a personal request the state's current Attorney General drop by Great.
Thank you at a community event Teresa was on the stage with Donald Trump this year When he came to the state to endorse with her strange for Senate and she's known death sessions for years She first got to know him to get help with the family situation her daughter in law is Chinese He was in China about to have a baby having a hard time getting a visa and the process was just taking too long And she was introduced to sessions when he was visiting a local hospital and I told him I said but it's a joke I said I probably should just flower to make so and bring her in the back of the pickup truck That would be a lot easier. That's why everybody else does it, you know And what he said and he just come alive and had this funny look on his face. I think She ran into him at other events started telling him about all the problems in Alberville She felt were caused by undocumented immigrants and he was just so nice to list. I mean he's just such a nice man anyway just a precious person and He listened, you know cuz you have a couple of minutes to be in there you're a little and then after that I guess after you talk to him a couple of times there's my friend Teresa's beef with the undocumented immigrants in town was a mix of things including the belief that they were costing the town money It just couldn't afford you get liable to racist if you just want to even discuss it.
It's That you're here and it's against the law and we're paying for you to be here You're not paying your taxes. You're going to school free. We get into that later in the show We asked an economist to run the numbers of that for us Teresa talks about teacher friends of theirs her husband worked with the public schools before he retired We have to pick and choose what they buy at the grocery store And then they see Latino families in the cashier line with food stamps and I just say I know they're not fruits anymore But that's what everybody in hound calls them kids were born here can get them even if their parents are undocumented but last time I went through the line just as an example the family Did not speak English one child probably about ten they had several children spoke English very polite very nice They finished with their groceries cashier said your groceries were Like ninety three dollars something like that. That will be two dollars and sixty nine cents when you see that time and time and time again When you see something that like people in the grocery store like it's possible those kids are American citizens Well, they are because they have the wit card the parents probably are not so do you feel like it's unfair if the kids are citizens Nothing's ever fair.
That's not the deal, but you know, we can't take care of everybody So you have to look to take care of the people in your own country first In 2008 the group that was organizing meetings about immigration around the state the Eagle Forum Asteries to organize one in Alberville and she did the immigration debate took center stage in a town hall meeting in Marshall County tonight The uff-48's train dough joins us live in Alberville trying to see and get pretty heated emotion ran high the two-hour meeting tonight And many were eager to voice their opinions the meeting attracted more than 200 people on both sides of the immigration debate I just remember standing in the door greeting everybody was like coming in It was popping at the same set night Mostly people I didn't know Many people weren't complaining like always about the local stuff about messy yards and uninsured drivers Everybody agreed they were part of a bigger story This wasn't just Alberville's problem There's albamas and countries but the first time they got a glimpse that they could rise up and do something about it The 90-minute presentation explained how they could fight the problem at the local state and national levels And had a pressure the representatives So we reserved them to support a new anti-immigration bill that was going to be coming up in the state Capitol And in the lake of that meeting Theresa and a couple people start this group concerned citizens where they try to figure out what could be done next It's not a big group maybe 10 to 12 regulars But two of them ended up running for office and they defined the city's new political climate By the time the next election came around in Alberville in the summer of 2008 immigration was the main thing everyone was talking about Be able to be concerned citizens and the new statewide for over the issue Their senator Deaf Sessions came to City Hall and talked to an overflow audience of mostly older white folks Who fumed about the expense to taxpayers and 287g that program the police wanted that would let them enforce immigration laws Sessions promised to follow up and get their officers trained in the city council race that year There was a lot of talk about how the city was at a critical juncture Jeannie Currington the trial agent who found herself always explaining the Latino population to their white neighbors was an incumbent on the city council back then And she ran for mayor to try to redirect the conversation away from confrontation at the candidate forums She says people demanded action, you know I think everybody thought that you could do something about it that you could you know control it and you know We couldn't control that we can't we can build a wall around Alberville so you know But those are some of the things I mean that would just that they were naive enough to think that I mean that would be a direct question What do you know if you're elected mayor? What are you gonna do about all these? Hispanics or illegals in town? What do you mean to get rid of them?
