Since Alabama has no foreign border and a Latino population of less than 4 percent, the main purpose of H.B. 56 seems to be the id-gratification of tribal dominance and its easy political dividends. A bill co-sponsor, State Senator Scott Beason, was frank about his motive: “when their children grow up and get the chance to vote, they vote for Democrats.”

Mr. Beason, who was later caught referring to blacks as “aborigines,” is from a predominantly white suburb of my hometown, Birmingham, which is gearing up for the 50th anniversary of our civil rights milestones of 1963: fire hoses and police dogs turned on child marchers and a church bombing that killed four black girls. For the 2013 “celebration,” the prize civic leaders were keeping their eyes on was the redemption that flowed from those debacles, notably the Civil Rights Act.

The city had nearly finessed that dialectic during the memorial in October for a local civil rights legend, the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth. Flying into the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport, the protagonists of the movement — Andrew Young, John Lewis, Joseph Lowery — were greeted at the funeral by Gov. Robert Bentley with words of regret about his segregated youth. So cordial was the network of mutuality that it was at least an hour into the six-hour service before speakers pointed out that Governor Bentley had signed the immigration law that reinvented the sin from which Mr. Shuttlesworth had supposedly delivered us.

As a result, the yearlong anniversary is shaping up to be Groundhog Day. Among other injustices, H.B. 56 bars undocumented residents from pursuing work or entering into any state-related business transactions or private contracts, depriving them of basic dignities and due process. When the Justice Department investigated the state for demanding checks on schoolchildren, the defiant reaction of Alabama’s attorney general prompted comparisons to George C. Wallace’s 1963 “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” at the University of Alabama.

At least one institution was primed to break out of the loop of bad history. Leading with a reference to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” some 150 ministers formally condemned H.B. 56 for preventing them from fulfilling the doctrine of the good Samaritan by making it illegal to give assistance to illegal immigrants, the basis of a suit against the state by three Christian denominations. A statement co-author, Matt Lacey, received dozens of e-mails from the law’s defenders beginning, “I’m a Christian but.” They saw no distinction between the bureaucratic category of “undocumented” and the moral one of “criminal” — a conflation that may also explain Justice Antonin Scalia’s incredulous question to the solicitor general: “Are you objecting to harassing the people who have no business being here?”