Guest Post: Jacelyn Thomas, Alabama’s Immigration Laws Prove Economically Inefficient

When Alabama’s immigration law, HB 56, was signed earlier this year, criticism largely focused on civil rights. Critics argued that the law was racist and would pave the way for mass racial profiling. Creating such intense fear and anxiety among the Latino community, the law would dissuade immigrant children from attending school, and would also create a public health and safety crisis. As the measures in HB 56 go into effect, the anti-immigration law has spectacularly failed even on its intended purpose—to spur economic growth.

The Center for American Progress published some of the economic losses that the state of Alabama has experienced as a directly result of HB 56. The article notes that two farmers in Alabama, an agriculturally-centered state, have reported net losses in the hundreds of thousands because of labor shortages occurring shortly after the law went into effect. CAP also noted that in 2010, undocumented immigrants paid approximately $130 million dollars in income, state, local, property, and consumption taxes, a sum that would decrease significantly as more and more immigrants flee the state.

A recent Businessweek article written by Elizabeth Dwoskin and widely circulated on the Internet, investigated in-depth the frustration that Alabama’s farming, hospitality, and construction industries are experiencing in the wake of labor shortages induced by the state’s strict immigration policies. Theoretically, HB 56 was intended to recover supposedly “stolen” jobs from native-born Americans. Now that thousands of undocumented immigrants have left the state, employers have been encouraged to seek natives to fill the labor gap, with little luck. Echoing the sentiments of many Alabaman farmers, farm owner Joey Bearden is quoted in the Businessweek article as saying:

“The governor stepped in and started this bill because he wants to put people back to work—they’re not coming…I’ve been farming 25 years, and I can count on my hand the number of Americans that stuck.”

There are various reasons why, according to Dwoskin, native-born Americans will not fill these jobs, and some of these reasons are not quite as obvious. A more commonly cited reason is that typical immigrant jobs do not pay rates that Americans are willing to accept. According to proponents of HB 56, the law will eventually force farmers to higher their wages, and will affectively stop the wages exploitation inherent in immigrant work.

But a few things complicated this hope for HB 56—farmers will not be able to afford increasing wages for natives, especially in the face of competition from states and countries where labor is cheap and abundant. What’s more, even if wages were increased a few dollars above minimum wage, Princeton University sociologist Doug Massey suggests that it is more than the nature of the work and the wages that keeps Americans away. A lot of it has to do with the stigma attached to jobs that are associated with immigrants.

While there is no clear-cut answer to economic problems that Alabama faces after instituting its harsh immigration laws, it has become more than clear that HB 56 is, as an Alabama University economics professor considers it, “economically absurd.”

Byline: This is a guest post from Jacelyn Thomas. Jacelyn writes about identity theft for IdentityTheft.net. She can be reached at: jacelyn.thomas@gmail.com.