Yeah, exactly and what would you say well? They're here in our community and I believe that they're here to stay we need to befriend them It's not gonna. It's not gonna be the all white Sweet little community we used to be then do you think that hurt you with voters? I think so The friend has a told her strategy was all wrong if she wanted to win here's how she needed to talk about immigrants kick him I was telling that you're gonna kick him out each by each wait you told Jeannie to just lie just say you can kick it all I said go ahead and say live because you know and she never say it she never said it she never said it And that's why she loves It wasn't right about what the voters wanted most people in town turned out not to be as worked up as that They did not pick a hard-liner.
It's just ready moderate mayor Randy Amos He's the police you've heard at the top of the show explaining the killing of goat did not violate city law Is usually an immigration weren't that different from genies? He got more than twice the votes of any other candidate But in a stunning and unexpected turnip events because of fluke the time when a direction they did not choose Right after the vote the city found out that someone in Randy's campaign had missed the deadline to file some campaign forms I couldn't certify him as the winner of mayor's race Instead Randy was put on the city council for mayor a point It's somebody who wanted council seat was a member of Teresa Ferguson's group concerned citizens without forceful and immediate action against undocumented immigrants Name Lindsay Lyons business owner runs the RVs in the big highway through town soon after he took office He talked about his plans to tackle the way the city looks schools uninsured drivers They did the crime the drugs the all the automobile accidents and so forth This is an interview we did with Birmingham news for the most part majority of the people here are Caring loving people but on the other hand a legal is illegal and we have no choice but to enforce what laws we have and Not just in the rules. We call grass to men the rules From the start he and Randy Amos lock warrants and pretty much never stopped fighting people pick sides And Lyons sets the council on a divisive crusade targeting the Latino population They've our city contractors from hiring undocumented immigrants. They make English the official language of our bill They ban taco trucks which leads to an uproar 200 people pack a town hall meeting Everything passes like the proposal to force Latino businesses to translate their signs into English Or their proposal that would find anyone who keeps their Christmas lights up past January 31st Or anyone was indoor furniture on their porch outdoors or broken vehicles on their lawn And then one of the hardliners on the council turned for help to the national anti-immigration heavyweight We quoted at the top of the show an innovator from the very cutting edge of the movement Alberts bill city officials are continuing their quest and curving illegal immigration So they've enlisted the help of a nationally recognized attorney Chris go back.
He is The man when it comes to illegal immigration issues councilman Chuck Ellis says today go back As an ally of President Trump's he's the person who explains down on Trump how the US actually could make Mexico pay for a wall He's the vice chair of the federal commission that the president set up to investigate voter fraud Back in the 2000s go back was traveling to cities around the country helping them draft anti-immigration ordinances that tested the limits of what the law would allow They targeted landlords who rented undocumented immigrants and employers who hired them I've been a great environment where they just could not get jobs or housing anymore Then they meet the rationalist and hey, wait, it's not worth it to be there anymore I'm gonna leave this is go back an Eagle Forum meeting in Alabama around this time You don't have to round people on the bus alone you give them the incentives to go home by rationing down the company that they will get a job I'd email I don't know how good is email dress seem like it was on a website or something This is Chuck Ellis the mayor's closest ally on the council also a member of Teresa Ferguson's group concerned citizens And I told him I was and he said I did read about out for a couple places I don't know how I could help me. I stood up every minute chair and we chatted and he said hey look I'll come out their proposal was to hire kobok to help them write a law that would find employers who knowingly hired undocumented immigrants This plan died when one of the moderates on the council and the Clinton called another city that used kobok Nellie Park, Missouri kobok helped them write ordinances that targeted employers and landlords the city passed the ordinances and immediately got sued by civil rights groups For being discriminatory and unconstitutional This mired them for years and expensive and fruitless litigation They had talked to their lawyer and I asked him what came of it. He said it cost millions The city millions and he I said would you recommend it? He said absolutely not he said nothing is gonna come of it and He said I would not recommend it the council voted against hiring kobok on a 3-2 vote But kobok found someone else to work with state Senator Scott Beeson the guy that in the statewide fight against undocumented immigrants The guy who created that commission to