Alabama has passed a sweeping bill to crack down on illegal immigrants that both supporters and opponents call the toughest of its kind in the country

From The New York Times:

Alabama has passed a sweeping bill to crack down on illegal immigrants that both supporters and opponents call the toughest of its kind in the country, going well beyond a law Arizona passed last year that caused a furor there.

Alabama’s bill goes beyond Arizona’s. It bars illegal immigrants from enrolling in any public college after high school. It obliges public schools to determine the immigration status of all students, requiring parents of foreign-born students to report the immigration status of their children.

The bill, known as H.B. 56, also makes it a crime to knowingly rent housing to an illegal immigrant. It bars businesses from taking tax deductions on wages paid to unauthorized immigrants.

“This is a jobs-creation bill for Americans,” said Representative Micky Hammon, a Republican who was a chief sponsor of the bill. “We really want to prevent illegal immigrants from coming to Alabama and to prevent those who are here from putting down roots,” he said.

In May, Georgia adopted a tough enforcement law, which civil rights groups filed a lawsuit on Thursday seeking to stop. Proponents of state immigration enforcement laws won a major victory last week when the Supreme Court upheld a 2007 law in Arizona imposing penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants.

The bill requires all Alabama employers to use a federal system, E-Verify, to confirm the legal status of all workers. The measure also makes it a state crime for an immigrant to fail to carry a document proving legal status, and makes it a crime for anyone to transport an illegal immigrant.