Critics of Alabama’s new immigration law have long argued that the bill is rooted in anti-Hispanic prejudice. After all, the argument goes, the bill allows police to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally. It’s hard to know what would cause a police officer to suspect a person of being an illegal immigrant, but it would seem that the burden would fall on people who don’t fall neatly into Alabama’s historically black-or-white racial paradigm. Rep. Micky Hammon, R-Decatur, just offered a telling bit of information that’s sure to stoke the fires of debate. Hammon is the author of the new immigration bill. He has told media outlets that Alabama has the second-fastest-growing illegal immigrant population in the nation. Earlier this week, Bama Fact Check looked into that claim – and found no evidence to support it. Hammon said he had proof that Alabama was No. 2 in illegal immigrant growth, but he never produced it. On Thursday, Hammon e-mailed Anniston Star reporter Brian Anderson with an article he said was evidence to support his claim. Here’s the link: the article cites a Pew Research Center report showing that the Alabama is No. 2 in the growth of its Hispanic population. There is, of course, a difference. First of all, despite the rhetoric we hear from Goat Hill, not all Hispanics are immigrants. Not by a long shot. Texas and California had significant Latino populations before they entered the Union. Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, and its residents are American citizens. To them, add the millions of Hispanic Americans whose families moved here a generation ago, or two, to three, and you have a huge population of native-born Americans who identify themselves as Latino. Obviously, even if all those people were immigrants, they wouldn’t necessarily be illegal immigrants. All of this stuff is fairly common knowledge in places with major Latino populations. Alabama, by most counts, isn’t one of those places. By the last Census count, only 3.9 percent of Alabamians identified themselves as “Hispanic or Latino of any race.” Perhaps that’s one reason why Alabama comes in second in percentage growth of its Latino population. That’s easy to do when the numbers are small to begin with.

Assigning a “truth rating” to various claims is the hardest thing we do here at Bama Fact Check. It’s often relatively easy to do a bit of research and pick apart a politician’s poorly researched statements. It’s much harder to get a group of editors together to decide whether those statements are (to paraphrase Mark Twain) lies, infernal lies, or statistics. Our most recent fact check –- a look into a legislator’s claims about the safety of abortion inducing drugs –- presented us with the hardest “truth rating” decision we’ve ever faced. The Alabama State Legislature is now considering a raft of bills designed to limit access to abortion statewide. One of those bills, sponsored by Sen. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would pose new restrictions on the use of mifepristone – the abortion-inducing pill once known as RU-486. The bill’s text includes a number of claims about mifepristone, including that it poses a “significant risk” to women’s health. The words aren’t Allen’s. As Anniston Star reporter Brian Anderson discovered, the wording of the bill was lifted, almost completely intact, from model legislation proposed by Americans United for Life, a pro-life group based in Washington D.C. Anderson set out see if there was any truth to the bill’s claims about the safety (or lack thereof) of mifepristone. He tried to contact Allen, and got no response -– after four days of trying. Then he contacted the bill’s true authors: the folks at Americans United for Life. They responded to his questions by repeatedly emailing the same set of boiler-plate answers. The response from pro-choice side was better, but not by much. State-level abortion rights organizations wouldn’t talk about the issue. Nationwide organizations did, but only after mulling the matter for days. Keep in mind that Anderson wasn’t asking The Big Abortion Question. He was asking about a couple of seemingly simple things. How does the scientific community define “significant risk,” and does mifepristone pose such a risk? Yet seemingly unbiased sources on the topic gave Anderson the cold shoulder. Doctors and professors in pharmacy colleges and medical schools did not respond to messages about the question. The FDA’s legislative branch didn’t respond to Anderson’s inquiries. Now, at Bama Fact Check, we’ve always observed a certain amount of gamesmanship when assigning truth ratings. If a politician makes a claim, he or she should be willing to provide documentation to support that claim. If the politician doesn’t support the claim, and the opponent does make a sound case, the judgment goes against the politician. In other words: back up what you say, or we’ll call you a liar. Sen. Allen didn’t provide information to back up his bill’s claims about abortion-inducing drugs. The bill’s real authors did only slightly better. On that account alone, we were prepared to rank his statement about “significant risk” as a falsehood. But there’s more to this story than rhetoric. There’s a real world, beyond word games, in which women actually face the choice of taking mifepristone or not taking it. The question of whether a drug is safe or unsafe is a question that matters in real-world terms. And the fact is, after days of trying to get a straight answer out of people who are in the know on such matters, we really didn’t feel any closer to an answer about mifepristone, about what “significant” risk means, or about whether that risk, if it exists, is worth taking. The editors of Bama Fact Check weren’t born yesterday. We know why it’s so hard to get people to talk on sensitive subject. The abortion issue settled into trench warfare years ago, with Americans in opposing camps and no middle ground except a wasteland. But the risks and rewards of mifepristone are testable, falsifiable claims that should, by all rights, be checkable. Because out there, there are a number of women who need and deserve straight facts on this issue. There are facts that we do know. We know that mifepristone is approved by the FDA. That doesn't guarantee its safety, but the FDA's approval is something most Americans as trustworthy. For us, this dilemma is an illustration of the need for Bama Fact Check, and the need for journalism in general. People in power, on both sides of the political aisle, profit from keeping a tight control on information. By fudging facts and hiding sources, people in power force everyone else into the prisoner’s dilemma, in which every decision is based on guesswork and fear. And when information is shared freely, it’s the individual human being who profits. She profits by having the information she needs to make a rational decision. Now that our article is out, we expect an onslaught of responses from both sides of the abortion debate. We hope those responses will include some real data. We hope people on both sides of the aisle will point to real, documented evidence to support their positions on mifepristone and how it should be administered. It’s about time somebody did that.

