Donald Trump is on a mission. He’s mad that America is still called a “melting pot,” and he wants to change that. It’s no small undertaking, either. With nearly 15% of the population made up of immigrants of all stripes — naturalized, on a path to citizenship, or undocumented ones (who make up the smallest percentage) — America has lived up to the reputation.

Indeed, the term itself comes from a play by the same name that’s more than 100 years old, so Trump has some serious history to contend with if he wants to erase it from our national lexicon.

What he sees is a future where not only are undocumented immigrants expelled, but police are allowed to racially profile in order to detain anyone they suspect of being here illegally. An America where you, a good neighbor, risk jail time if you give Pedro next door a ride down to the Home Depot to look for work, if he doesn’t have papers.

Trump sees a country where ICE — an agency younger than all three of my own children — can raid schools and force children to submit to documentation inspection, and tell on their parents if they’re here illegally.

In short, Trump is interested in making America not so much “great” again, but white again.

He should take a page from Alabama’s recent history to see how that might play out. Because the Cotton State tried to implement a pretty draconian immigration law back in 2011, and it did not end up the way they may have envisioned.

Alabama’s HB56 attempted to root out illegal immigrants, and only ended up hurting the heart of Dixie in the long run. Or short run, really. It took less than two years before the state’s effort to get undocumented immigrants to essentially “self-deport” wound up in shambles, with most of the immigrants still there or back again after vast swaths of the law were found unconstitutional or simply unworkable.

The bill had many of the provisions described above, with the exception of the ICE raids. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was still an agency in its infancy at the time, and Barack Obama was not using it the same way that Donald Trump has and plans to. Back then, Alabama just required children to report their parents to the school principal.

Oh, and then-Governor Bob Riley actually required that whole racial profiling thing. Cops weren’t just required to arrest, they were required to suspect a reason to arrest.

HB56 was considered not just the harshest immigration law in Alabama’s history, but the harshest ever in the country. Kids stopped going to school. Undocumented workers fled the state. Tomatoes, peppers, and blueberries rotted on the vine. Farmers were faced with no workforce.

Americans who had previously accused the undocumented of “stealing their jobs” didn’t last a single day at work in the fields. The founder and CEO of Grow Alabama, Jerry Spencer, recruited dozens and dozens of Americans just for a single workplace an hour north of Birmingham on Chandler Mountain. Only three Americans made it through the monthlong experiment.

Spencer told the Huffington Post at the time, “It really showed no comparison. The American workers could not do what the Mexican workers did. They were physically and mentally incapable.”

But when you lose farm workers, you lose farms. Spencer told HuffPo that dozens of the farmers who had participated in Grow Alabama has simply decided to retire early. Others switched to less labor-intensive crops, like growing trees.

But it wasn’t just farm workers. It took less than six weeks before Alabama started watching the law fall apart. An NBC News report from 2013 recalled one of the early stories:

On November 16, 2011, police in Tuscaloosa stopped a driver for not having the proper tag on his rental car. Normally, this would have been a minor citation. But the driver did not have a license on him, only a German ID card, and that triggered what was supposed to be HB 56’s most powerful weapon against illegal immigration. Under the law, police were now required to arrest the man, haul him to court, and detain him until federal immigration authorities determined his fate, no matter how long that took.

You can see where this is going. The man turned out to be an executive for Mercedes-Benz, who were in the state along with several other foreign auto manufacturers providing thousands and thousands of much-needed jobs. Missouri swooped in and offered Mercedes a spot in the Show-Me State — instead of the Show Me Your Papers state.

Two weeks later, a Japanese executive from Honda was arrested and charged, despite showing a Japanese license, his passport, and a work permit.

Long lines to renew car tabs — which now required proof of citizenship — plagued the urban centers. Utilities ground to a halt, unsure of their obligations as to whether to cut off service for people who couldn’t prove citizenship.

Former Alabama lawmakers have mostly put the law behind them, although it’s technically still on the books. It’s mostly a toothless law at this point, having been gutted by the courts and lawsuits. Every incumbent in the city of Albertville lost their seat in 2012 over backlash from HB56. Most of the immigrants have come back to Alabama.

Donald Trump would do well to take notes from Alabama’s experience. Because if you can’t get illegals to self-deport in a state that’s already socially hostile to them, where can it be done?