In Alabama, a Harsh Bill for Residents Here Illegally

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.

The measure was passed by large margins in the Alabama Senate and the House, both Republican-controlled, in votes on Thursday. Governor Robert Bentley, a Republican, is expected to sign the bill into law.

“Alabama is now the new No. 1 state for immigration enforcement,” said Kris Kobach, a constitutional lawyer who is secretary of state in Kansas. He has helped write many state bills to curtail illegal immigration, including Alabama’s.

“This bill invites discrimination into every aspect of the lives of people in Alabama,” said Cecillia Wang, director of the immigrants’ rights project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has brought legal challenges against several state immigration-control laws. Calling Alabama’s bill “outrageous and blatantly unconstitutional,” Ms. Wang said, “We will take action if the governor signs it.”

The Alabama bill includes a provision similar to one that stirred controversy in Arizona, authorizing state and local police officers to ask about the immigration status of anyone they stop based on a “reasonable suspicion” the person is an illegal immigrant. Federal courts have suspended most of that Arizona law.

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 requires Alabama’s public schools to publish figures on the number of immigrants — both legal and illegal — who are enrolled and on any costs associated with the education of illegal immigrant 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.

The Alabama bill comes at the end of a legislative season when many states wrestled with immigration crackdown proposals. Measures focusing only on enforcement failed in 16 states, according to a tally by the National Immigration Forum in Washington, a group opposing such laws.

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.

Alabama’s law includes some provisions similar to the Arizona statute that courts rejected as incursions on legal terrain reserved for the federal government. But Michael Hethmon, general counsel of the Immigration Reform Law Institute in Washington, said the Alabama bill was a compendium of measures against illegal immigrants that his group had tested in other states. Mr. Hethmon’s group is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which seeks to reduce immigration.

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.

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Cuomo and Legislators Strike Deal on New Ethics Rules

In the wake of scandals that have felled two New York governors and multiple state lawmakers, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and leaders of the Legislature announced an agreement on Friday to overhaul the state’s ethics laws as part of an effort to stem corruption and misconduct in Albany.

The agreement would force legislators, many of whom have part-time law practices, to disclose the names of clients who have business before the state; would allow prosecutors to seek to strip pensions from future elected officials convicted of felonies; and would for the first time allow officials appointed by a governor a role in overseeing legislative compliance with ethics laws.

“Government does not work without the trust of the people,” Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said in a statement. “And this ethics overhaul is an important step in restoring that trust.”

The agreement followed months of tortuous negotiations conducted in secret. The governor, who has made overhauling ethics rules a priority, tried to pressure the Legislature by traveling the state with a PowerPoint presentation listing the names of lawmakers charged with corruption; two continue to serve and will be eligible to vote on ethics changes even while awaiting trial.

Mr. Cuomo had repeatedly warned that if the Legislature did not agree to revise ethics rules, he would use a century-old law known as the Moreland Act to appoint an investigative commission charged with ferreting out legislative abuses.

Government watchdog groups were guardedly optimistic about the ethics overhaul after being allowed to inspect a draft agreement.

“It’s novel and untested, but promises to be a success because of its different approach,” said Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union. “For there now to be external oversight of the State Legislature by a separate body is significant.”

The agreement is to be announced on Monday in Albany, but the governor and legislative leaders issued a joint statement on Friday describing the details. If approved by the Legislature, the agreement would be the second major overhaul of the state’s ethics enforcement apparatus in the last four years, and would create a joint ethics commission with oversight over both the executive and legislative branches.

“Time will tell,” said Lawrence Norden, senior counsel to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “There are no guarantees. But it is better than what we have now.”

The commission would include six people appointed by a governor, split between Democrats and Republicans. In addition, the majority leaders of both legislative houses would make three appointments each, and the minority leaders would each make one.

In a concession to Republican concerns that Democrats would use the commission for partisan purposes, the structure of the new commission gives de facto veto power to the appointees of the Assembly speaker and the Senate majority leader to block investigations of sitting lawmakers. And if the commission voted against pursuing a complaint, that decision would remain secret — as would any vote to block a public finding of wrongdoing after an investigation.

To help insulate appointees from political influence, board members will serve five-year terms. No member may be a lawmaker, senior state official or lobbyist.

In addition to requiring lawmakers to disclose their own clients, the state will create a public database of people or firms who represent private interests before state agencies. The new disclosure is intended to allow closer public scrutiny of firms that employ lawmakers, even in cases where the lawmakers do not personally represent clients before state agencies.

The State Senate leader, Dean G. Skelos, a Long Island Republican, and the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, are paid for part-time work at large law firms; both men say they do not personally represent any clients with business before the state, but partners at Mr. Skelos’s firm do represent such clients.

The deal gives Mr. Cuomo another victory, on top of his successful budget negotiation and his brokering of a pact to cap property taxes. But it does not accomplish another of his goals: to improve the state’s campaign finance laws, widely criticized by government watchdog groups as outdated, weakly enforced and overly permeable.

The last round of ethics improvements was won in 2007 by Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat, who persuaded the Legislature to enact a ban on gifts to public officials and new limits on lobbying for former public officials.

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