investigate the problem in 2010 he and kobok got their chance to do something major for the first time in over a hundred years Republican swept both Alabama houses and the governor's ship which suddenly made it possible to pass sweeping new legislation targeting immigrants kobok helped be syndrafted it was called HB 56 the Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act and out of the crackdown on illegal immigration in Alabama The state's new immigration law is considered one of the toughest in the country So we came here to Albertville, Alabama 2011 Fox News Alabama's new law HB 56 was groundbreaking the most extreme anti-immigration state law ever passed intended to make life in Alabama so unpleasant that people would self-deport to accomplish this it made a criminal act for citizens to have all kinds of transactions with people that they knew or should know or Undocumented write them a home or harbor them or transport them was illegal to give them a job most contracts with them were invalidated Some public utilities refused to provide gas electricity or water without proof of status Schools had to find out the immigration status of new students report that information to the state We could detain anybody that even suspected might be in the country illegally and to get the bill passed Scott Beeson says he definitely relied on Albertville Albertville did make a difference by being able to take some legislators there because some people lived in places that weren't impacted by legal immigration and they were buying into this story that oh it's really not a big deal and we really don't have a problem here So it was more to show that look there are some towns who are being impacted by legal immigration So they could really see it so it was a reality Theresa Ferguson organized towards the worst problem spots She called it the show and tell for any politician to get into town state senators three gubernatorial candidates the attorney general a member of Congress She had her talking points and index cards that she carried around her purse at all times She wrote me some of the spots, but this is the trailer park that was telling you here on the back Was a trailer used as a branful you went to places that have been prostitution and drug bust I think this right here.
Don't want to slow down very much But you see she provided her in state senator hint and Mitchum It once lived in Albertville out on the show and tell we saw this a drove him around to see rundown trailer parks and places They made a rest after half an hour. She says the car returned and when they opened the door senator Mitchum Looks like they had just beaten him with a stick, you know, he just was so sad. He said I am so sorry I did not know So after Albertville held gay HB 56 past once it went into effect when reporters looked for a place to see an action Albertville was the place they went to Mayor Lindsey Lyons he was on Fox CNN and TR and TV around the state He told the stand-out reporter quote people may not realize that Albertville had a large impact on the spill Some of the ideas in the bill originated here in Albertville. Here.
He has been interviewed on NPR There's less traffic there here in Albertville, so a noticeable difference already Do you like what this has done to your town? I think why I supported him why I'm just at a job prayer recently He's job in the past Lions made us claim to lots of reporters Tom Hall was headed HR Wayne farms in Albertville at the time and I have to admit that they shocked me Because they certainly not true it had no impact Frank Singleton wasn't is the spokesperson for Wayne farms. He says they lost 17 out of 850 workers There were not hundreds of local people who suddenly showed up and got jobs at Wayne farms as a result of any of those bills The real impact of HB 56 on Albertville was this some people moved away a lot of people stayed home for state off the roads One guy told us he gave people rides in the trunk of his car Businesses that cater to Latino customers saw a big drop in in just three days The school's lost about 120 Latino kids out of 1400 according to administrators This is the person in charge of outreach to Latino families for the school district to get gay Oh, that was a terrible week. I will see the parents coming crying and the teachers crying and we draw the children And we would just look at each other and hug and they were crying and I mean it was just a bad week Lots of longtime residents in number go it seemed like their town was constantly on television during this period Did any time anybody get a story about HB 56 to come to Albertville and talk about how terrible the town was Now before the law undocumented immigrants had ruined the city ceiling jobs bringing crime and drugs They brought her to one of the moderates on the city council.
It was all negative I mean every way we were being portrayed was negative. I think that was totally counterproductive It caused fear and distrust And you know, it's hard to build a community on that type of thing At four the numbers so all the time in Albertville people would bring up the thing That's at the heart of the immigration issue for so many people and that is the millions of people who are living in the country illegally What's that cost taxpayers like what's cost them? One of the things we were excited to investigate when we went to Alabama was to figure out what is the real answer to that? That's one town like how much money was it?
