By Bob Johnson

Associated Press (July 9, 2011)

MONTGOMERY, Alabama (AP) – Civil rights groups sued Friday in federal court to block Alabama’s new law cracking down on illegal immigration, which supporters and opponents have called the strictest measure of its kind in the nation.

The lawsuit claims the new law will make criminals out of church workers who provide shelter to immigrants and even citizens who give their neighbors a ride to the store or to the doctor’s office.

“This law interferes with the free exercise of religion. It criminalizes acts of love and hospitality,” said Scott Douglas, executive director of Greater Birmingham Ministries.

The lawsuit, filed in Huntsville, said the law is of “unprecedented reach” and goes beyond similar laws passed in Arizona, Utah, Indiana and Georgia. Federal judges already have blocked all or parts of the laws in those states. It asks a judge to declare Alabama’s law unconstitutional and prevent it from being enforced.

Alabama’s law, which takes effect Sept. 1, allows police to arrest anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant if the person is stopped for some other reason. It also requires businesses to check the legal status of new workers and requires schools to report the immigration status of students.

Matthew Webster was among the individuals who joined the lawsuit as plaintiffs. He and his wife, who live in the community of Alabaster south of Birmingham, are in the process of adopting two boys who are already in the country illegally. Webster, who described himself as politically conservative, said he feared the boys could face deportation under the new law before the adoption process is done and the boys are in the U.S. legally.

He said the boys “have the fear of being picked up” even walking to school.

“This criminalizes me and my wife for harboring and transporting these kids,” he said.

The lawsuit said the new law will subject Alabama residents, including U.S. citizens and non-citizens who are in the country legally, to racial profiling. The law also recalls memories of Alabama’s troubled segregationist past by making life more difficult for a targeted class of people, according to the lawsuit.

“Individuals who may be perceived as ‘foreign’ by state or local law enforcement agents will be in constant jeopardy of harassment and unlawfully prolonged detention by state law enforcement officers,” the lawsuit said.

A sponsor of the bill, House Majority Leader Micky Hammon, a Republican from Decatur, said he is confident the courts will find that the law passes constitutional muster.

In a statement, Hammon called the organizations that filed the lawsuit, including the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama, “liberal groups working to shield those who live here illegally.”

“It is important to note that our law seeks to protect immigrants who reside here legally while affecting only those who break our laws with their simple presence. We cannot turn a blind eye toward those who thumb their noses at our borders and our laws,” Hammon said.

Hammon and other supporters say the immigration law will ease unemployment in Alabama by opening up jobs currently held by illegal immigrants.

But the legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mary Bauer, said the new law could discourage overseas businesses from bringing new jobs to Alabama.

“It sends a message that people who look foreign are not welcome in our state,” Bauer said. “If we are really talking about creating jobs, this is the worst form of political posturing by politicians.

The lawsuit says parents may not enroll their children in elementary and high schools because of the law’s provision requiring schools to check the immigration status of students. Lawmakers have said that the intent of that requirement is to gauge how much the state is spending to educate illegal immigrants, and that the law does not prohibit illegal immigrants from attending public schools

Alabama’s law also makes it a crime to knowingly give a ride to an illegal immigrant and for landlords to knowingly rent to illegal immigrants.

The lawsuit was filed by various organizations across northern Alabama that represent immigrant groups as well as individual immigrants who are listed under the pseudonyms John Doe and Jane Doe. The lawsuit names as defendants various state and local officials, including Republican Gov. Robert Bentley, Attorney General Luther Strange and state schools Superintendent Joe Morton.

The law was written so that if any provisions are found to be unconstitutional, other parts can remain in effect.

BBC News (July 8, 2011)

An Arizona sheriff office’s will pay $200,000 to two Hispanic men unlawfully detained during an anti-illegal migrant raid on a landscaping firm in 2009.

Julian and Julio Mora, one a legal resident and the other a US citizen, were held for three hours by Maricopa County deputies.

In April, a judge agreed the deputies violated their constitutional rights.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is known for his harsh crackdowns on illegal immigrants.

In February 2009, a team of dozens of deputies and volunteers with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office raided Handyman Maintenance Inc, a landscaping company based in Phoenix, Arizona.

They had a warrant to search the company premises for evidence of document fraud, and ultimately arrested 60 illegal aliens, the sheriff’s office said at the time.

The two Moras men – Julian is Julio’s father – were on their way to work when they were stopped in their truck outside the company grounds, handcuffed with plastic zip-ties, and held for three hours with other employees.

They were released when deputies established that they were in the US legally and had committed no other offenses.

‘Don’t ignore the constitution’

In August 2009 the men sued the sheriff’s office, arguing that officials had violated their right under the US constitution to be protected from unreasonable search and seizure. In April, Federal Judge David Campbell agreed, ruling the deputies had no lawful reason to detain them.

On Thursday the Moras and the sheriff’s office agreed settled the case.

“Sheriff Arpaio’s deputies are not free to ignore the constitution when they are enforcing immigration laws,” their lawyer Annie Lai, of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.

“County officials should take heed that the Moras and hundreds of other Latino residents who have been detained in the raids without any evidence of wrongdoing have recourse in the courts.”

A lawyer for the sheriff’s office said the large number of deputies working on the raid precluded them from identifying which had been involved in the Moras’ detention, so it could not defend against the suit.

