After tornados wreaked havoc across Alabama on April 27, killing 238 people and causing over $2 billion in damages, rebuilding became a priority for the areas affected. But Alabama’s new strict immigration law may wreak havoc on the rebuilding effort and the estimated 51,700 jobs such an effort will create. The “strongest immigration bill in the country,” which Gov. Robert Bentley (R-AL) signed on June 9, won’t take effect until September, but businesses and communities are already seeing a mass exodus of undocumented workers:

“That’s what Ever Duarte, head of the city’s Hispanic soccer league, predicts after losing a third of his teams in a week. “They’re leaving now, right now,” says Duarte, 36, during a pause in a pickup soccer game. “I know people who are packing up tonight. They don’t want to wait to see what happens.” Two weeks ago, he says, his league had 12 teams. “Last week, it was eight.”

Undocumented workers are fleeing the state to avoid the new anti-immigrant climate sure to be created by the new law. Under the legislation’s auspices, any individual that provides an illegal immigrant with a job, a place to stay, or even a ride can be prosecuted by the state.

Although the funding for the law has not yet been procured, the threat is still enough to send immigrant workers out of the state in droves. And unfortunately for the disaster-stricken residents of Tuscaloosa and the surrounding counties, “Hispanic workers, documented and undocumented, dominate anything to do with masonry, concrete, framing, roofing, and landscaping,” local contractor Bob McNelly said.

This looming disaster for the Alabama construction industry follows closely on the heels of a dire labor shortage in Georgia’s agricultural sector, which is attributed to the state’s strict new immigration law that takes effect today. Around 11,000 jobs have gone unfilled, even though the state’s unemployment rate is above the national average at 9.8 percent, and the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association has estimated that around $300 million in profits have been left to rot in the fields.

Bryan Tolar, president of the Georgia Agribusiness Council, describes his state’s labor shortage as “unprecedented” and expresses amazement that Alabama would pass such a similar immigration law after seeing its economic consequences across the state line. “It was like, ‘Good Lord, you people can’t be helped. Have you all not been paying attention?’” Tolar said. “As we say in the South, bless their hearts.”

At a time in which states cannot afford to spend money on anti-immigrant enforcement and industries are struggling to get back on their feet, GOP lawmakers are continuing to ignore the real economic impact of pandering to their xenophobia.

–Sarah Bufkin

Our guest blogger is Michael Linden, director of Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Today the Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler takes Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) to task for saying, “I think we ought to go back to the people and the party that was the only party and the only people to balance the budget in 40 years. I hate to break it to my Republican friends, but that is the Democratic Party. We are the ones who did it.” Kessler gives her “three pinnocchios” and calls her statement an “alternate history.”

But Kessler is the one who is wrong.

One of Boxer’s main pieces of evidence was a piece I wrote in March using Congressional Budget Office reports to show that legislation passed by the Republican-controlled Congresses in 1995, 1996, and 1997 had literally nothing to do with the surplus in 1998. And those are the facts.

So why, then, does he give Boxer three pinnocchios? What is his evidence that the GOP had anything to do with the surpluses? Well, he says, they caused a “substantial shift in the policy debate” when they got to Washington.

Even if that claim is true — and Kessler offers no evidence that it is — did that “shift in the debate” lead to any actual legislation that had any impact on the bottom line? No, it did not. I’m at a loss to explain how a perceived “shift in the debate” that led to no real change in budgeting policy can be credited with improving the budget situation.

Kessler is also upset that Boxer doesn’t give enough credit to the booming economy for its role in helping to balance the budget. And it is true that the enormous economic growth in the early 1990s was crucial to achieving a balanced budget.

But that doesn’t invalidate the point that GOP-led legislation played no role. Quite the opposite. Even with the benefit of the boom, the budget would still have been in deficit had it not been for the Democratic-passed legislation. Republican-passed legislation still played no role at all. Read more

ThinkProgress filed this report from Rock Hill, South Carolina.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) officially kicked off her presidential campaign this week with a three-state tour through Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Her South Carolina swing culminated in a town hall event Wednesday evening at Winthrop University in Rock Hill. A thousand people came out to see the Congresswoman field softball questions like “Where do you stand on abortion?” from audience members and via Facebook, with 500 people spilling into an overflow room.