Where there are different ways to estimate this and the National Academy of Sciences tried to convene as impartial and unbiased look at the evidence as possible To come up with numbers for the whole country they sampled 18 economists and demographers and sociologists from varying points of view to figure out What do immigrants cost taxpayers the issue the report last year can't even serve on the NES committee She's an economist at the Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute and I'll be sore through the findings The 618 page report is dense with charts and tables We've been pointed out if you're an undocumented worker in an Albertville poultry plant You still have to present a social security number get the job and so you pretty much pay the same taxes as anybody So you were paying sales taxes on the things you buy You're paying property taxes either if you own your home or through the rent you're paying to your landlord and Depending on whether or not you're working with somebody else's documents You're paying income taxes and social security taxes You're just not receiving the benefits when you retire that money is a big bonus for the federal government in 2010 for instance The Social Security Administration estimates 13 billion went into the Social Security Trust Fund from undocumented workers I don't get billion dollars just paid out to them so again an undocumented poultry worker in an Albertville paste the same taxes as anybody It doesn't qualify for most government benefits And what that means is that there are biggest cost to government Ruben says back to one way that costs more than other people is schools That's the big public service that they're using because they often have more kids than Non-immigrant populations contrary to whatever stereotypes about there's not a lot more kids three fourths of a child more per couple than non-immigrant families in Alabama What that means are school costs when you run the numbers and Kim Ruben and her colleague Aaron Huffert Doug of the data on how to fill school costs do that for us is that non Latino taxpayers in Albertville are paying $272 every year in local taxes to other sector kids that their immigrant neighbors are enrolling in the Albertville city school system Come in there and also research food stamps for us That's the supplemental nutrition assistance program or SNAP for other complaints that we heard in Albertville about how in the grocery store You see Latino mothers using food stamps to reach a focus in at one point drove me to the big food line stores So that I could witness this myself Here are the facts on food stamps when the Tina family's moved into Albertville in the county of the San Marshall County between 1990 and 2010 snap use did go up in Marshall County Ruben says it doubled from 8% to 16% In the rest of Alabama with a Herbie and immigrants went way faster and way higher from 11% to 26% So having more immigrants in Marshall County carlated with lower food stamp use not higher and fewer taxpayer dollars spent But these individual spending programs don't get you the big picture to get the big picture I think that the most helpful chart in the huge National Academy of Sciences report is a table They call table 812 table 812 its premises. It says okay a new immigrant arrives in America tomorrow What is everything that person is going to cost government at every level over the course of their entire lifetime including whether kids costs and the grandkids And then what is everything they and their kids and the grandkids are going to pay in taxes over that same period? So this track looks at everything all federal state and local taxes all federal state and local government services over a person's lifetime 75 years And what table 812 shows very clearly is that whether you get more from government or give more to government really depends on how educated you are It's just that immigrants who have even a little bit of college pay in more than they take over the course of their lives But immigrants like the ones in Albertville's poultry plants and mostly do not have high school educations They are the costliest government even in the rosiest scenario in this table They and their kids and the grandkids cost the government money over the course of 75 years The author of this table is a demographer named Gretchen Donahauer The calculation for us that specifically would apply to the undocumented population in Albertville That is poultry plant workers who don't have a high school education and also don't have legit social security numbers So they probably won't be collecting social security or Medicare in their old age Those workers will cost the government $21,000 So it's $21,000 for 75 years That's when undocumented immigrants and Albertville's chicken plants and their kids and grandkids cost federal state and local taxpayers Over the course of the immigrants entire life Of course how do you think about that 21,000 depends on your values? Maybe think that's worth it for the economic growth and whatever other contributions the immigrant and his family will make Maybe you don't but to put the number in context Anyone in America who doesn't have a high school education is a net drain on government over the course of their lifetimes on average The NAS report includes data on this also A native born American without high school education will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars more than even a documented immigrant even somebody who collects old age benefits If you don't graduate high school, generally you're just not earning enough to pay that much into the system 25 today For 2012 just a year after the anti-immigrant state law HB 56 went into effect Everything in town reversed course all that anti-immigrant politicking HB 56 was gutted.
