by Sue Weishar, Ph.D.

    How is it that in Louisiana, a state with a rapidly diminishing coastline, the highest incarceration rate in the world, and a crumbling infrastructure, “amnesty” for “illegal aliens” is the issue dominating political ads in the U.S. Senate race? This in the same state that announced a tax amnesty for delinquent taxpayers on September 12. In April the New Orleans Municipal Court announced an amnesty plan to encourage thousands of residents to come to court to avoid being arrested on outstanding misdemeanor warrants. Amnesty is a time-tested public policy strategy to clean the slate and give people a fresh start. Why has “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants become such a dirty word? 

   Anyone with a working set of eyeballs could see that Latino workers were essential to the state’s recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina. Although at the time no one was very interested in asking about the legal status of the workers doing the dirty, dangerous work of digging south Louisiana out of the smelly gray muck that blanketed the region, researchers from Tulane and Berkeley universities did inquire. They found that half the reconstruction workforce at the height of disaster recovery in March 2006 was Latino, and that half of those workers were undocumented. You might think that a state that has benefited so substantially from the labor of undocumented immigrants might be more open to the concept of amnesty. Instead we’ve opted for amnesia. MORE>>