“If you can’t have the officers, it’s an uphill climb,” Tim Casey told the Arizona Republicnewspaper.

“The sheriff’s office has made some good, positive changes, so when they have 100 deputies doing operations, they’re going to record things better so this doesn’t happen again.”

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

Published: May 30, 2011

A cognitive neuroscientist, Ellen Bialystok has spent almost 40 years learning about how bilingualism sharpens the mind. Her good news: Among other benefits, the regular use of two languages appears to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms. Dr. Bialystok, 62, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, was awarded a $100,000 Killam Prize last year for her contributions to social science. We spoke for two hours in a Washington hotel room in February and again, more recently, by telephone. An edited version of the two conversations follows.

Q. How did you begin studying bilingualism?

A. You know, I didn’t start trying to find out whether bilingualism was bad or good. I did my doctorate in psychology: on how children acquire language. When I finished graduate school, in 1976, there was a job shortage in Canada for Ph.D.’s. The only position I found was with a research project studying second language acquisition in school children. It wasn’t my area. But it was close enough.

As a psychologist, I brought neuroscience questions to the study, like “How does the acquisition of a second language change thought?” It was these types of questions that naturally led to the bilingualism research. The way research works is, it takes you down a road. You then follow that road.

Q. So what exactly did you find on this unexpected road?

A. As we did our research, you could see there was a big difference in the way monolingual and bilingual children processed language. We found that if you gave 5- and 6-year-olds language problems to solve, monolingual and bilingual children knew, pretty much, the same amount of language.

But on one question, there was a difference. We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: “Apples grow on noses.” The monolingual children couldn’t answer. They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, “It’s silly, but it’s grammatically correct.” The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important.

Q. How does this work — do you understand it?

A. Yes. There’s a system in your brain, the executive control system. It’s a general manager. Its job is to keep you focused on what is relevant, while ignoring distractions. It’s what makes it possible for you to hold two different things in your mind at one time and switch between them.

If you have two languages and you use them regularly, the way the brain’s networks work is that every time you speak, both languages pop up and the executive control system has to sort through everything and attend to what’s relevant in the moment. Therefore the bilinguals use that system more, and it’s that regular use that makes that system more efficient.

Q. One of your most startling recent findings is that bilingualism helps forestall the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. How did you come to learn this?

A. We did two kinds of studies. In the first, published in 2004, we found that normally aging bilinguals had better cognitive functioning than normally aging monolinguals.Bilingual older adults performed better than monolingual older adults on executive control tasks. That was very impressive because it didn’t have to be that way. It could have turned out that everybody just lost function equally as they got older.

That evidence made us look at people who didn’t have normal cognitive function. In our next studies , we looked at the medical records of 400 Alzheimer’s patients. On average,the bilinguals showed Alzheimer’s symptoms five or six years later than those who spoke only one language. This didn’t mean that the bilinguals didn’t have Alzheimer’s. It meant that as the disease took root in their brains, they were able to continue functioning at a higher level. They could cope with the disease for longer.

Q. So high school French is useful for something other than ordering a special meal in a restaurant?

A. Sorry, no. You have to use both languages all the time. You won’t get the bilingual benefit from occasional use.

Q. One would think bilingualism might help with multitasking — does it?

A. Yes, multitasking is one of the things the executive control system handles. We wondered, “Are bilinguals better at multitasking?” So we put monolinguals and bilinguals into a driving simulator. Through headphones, we gave them extra tasks to do — as if they were driving and talking on cellphones. We then measured how much worse their driving got. Now, everybody’s driving got worse. But the bilinguals, their driving didn’t drop as much. Because adding on another task while trying to concentrate on a driving problem, that’s what bilingualism gives you — though I wouldn’t advise doing this.

Q. Has the development of new neuroimaging technologies changed your work?

A. Tremendously. It used to be that we could only see what parts of the brain lit up when our subjects performed different tasks. Now, with the new technologies, we can see how all the brain structures work in accord with each other.

In terms of monolinguals and bilinguals, the big thing that we have found is that the connections are different. So we have monolinguals solving a problem, and they use X systems, but when bilinguals solve the same problem, they use others. One of the things we’ve seen is that on certain kinds of even nonverbal tests, bilingual people are faster. Why? Well, when we look in their brains through neuroimaging, it appears like they’re using a different kind of a network that might include language centers to solve a completely nonverbal problem. Their whole brain appears to rewire because of bilingualism.

Q. Bilingualism used to be considered a negative thing — at least in the United States. Is it still?

A. Until about the 1960s, the conventional wisdom was that bilingualism was a disadvantage. Some of this was xenophobia. Thanks to science, we now know that the opposite is true.

Q. Many immigrants choose not to teach their children their native language. Is this a good thing?

A. I’m asked about this all the time. People e-mail me and say, “I’m getting married to someone from another culture, what should we do with the children?” I always say, “You’re sitting on a potential gift.”

There are two major reasons people should pass their heritage language onto children. First, it connects children to their ancestors. The second is my research: Bilingualism is good for you. It makes brains stronger. It is brain exercise.

Q. Are you bilingual?

A. Well, I have fully bilingual grandchildren because my daughter married a Frenchman. When my daughter announced her engagement to her French boyfriend, we were a little surprised. It’s always astonishing when your child announces she’s getting married. She said, “But Mom, it’ll be fine, our children will be bilingual!”