Keep portions were found unconstitutional by the courts The immigrant families moved away from Albertville most moved back in 2012 the mayor and the city council came up for election again and Albert Hill voters hit the reset button last night not a single person elected in 2008 was voted back into office The mayor and four council people all out The city council since then has not spent its time trying to figure out how to control or deport the town's Latino residents In fact, after meetings immigration doesn't come up. A councilman pulled us they consciously keep it off the table One sign of how things have changed is that the Trump administration is expanding the 287g program Which gives local police officers the power to do immigration enforcement which Albertville sought for years But they're not trying to get it anymore Beni Moamak who was police chief during the most divisive years said something we heard from a few people I would say during that time period that we've all talked about here was growing pains with the city in a lot of respects The city was in culture shock I don't think he is so much anymore The current mayor told us the city is now following the examples set by the Albertville schools And this is a single most surprising thing we found in arverville was how the schools handled such a big population of immigrants During the years the city council was picking fights with the city's Latino residents right across the street at the offices of the arverville city schools They were taking the exact opposite approach trying to integrate them into the community And they did an exceptionally competent job of it At the very beginning in the early 90s when they had just a handful of Latino students They hired a person whose job was to advocate for them and to make sure the schools accommodated them In 1996 the school started pre-k and one of the Latino trailer parks They got a grant for teachers to visit the parts of Mexico their students came from to see the conditions they were used to learning in At one point the schools made the dramatic and difficult choice to stop pulling Latino kids out of class for separate language and other instruction It took three or four years to fully put that into effect and retrain the teachers to completely include the Latino kids in their lessons Today the student population is nearly half Latino and the Latino kids are integrated into the ban sports teams activities AP classes This is a lab for AP physics four girls roll marbles not slow the measurements three of them with Tina Right now Latino kids make up 43 percent of the high school and about a third of the students in AP classes So not fully represented in quite yet, but getting there Our coworker Lily Sullivan attended high school with pretty much the same demographics as Albertville high school And she was always one of the few latinas and honors classes and she visited five AP classes in Naperville And couldn't miss one and when she saw kind of blew her mind right Lily. Yeah, it was really great to see I just couldn't have imagined this This is bestie cost bar. She's a senior she's 17 and she's not lab group She's pretty bookish glasses wearing and this time she explains the social dynamic at school Well, this is kind of like a small community So everybody's grown up with each other and knows each other So there's nothing like really tense bestie bestie's dad came to Albertville working chicken plants I know her mom's like my grimp farm worker family And so when I asked her she's doing all these activities and she's just rattling them off clubs Like I'm president of HOSA.
I'm the vice president of the FLA I'm a soccer team HOSA is health occupation students of America And I was just like how did you know how to do this? How did you know about these programs and stuff? And then she just says like oh well I had this one teacher freshman year who pulled me into this club and another teacher pulled me into this club We had Mr. Bolding.
He knew my dream of becoming a neurosurgeon because I had admired Dr. Benjamin Carson For his surgery on the conjoined twins And so he told me about HOSA and so I joined and I was like oh there was no way she was going to slip through the cracks You know, this is obvious that you know she's she's a Latina and um her teachers still had really high expectations of her And they just expected her to do well and so she did Typically the school has not eliminated the achievement gap between the Latino kids and the non-Latino kids when kids in our school system Not speaking much English. That's notoriously difficult. A part of the gap is more about poverty than ethnicity I say white expert on testing now about Tom Spencer the public affairs research council about about my in Birmingham Explain to me that Albertville student population is one of the poorest in the state But each year a higher proportion of their kids meet state standards and when you put it in the context of poverty They outscore where they'd be protected to score They're actually significantly exceeding and then when you get to the fact that they're graduated they have a 95 percent graduation rate for Hispanics It's actually a higher rate than the white kids.
