As has been extensively documented, Alabama's harsh "Papers Please" immigration law, HB 56, has been a complete disaster for the state of Alabama and rallying point for those who long for the days of Jim Crow.
Anyone in their right mind would run away from HB 56 and support the Department of Justice's efforts to block the law, particularly the injunction preventing schools from checking the immigration status of children, but Herman Cain is not in his right mind.
In Alabama yesterday, pizza magnate Herman Cain said his administration would support Alabama’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. “Under the Cain presidency, the Justice Department would not be suing Alabama. The Justice Department would be helping Alabama,” Cain said after winning the West Alabama straw poll. Alabama has the nation’s most restrictive immigration law, and the Justice Department is challenging the law in federal court. One Alabama judge has already found part of it unconstitutional. Yet in a Cain administration, he said “empowering states to do what the federal government won’t do” is vital to stopping undocumented immigration.
Although it was Herman Cain who said those words, I doubt any of the Republican presidential candidates would govern differently.
Under a Republican administration, its highly unlikely that anything would be done about immigration at the national level despite the Republican's frequent whaling over the federal government's supposed lack of action, but the rampage of Republican-controlled state legislatures would be relentless under a complicit Department of Justice managed by cronies and buffoons who obtained their law degrees at Liberty University.
When a new president takes office, so do new managers of virtually every federal agency, and as the Bush Administration showed us, a mismanaged federal agency is capable of inflicting just as much harm to the nation as the man in the Oval Office.