In a stunning turnaround, Arizona Republicans killed 5 of the state's notorious immigration laws. Terry Greene Sterling obtains a report showing deportations pummeling the local economy.
In a surprise St. Patrick's Day coup, conservative Republican senators in Arizona slapped down five harsh immigration laws that aimed to deny state birth certificates to babies born to unauthorized immigrants, turn school teachers and hospital workers into immigration enforcers, prohibit undocumented immigrants from attending college, and criminalize them for driving.
Related story on The Daily Beast: Arizona's Latest Legal Outrage
The roundly defeated measures signal that Arizona is ticking slightly towards the right-center. And, like many states that have rejected immigration measures this year, is beginning to recognize that immigration-crackdown laws can derail already fragile economic recoveries.
An embargoed report obtained by The Daily Beast details how deporting all of Arizona's unauthorized immigrants would spell disaster for the already stressed economy. Not only would 17 percent of jobs vanish statewide, the liberal Center for American Progress and the Immigration Policy Center say, but ousting all of Arizona's undocumented migrants could  "shrink the state economy by $48.8 billion."
Even so, ridding Arizona of its 400,000 or so "illegals" has long been the stated goal of  Russell Pearce, the temperamental Tea Partier with a reputation for bullying who ascended to the presidency of the state senate after sponsoring SB 1070, Arizona's notorious immigration law that makes it a crime for unauthorized migrants to set foot in the Grand Canyon State. (Parts of the law have been temporarily stayed by a federal judge.)
The passage of SB 1070 last spring sparked a successful wave of ongoing boycotts against the state, says boycott organizer and former Arizona senate minority leader Alfredo Gutierrez. The success of the boycotts, he says, are partly due to the simple fact that it was an easy sell -- Americans were "repulsed by the orgy of hate" in his home state. He notes that the state's hospitality industry took a documented $150 million hit in cancelled convention and hotel reservations.
"I don't think this was an epiphany of justice and understanding," Gutierrez says of the senate trouncing of the five bills favored by Pearce and immigration hardliners, "this was about economic impact."
The Arizona Chamber of Commerce acknowledged the negative effects of the Latino-led boycott in a letter on its website yesterday. And in a St. Pat's Day letter to Pearce, Arizona's biggest employers said they'd felt the boycott sting, and they'd had enough.
"I don't think this was an epiphany of justice and understanding, this was about economic impact."