Immigrants face Alabama civil rights backlash

[pampango]

Fifty-seven years after a historic Supreme Court ruling put an end to racial segregation, Alabama is in the grip of another civil rights crisis, only this time one affecting Hispanics.

"People are fleeing the state, they're afraid to step out of their homes, they're made to be criminals," said Sam Brooke, a lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a Montgomery-based group that fights racism and organized intolerance.

The legacy of that bitter civil rights struggle, a point of pride here, is being tested by what rights activists see as a powerful backlash, only this time targeting the 11 million immigrants in the country without papers, an estimated 130,000 of them in Alabama.

"The goal is to make life so unpleasant, so unlivable that people self-deport," said Olivia Turner, executive director of the Amerian Civil Liberties Union of Alabama.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gr0_6YQOYm0z4inw6jY_hS1n8vGQ?docId=CNG.e953307fb21b1766114179006e2d47a2.401

"The goal is to make life so unpleasant, so unlivable that people self-deport..." is the definition of the right's goal of "attrition through enforcement".

"People (racial minorities) are fleeing the state...". Hey it worked in the early 20th century in the South.