Anti-Immigration Legislation Bubbling Through the South--Redux

The Fourth of July is a good time to contemplate various aspects of freedom, and the opposite of that--namely the anti-immigrant laws recently enacted in several states in the south. An editorial in the New York Times picks up the theme:

If you thought the do-it-yourself anti-immigrant schemes couldn’t get any more repellent, you were wrong. New laws in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina are following — and in some ways outdoing — Arizona’s attempt to engineer the mass expulsion of the undocumented, no matter the damage to the Constitution, public safety, local economies and immigrant families.

The laws vary in their details but share a common strategy: to make it impossible for people without papers to live without fear.

South Suburbs of Chicago Grow as Blacks Leave the Loop

The New York Times today followed up on a story that I commented on several months ago as the first data from the 2010 Census were being released--the City of Chicago has been shrinking because the black population has been heading to the suburbs. More specifically, the southern suburbs of Chicago.

One path that so many black middle-class home buyers have followed from Chicago’s South Side in recent years ends just off Lincoln Highway, past the entrance to the Newbury Estates subdivision in Matteson.

The subdivision, about 30 miles from the Loop, represents only part of a much greater migration to the south suburbs from 2000 to 2010. In all, Chicago’s black population declined by about 181,000 people, or 17 percent, in that period, according to recently released figures from the 2010 census. The rapid contraction of the black population was the main driver of the city’s overall population loss of about 200,000 in the last decade, a fact noted by Rahm Emanuel in his mayoral inauguration speech in May.

Kansas Anti-Abortion Rules Blocked for the Time Being

The state of Kansas has tried to stop legal abortions from taking place there by creating a new set of rules by which all abortion providers (of whom there are only three) must abide. However, a federal judge has temporarily blocked the implementation of those rules until a trial is held to determine their legality.

U.S. District Judge Carlos Murguia's injunction will remain in effect until a trial is held in a lawsuit challenging the Kansas rules. A new licensing law and state health department regulations had taken effect Friday, and abortion providers were given the latest version of those regulations less than two weeks ago.

The new law requires hospitals, clinics and doctor's offices to obtain an annual license from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment to perform more than five non-emergency abortions in a month. The regulations tell abortion providers what drugs and equipment they must stock and, among other things, establish minimum sizes and acceptable temperatures for procedure and recovery rooms.

In blocking the law, Murguia said evidence presented in court documents showed the providers would "suffer irreparable harm" through the loss of business and patients, and that at least two women currently seeking abortions would be harmed by not being able to go to the provider of their choice.