Hispanic families have been fleeing Alabama in droves and thousands of children have been too terrorized to show up for school in the wake of a federal judge’s decision last week to allow the state’s harshest-in-the-nation anti-immigrant law could go into effect.

No group has been more outraged and vocally opposed to the law than Alabama’s farmers, who say that without the immigrant farm labor they depend on, they will soon be forced out of business. The exodus of immigrants has already created a labor shortage, and farmers say crops are rotting in the field and they are in danger of losing their farms. As in many other states, undocumented workers are the backbone of Alabama’s agriculture industry.

But farmers’ pleas fell on deaf ears when they spoke recently to the bill’s sponsor, Alabama state Sen. Scott Beason (R). Beason stood firmly behind the law, arguing that it would help free up jobs for Alabamians in a state suffering from high unemployment. The farmers were quick to tell him that immigrants are the only ones willing to do this kind of back-breaking field labor. One farmer even challenged Beason to try the work himself if he was so confident immigrants could be easily replaced:

Tomato farmer Brian Cash said the migrant workers who would normally be on Chandler Mountain have gone to other states with less restrictive laws.

After talking with farmers at the tomato shed, Beason visited the Smith family’s farm. Leroy Smith, Chad Smith’s father, challenged the senator to pick a bucket full of tomatoes and experience the labor-intensive work.

Beason declined but promised to see what could be done to help farmers while still trying to keep illegal immigrants out of Alabama.

Smith threw down the bucket he offered Beason and said, “There, I figured it would be like that.”

Farmers have every reason to be angry — many of them say that because of Beason’s law they’ll be out of business by next year. Chad Smith said his family would normally have 12 trucks working the fields on Monday, but only had the workers for three. “The tomatoes are rotting on the vine, and there is very little we can do,” he said, estimating that his family could lose up to $150,000 this season. Likewise, Lana Boatwright said she and her husband had used the same crews for more than a decade, but only eight of the 48 workers they needed showed up after the law took effect.

Americans for Immigration Reform predicted in 2008 that if all undocumented immigrants were removed from Alabama, the state would lose $2.6 billion in economic activity, $1.1 billion in gross state products, and approximately 17,819 jobs, even accounting for adequate market adjustment time. Experts estimate that around 75 percent of the nation’s seasonal agricultural workers are unauthorized immigrants. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, 95,000 unauthorized immigrants worked in Alabama in 2009 and 2010, making up about 4.2 percent of the labor force.

Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law allows police to racially profile and pull over anyone they suspect might be in the country illegally, and blatantly violates children’s constitutional right to an education by forcing schools to check children’s immigration status before they can be enrolled.

Swept up in the craze of preventing widespread voter fraud that doesn’t actually exist, Tennessee Republicans passed a voter identification law this year that they claimed would put an end to fraud and ensure fair elections. Like similar laws in other states, Tennessee’s version has come under scrutiny from voting rights advocates, civil rights groups like the NAACP and ACLU, and even Democratic senators, who oppose the laws because they will disenfranchise poor, elderly, and minority voters who are less likely to have photo IDs.

The state now has evidence that that will be the case. Dorothy Cooper, a 96-year-old Chattanooga resident who says she has voted in every election but one since she became eligible to vote, wanted to ensure she’d have the necessary ID to vote in next year’s elections, when Tennessee’s law goes into effect. But when she went to apply for the ID, she was denied, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reports:

That morning, Cooper slipped a rent receipt, a copy of her lease, her voter registration card and her birth certificate into a Manila envelope. Typewritten on the birth certificate was her maiden name, Dorothy Alexander.

“But I didn’t have my marriage certificate,” Cooper said Tuesday afternoon, and that was the reason the clerk said she was denied a free voter ID at the Cherokee Boulevard Driver Service Center.

“I don’t know what difference it makes,” Cooper said.

Cooper doesn’t have a driver’s license — she never learned to drive — and has never needed identification to vote, and her lack of a valid marriage license is likely due to the fact that she’s outlived two husbands. Under the Tennessee law, Cooper will still be able to vote via absentee ballot, which does not require photo ID. But standing outside her normal voting precinct, Cooper told the Times Free Press she will miss going there to vote. “We always come here to vote,” Cooper said. “The people who run the polls know everybody here.”

In preparation for the 2012 election, GOP state lawmakers launched what former President Bill Clinton described as the most determined voter disenfranchisement effort since Jim Crow. The centerpiece of this effort are so-called “voter ID” laws, which could prevent millions of voters from casting a ballot in 2012. Moreover, because the voters disenfranchised by voter ID are disproportionately minorities, students and low-income voters — all demographics that tend to vote for Democrats — the overall effect of these laws is to skew the electorate towards Republicans.

Voter ID laws are also illegal. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act forbids state voting restrictions that have a greater impact on minority voters than on others. There is, however, a catch. According to one of the nation’s top voting rights experts, before DOJ can bring a lawsuit challenging this illegal voter disenfranchisement, it must first allow voters to be disenfranchised:

“In order to bring a Section 2 case, you’d have to as a practical matter show two things. One, that there’s a significant racial disparity and two, that the burden of getting an ID is significant enough for us to care about,” Samuel Bagenstos, who was until recently the number two official in the Civil Rights Division, told TPM.

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Indiana voter ID case also suggests the court would be skeptical of a Section 2 case. And regardless of how the courts would find, any Section 2 case would almost certainly have to wait until after the 2012 election, since the evidence that the laws were discriminatory “can only be gathered during an election that takes place when the law is enacted,” Bagenstos said.

Sadly, the picture is even worse than Bagenstos suggests. If voter ID laws succeed in changing the result of the 2012 presidential election, than the next Attorney General will literally owe their job to their continued existence — hardly a recipe for vigorous enforcement of voting rights laws. Worse, the new Congress could very well owe its majority to voter disenfranchisement, and it could even repeal the Voting Rights Act outright if this law threatened their ability to remain in office.

The drafters of the Voting Rights Act anticipated this very problem, and they responded to it with Second 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 5 requires many states to “preclear” any new voting rules with a federal court or the Department of Justice, but it faces its own problem. Two years ago, the Supreme Court’s conservatives strongly hinted that they may strike down the provision of the VRA requiring many states to preclear new voting laws, and another recent case dealing with race discrimination in the workplace raises the — albeit less likely — possibility that they could also invalidate the VRA’s ban on laws that have a disproportionate impact on minorities.

So if DOJ acts now, they could run headlong into many of the same justices that brought us Bush v. Gore. If DOJ waits, then the fate of our democracy could rest in the hands of U.S. Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. None of this means that DOJ should hesitate one second to block illegal voter ID laws under Section 5 when it has the opportunity to do so, but it does mean that the American people may effectively be powerless against a widespread effort to rig our future elections.