We're only 92 percent They actually produced the al- the high school produce more Hispanic high school graduates than any other school in the state And so what's that say to you? It says to me that um they're doing something right up there that they're they're closing gaps and um, they're doing something impressive So in this town where things got really ugly and heated for a while schools were accountability force The one place where people actually got to know one another We met white parents who said their kids made friends where they volunteered at the schools and it changed how they viewed immigrants As for their Latino neighbors, I talked to lots of them about what it feels like in town right now And mostly people said I'm comfortable here. I made a life here. I like it People owned homes or settled into neighborhoods have white friends But that's not the same as feeling welcome Especially in the last two years they say with the rise of Donald Trump Marshall County went for Donald Trump 83 percent And by the way 71 percent for Roy Moore this week Carlos who was in our first episode says you see it most of the store You're not done with the younger generation because they've gotten used to growing up around us But with the older generation they don't get us in a bad kind of way As a school's migrant advocate two to gate hops to lots of Latino families in town And she sent out something I heard from a bunch of people She says they don't care about trying to win over anyone.
It doesn't want them here Like you know like saying well, I got a job here, you know, I'm sorry. I got a job and I'm gonna do it until Until they want me here until they want me here. That's what people used to say. Yes In the opening of our first program in Outerville We had this quote from state senator Scott Beeson behind HB 56 He said back in 2011 if you allow illegal immigration to continue in your area You will destroy yourself eventually if you don't believe illegal immigration will destroy your community Go check out parts of Alabama around out reveal But everville was not destroyed by lots of measures It's thriving with the spanic businesses all over town main streets coming back retail box stores moving in Local sales tax revenues are on the rise They just spent millions building a beautiful high school and in the middle of spending more millions on a big rec center As we reported last week immigrants did not take jobs from american workers They're preparing to create lots of jobs.
We asked got Beeson that how it all worked out I'm glad that things are going well for them now, but I still believe that you can't just allow unbridled illegal immigration into one little town or whatever Even though things have turned out pretty positive for for alberville so many years later What do you think what do you think the lesson of the town is? Um, you know, I think if we're gonna learn anything or I'd like something to be to be remembered about alberville is that You know people in Alabama people in alberville folks in the south they're good folks And even when they have issues with with an influx of folks who are from different countries or whatever Eventually over time, I mean we're very welcoming But I but that would not make me want any other community to have to go through the same things that alberville did just because 20 years later Well, it seems okay now Talking over 100 people in town. It's not true the town was welcoming It's more like they fought it at every level in city council at the state level with hb-56 And they failed and only after they failed that they decided to take another path to the queue from the people who actually were welcoming The schools The anti-immigration activist chris kobak has said that in the 2000s Alabama was a laboratory for the rest of the country and a model And while the crackdown he and jeff sessions and others tried to engineer in the whole tree towns around the state didn't pan out They all moved on to try again this time from washington dc The woman used to bring politicians into alberville. Teresa Ferguson told us she stopped organizing in town long ago It's not needed now Because she said their guy is in the white house.
She's counting on him. She told us to set things right There isn't Jim in the pride of alberville the alberville high school Aggie band They will be performing in the rose parade in california on new year's day The day's program is produced and reported by meeky niekly Sullivan diam wu and me our corporate here was gabriela munios Original music by mark is from bragala our staff includes susan bertons Zoe chase damechivis shanko with knee dangerfield neo-drumming steffinie food campbelly handerson david kesenbaum jonathan and hevar Be a parker robin semi and christopher sotala mat tyranny and julie wittaker she and your producers brion reed Sers thanks data regare Tim tynmore john slifta courtney johnson chris lindley joys bishop tracie harneigott matt arnold david cleimans linele green Nelva contreras anita and larry stansel ryan edwards leighton coo mary elin moy jooers erin brantley drich tbly the brimming ham news Sarah benthan virginia laura mary holland on gumery and jim dolan our website this american life dot org This american life is a little bit of public radio stations by prx the public radio exchange Thanks as always for programs co-founder miss tony malatea, you know He just saw the new fast and furious movie was not into it at all They were just like drive around like without knowing absolutely anything totally like idiots I'm out of glass back next week with more stories of this american life