By Lekan Oguntoyinbo
I once lived as an illegal immigrant for a year in Alabama. Thank God, it was back in the 1980s. For under the radical anti-illegal immigration law recently passed by the Alabama Legislature, it would be a crime for my friends to extend to me much of the same big-heartedness I enjoyed during that trying period.
In August 1985, I was a freshly minted 20-year-old graduate of a midsized university in Missouri. I had about $5 to my name. My parents, who put me through college, had lost everything when Nigeria's economy tanked.
Getting a job was out of the question. I had entered the country on a student visa. Under immigration law, I was not allowed to work. So, I borrowed money for bus fare to travel to Dothan, so I could move in with my brother and his family while trying to finagle my way into graduate school at the University of Alabama.
I got accepted, but without the graduate assistantship I needed to pay my way through school. I had to defer admission until summer 1986.
I was determined to find the money. So I moved to Tuscaloosa and stayed with two students I'd met in Dothan. The two friends -- Darrin Chatham and Alan Lopez, both members of the University of Alabama football team -- put me up at no cost. For months, they fed me, loaned me money, drove me places and introduced me to scores of new friends who were equally kind to me.
I finally got my assistantship, but I had another problem: I was illegal.
Under immigration law, a person who comes here on a student visa may not take a break from school except during the summer. I'd been out of school for two semesters. My only option was to leave the country and turn right around and come back in, wiping my slate clean in the process.
With the help of my friends, I raised about $400 to fly from Birmingham to Montreal. I spent the night on a bench in the airport and returned to Alabama. I resumed my studies less than a week later and went on to spend two of the best years of my life at the University of Alabama, where I was inducted into an honor society and one year voted Most Valuable Staff Writer of the student newspaper.
I clearly couldn't have succeeded without the help of my friends, but my success wouldn't be possible today.
The new Alabama law makes it a crime to give an illegal immigrant a ride or house one. It permits local law-enforcement officials to arrest anyone "suspected of being an illegal immigrant." It requires public schools to verify the immigration status of students, and denies college enrollment to the undocumented.
So, under this law, Chatham and Lopez would have been breaking the law for giving me shelter. Bob Keith, a pillar of the Tuscaloosa community and an elder at the University Church of Christ, would have been prosecuted for driving me to his home to have lunch with him and his wife. And I could have been arrested and deported when one of my friends was pulled over.
State Rep. Mickey Hammon, an architect of this harsh bill, reportedly said the bill is designed to "attack every aspect of an illegal alien's life." Hammon and the rest of his fellow legislators may well succeed in chasing many of the undocumented out of the "heart of Dixie" and discourage others from coming in.
But the legislators who championed this xenophobic bill -- and the governor who signed it -- miss the big picture. This bill imposes an unnecessary hardship on countless businesses and schools in one of the nation's poorest states.
Above all, it reinforces stereotypes -- many of them unfair -- of Alabama as a hotbed of incorrigible bigots. Seriously, how many white people do you expect will be stopped on suspicion of being illegal immigrants?
"This law reminds me of the Fugitive Slave Act," my friend Afi Odelia-Scruggs, a writer, said to me the other day. The Fugitive Slave Act, she pointed out, punished people for extending a helping hand to vulnerable human beings. It doesn't stretch credulity to argue this new law does the same thing.
In that brief but agonizing period when I lived in Alabama as an illegal immigrant, I learned about the depth of the human capacity for love, compassion, selflessness and generosity.
A quarter of a century later, I am once again learning about human nature. This time, I am learning about the human capacity for shortsightedness and the tendency to sometimes appeal to primal instincts just for the sake of scoring cheap political points.
Lekan Oguntoyinbo, an associate professor of journalism at South Dakota State University, is working on a book about the impact of African immigrants in the United States. Email: oguntoyinbo@gmail.com.