"Juan Crow" Lawmaking in Tennessee

I hope you all caught Dave's great post a few weeks back on "systemic discrimination and exploitation" against Latin@ immigrants in the South, according to a recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Dave writes,   "Roberto Lovato has dubbed this [growing anti-immigrant] phenomenon Juan Crow, highlighting the similarities of this system to the previous network of social norms, law enforcement priorities, and economic abuses that kept Southern blacks poor and powerless under the Jim Crow regime of official disenfranchisement."

As I sit in my Nashville hotel room, I'm reminded of an exchange I had with a Latin@ activist at a community development meeting years ago in Memphis, when he told me that the state was organized so tightly along our black-white color line, that it didn't even have official terms (e.g., Hispanic) to recognize its growing Latin@ population.  As I read the local news now, it seems the state is really grappling, and painfully, with how to incorporate - or disenfranchise - its Latin@ residents.  Turns out, all low-income Americans are at risk from these often discriminatory actions.

First, the good news.  A few weeks ago, the TN House voted down a law that would have required government issued photo IDs to vote.  I know on its face this sounds like sensible, practical legislation, but immigrants' rights and anti-poverty activists alike find that laws like these are discriminatory and have unintended consequences far beyond the "illegals" generally targeted by such bills.  For example:

Recent changes to Medicaid rules similarly imposed citizenship documentation requirements on applicants to prove eligibility. Critics warned this could deter eligible individuals from enrolling, including U.S.-born children of immigrants.

One of the troubling ironies of the policy is that in some cases, other groups were harder hit than the undocumented immigrants that the rules were designed to exclude. In 2007, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities tracked Medicaid enrollment in Alabama, Kansas and Virginia and found that enrollment had “declined by a larger percentage among white and African American children than among Hispanic children after the requirement took effect.” Presumably, many low-income parents couldn't produce the necessary birth certificates or other papers (and may have been less vigilant than Latino parents about collecting necessary documentation to ward off legal hassles).

Racewire writes about this "law of unintended consequences" that stems from legislation such as Tennessee's REAL ID Act, which legalized a "two-tier" form of driving licenses, one for legal residents only and the other for everyone else, the latter not being a form of identification.  The Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition found that the

"two-tier licensing structure had left many immigrants vulnerable to discrimination and other barriers to services that required official identification.

Driver's licenses may seem like bureaucratic tedium to many, but REAL ID represents a larger pattern of pushing undocumented immigrants and others further outside the purview of law and critical social services."

Apparently, shoving their fellow low-income citizens to the margins as well.

(Photo by author of the Highlander Research & Education Center in E. Tenn., a legendary civil rights and organizing institution that today offers numerous programs to build coalitions among low-income and working-class whites, African-Americans, and Latin@s in the U.S. South)