No one questions Bachmann’s conservative bona fides, but when she tried to appeal to goldbugs in the audience, she seemed more uncertain of her footing. In response to an audience question, Bachman proudly said she has signed on to Rep. Ron Paul’s (R-TX) plan to audit the Federal Reserve. In an apparent attempt to prove she’s on board with people who believe gold is a more stable and reliable form of currency than the dollar, she then made a series of laughably uninformed economic claims:

BACHMANN: The shorthand way of describing to you what quantitative easing is is a license to print money without any value behind it…In the last two years of the Obama administration, if you pull a dollar out of your pocket, you have lost 14 percent of the value of that dollar. That means the federal government has stolen that money from you… They’ve been printing essentially valueless money and flooding it into the money supply. I don’t stand for that. A dollar in 2011 should be the same as a dollar in 1911. A dollar should be worth a dollar.

Watch it:

A dollar in 1911 had the same buying power as slightly more than $23 today. Bachmann doesn’t seem to understand that the dollar’s value naturally changes over time and accompanies economic growth — and that’s a good thing. Furthermore, the U.S. experienced inflation even when it was on the gold standard (which ended in 1971). Additionally, gold’s value isn’t fixed and also fluctuates over time — for instance, price of gold is currently at a record high.

So being on the gold standard and keeping a constant dollar value are inconsistent proposals. To achieve 0 percent inflation — which is itself an absurd idea, even according to Republican economists — a country would need an independent central bank.

As ThinkProgress has reported, gold bugs in the Tea Party have been playing an important role in the early states, and have made returning to the gold standard a litmus test for GOP candidates. Republican politicians have increasingly pandered to the far-right base by endorsing loony gold schemes, such as when presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty derided the U.S. dollar as a “fiat currency” — “a signal to a narrow constituency of voters who believe that America’s woes began when it abandoned the gold standard.”

ThinkProgress filed this report from Allentown, Pennsylvania.

From the onset of his presidential campaign, Mitt Romney has “bet his candidacy on the economy,” as Dan Balz of the Washington Post put it. During the former Massachusetts governor’s announcement speech, he declared:

Barack Obama has failed America. When he took office, the economy was in recession. He made it worse.

Romney has repeated the same line during campaign stops since, including as recently as three days ago.

The Massachusetts Republican was asked about this charge by NBC’s Sue Kroll during a press conference in Allentown, Pennsylvania yesterday. Romney claimed to never have said it, responding, “I didn’t say that things are worse”:

KROLL: You continue to say that the economy is worse, but unemployment is lower than it was in 2009, the stock market was tumbling and it’s now above 12,000, and it is growing slowly, we just had a two percent gain this last quarter. So how can you continue to say that things are worse when they really aren’t worse?

ROMNEY: I didn’t say that things are worse. What I said was that the economy hasn’t turned around. That you’ve got 20 million Americans out of work or seriously unemployed. Housing values are going down. You have a crisis of foreclosures in this country. By the way, if you think the economy is great and doing well, be my guest.

Watch it:

During his 2008 presidential bid, Romney garnered a reputation as a flip-flopper. As far back as his Senate run in 1994, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy coined the term “multiple-choice Mitt.” Romney’s words Thursday did little to shed that image.

Washington Monthly’s Steven Benen summed up the situation well: “Even for Romney, who’s flip-flopped more often and on more issues than any American politician in a generation, this is ridiculous. He’s argued repeatedly that Obama made the economy worse, and when asked to defend the bogus claim, says he never made the argument in the first place.”

As the U.S. creeps closer to hitting its legal borrowing limit, several congressional Republicans have begun to claim that failing to raise the nation’s debt ceiling would not be a bad thing for the economy. They continually say that the Treasury Department will be able prioritize payments from the tax revenue that comes in on a daily basis, despite repeated warnings from Treasury and budget experts that such a plan is untenable.

And it’s not only congressional Democrats and Treasury officials who have wearied of the Republicans’ games. In an interview with Bloomberg News, former Republican Sen. Pete Domenici (NM) expressed exasperation with the way the current crop of GOPers is handling the debt ceiling debate:

“The debt’s coming due, and they say it isn’t coming due,” Domenici said in a recent interview. “They’re wrong.”

He expressed frustration that his party may be willing to let the debt limit be ruptured. “Who do we get?” he asked. “Bring God down, Christ” to make the case against doing so? [...]

He said Republicans, particularly in the U.S. House, “have got to listen to another radio because it’s not the way they’re telling them.”

Domenici is part of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which released a report this week showing that Social Security could be one of the first casualties of the GOP’s debt ceiling intransigence.