As our regular readers know, Bama Fact Check has been out of action since the April 27 tornadoes. But that doesn’t mean our reporters haven’t been fact-checking. The tornadoes had a major effect on the communities covered by Fact Check’s partner organizations. The Tuscaloosa News, for instance, was busy reporting on a city largely flattened by an EF-4 twister. At The Anniston Star, another paper in the Bama Fact Check partnership, an EF-4 tore a similar hole through a much less populated landscape. It’s taken two weeks just to return to something like a normal schedule, if "normal" is the right word for life after one of Alabama’s biggest disasters. As it turns out, fact-checking is a big part of what reporters do in response to disasters like the April 27 tornado outbreak. The Tuscaloosa News even set up a blog to stamp out the more pervasive rumors swirling through town. And here's what they reported: the mayor of Tuscaloosa is, in fact, still alive. Bodies were not found in the Holt landfill. And the city of Tuscaloosa is not hiding hundreds of unidentified bodies. And as the editors of the News pointed out in a recent editorial, accurate information does matter. It matters a lot. No, you haven’t heard from Bama Fact in a while. But you’ll see us back in action shortly. In the meantime, here’s a little treat for the political wonk in everyone. While Alabamians were digging out of the rubble, Newt Gingrich – a man who has made a lot of public statements over the years -- declared his intention to run for the presidency. The Washington Post fact-checked the two-minute video announcing his candidacy. So did Politifact. Enjoy.

When he was running for office in 2010, Gov. Robert Bentley pledged to create a cabinet-level Director of Small Business. Small business was a hot theme back then. Politicians from both parties noted that most businesses are small businesses, that helping small business could bring back jobs, and that mom-and-pop shops deserved as much government attention as the major players. Collectively, small businesses were Too Big to Fail. Or at least, that was the mood in the campaign year. Three months into his administration, Bentley still hasn't appointed his small business director -- though scuttlebutt in Montgomery suggests he's interviewing people for the job. Still, small business advocates aren't griping. They've been getting legislation they wanted -- tax incentives, tort reform, and other measures -- and in some cases, they're even writing the legislation. From the Anniston Star -- Bentley has yet to create director of small business.