Alabama 'Yellowhammers' its own (again)

In the 1998 movie version of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, Inspector Javert (Geoffrey Rush) coldly says to a wretched victim, "It's a pity the law doesn't allow me to be merciful." A federal judge in Alabama seems to have adopted a similar attitude. Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn of Federal District Court in Birmingham has "upheld most of Alabama’s new immigration law, the nation’s harshest and most radical attempt to harness a state’s power to find and punish illegal immigrants," according to the New York Times. One particularly noxious section requires schools to collect data about the immigration status of incoming students and their parents for State "assessment" of criminal activity. It's a page right out of the KGB manual. The idea of course is to scare away the kids of illegal immigrants and/or entrap their parents. The trouble (among other things) is that most of these children were born here. Therefore, Alabama is potentially threatening lawful, American citizens (i.e., innocent kids). It's almost as if Alabama, the Yellowhammer State, has become a far-flung province of the old the USSR, complete with state-sanctioned "informers." With states like Utah, Georgia, Indiana and South Carolina jumping on the "papers, please" bandwagon with similar laws, this is becoming truly dystopian in scope. The Obama administration plans to appeal the Alabama decision and the matter will ultimately go to the US Supreme Court. The sooner, the better.