And Domenici is not the only prominent Republican warning the Republicans against continued brinkmanship. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said the Republican lawmakers threatening to not raise the debt ceiling are “playing a very dangerous game.” “In the short term, to play around with even talking about a default, even a so-called technical default on U.S. debt, I think is really highly problematic,” she said, adding that just by getting close to a default, “you’ve increased interest costs, you’ve increased Treasury’s borrowing costs and you’ve created a bigger deficit problem. So why even go there? Why even flirt with it? I just don’t understand it — it’s very harmful and will make the budget deficit worse.”

Minnesota’s government will be shutdown over the Fourth of July weekend as the state’s Republican-controlled state legislature and Democratic governor failed to reach an agreement to close a $5 billion budget deficit before midnight. To close the deficit, Gov. Mark Dayton (D) proposed raising taxes on people making over $1 million a year. Republicans, who took control of both houses last November and campaigned on a platform of no tax increases, are digging in their heels and insist on reducing the deficit through major budget cuts.

This state battle closely mirrors the one on the national stage over the debt ceiling:

Without a two-year budget agreement in place, state parks and the Minnesota Zoo will be shut for the July 4 holiday weekend, nonemergency road construction will halt and thousands of state workers will be furloughed.

Government functions deemed critical by a county judge on Wednesday will keep operating, including the state patrol, prisons and the Medicaid health-insurance program for the poor. Courts will stay open, and welfare and food-stamp payments will continue.[...]

Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch, a Republican, said late Thursday that the state’s health and human-services budget was a sticking point in the negotiations.

Ms. Koch was interrupted several times by protestors in the Capitol chanting, “Tax the rich!”

The effects were reportedly already being felt hours ahead of the deadline, as people rushed to get driver’s and fishing licenses, and “park officials began warning campers to pack their gear and leave.”

Dayton is standing by his plan to raise taxes on millionaires in order to spare cuts in services to the most vulnerable residents. He told reporters late Thursday, “This is a night of deep sorrow for me because I don’t want to see this shutdown occur. But I think there are basic principles and the well-being of millions of people in Minnesota that would be damaged not just for the next week or whatever long it takes, but the next two years and beyond with these kind of permanent cuts in personal care attendants and home health services and college tuition increases.”

This is Minnesota’s second government shutdown in the last six years. The first occurred in 2005 under then-Governor Tim Pawlenty (R), and lasted only a few days. However, this year’s shutdown is “expected to become the broadest shutdown of state services in its history.”

ThinkProgress filed this report from a campaign event in Allentown, Pennsylvania

Republican leaders in both the House and the Senate have come out in opposition to three pending trade deals if President Obama includes reauthorization of a program meant to aid workers who lose jobs due to outsourcing caused by international trade. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI), Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and other Senate Finance Committee Republicans plan to oppose the deals if the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program is included.

Despite widespread Republican opposition to the program, however, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) endorsed the idea of assisting workers who lose their jobs due to free trade during a presidential campaign stop in Allentown, Pennsylvania yesterday, even touting a worker assistance program that exists in Massachusetts:

KEYES: The Senate is marking up three trade agreements right now, but Republicans are opposing assistance for workers whose jobs are shipped overseas. Is that assistance something you would support?

ROMNEY: I’m not familiar with the specific bill. I can tell you this –

KEYES: It’s the three trade agreements with South Korea –

ROMNEY: …I can tell you my experience in dealing with the issue, the very serious issue of people whose careers have been lost because industries are lost, is that in some respects the best way to help those folks is to, if you will, attach a bit of a bonus or a bounty to those who are unemployed for some period of time and let that money go to someone who actually hires them and puts them in a training program in their enterprise. I like people getting trained for actual jobs. And we did that in my state, we made it a $2,000 bonus that got attached to anyone who was unemployed for a year or more. That strikes me as an appropriate way to help get people back on their feet. I like helping individuals who’ve been out of work for a long time, whose industries have been decimated, and helping those folks get the skills they need to get better jobs is something that makes a lot of sense.

Watch it:

Though Romney didn’t endorse the TAA program specifically, his support for worker assistance of any kind runs counter to congressional Republicans, who are so opposed to the idea of providing aid to workers that they skipped the markup of the trade agreements yesterday afternoon.

But as with anything Romney supports today, it’s hard to know if he will continue supporting it tomorrow. Though he touts Massachusetts’ Worker Training Development Fund now, he attempted to veto $6.3 million out of its budget in 2006.