Congratulations! Last Friday, the last gavel went down on this year’s legislative session without a single piece of anti-immigrant legislation being signed into law. MIRA was there on the front lines, talking to legislators, testifying at committees, and keeping you up-to-date on new developments.
This year, MIRA defeated more than a dozen bills that would have resulted in the discrimination, harrassment, and disenfranchisment of immigrants of all backgrounds and immigration statuses. A few of them include:
HB167 – This bill would have prohibited taking the state driver’s exam in any language other than English, making it virtually impossible for new immigrants and refugees to get a driver’s license.
SB 195 – In an effort to identify immigrants as targets for discrimination, this measure would have placed an emblem on the IDs of documented immigrants marking them as “aliens.”
HJR 26 – Were this resoultion to have passed, it would have denied emergency medical care to undocumented immigrants, including pregnant women and children, forcing Missouri hospitals to break federal law.
HJR 31, SB 308, HB 708, and HB768 – Each of these four measures were worded differently, but all had the effect of barring consideration of Sharia law (a religious code for practicing Muslims) in state courts. Because the First Amendment already prohibits consideration of any religious code in our courts, these bills were introduced solely as a way to discriminate against Muslims and provide an opportunity to debate the “un-Americanism” of immigrant and non-immigrant Muslims.