ThinkProgress has noted the hardly unsurprising fact that HB 56, Alabama’s draconian anti-immigrant law, has caused Hispanic children to be subjected to increased bullying in the state’s public schools, so it’s not a stretch to imagine that drop-out rates within Alabama’s Hispanic community have risen as students no longer feel welcome. It’s easy to see that the harsh enforcement of the HB 56 legislation is inappropriate in an educational setting; in fact, members of the Birmingham Board of Education passed a resolution last year to oppose HB 56 for this very reason.

Last week, a U.S. Justice Department official added to the mounting criticism of HB 56, saying the harsh legislation has already had “lasting” negative effects on the state’s Hispanic students. Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, head of the federal department’s Civil Rights Division, addressed a strongly-worded letter to Alabama’s education department on HB 56′s consequences for school children:

Hispanic students absence rates tripled while absence rates for other groups of students remained virtually flat. [...] The rate of total withdrawals of Hispanic children substantially increased, with 13.4% of such children having dropped out between the beginning of the current school year and this February.

As Perez goes on to point out, the Constitution guarantees immigrant students’ right to an education — and even on top of that, nearly 99% of all of Alabama’s K-12 public school students are, in fact, U.S. citizens. After conducting interviews with students, parents, and teachers in the state’s public school districts, the DOJ official has determined that many school children of Hispanic origin feel “unwelcome in schools they had attended for years” regardless of their immigration status.

Just as Perez makes clear, the harmful HB 56 legislation has already begun to do its damage. In order to prevent even more negative effects on Alabama’s children — both immigrants and U.S. citizens — it has to go immediately.

The harm from Alabama’s extreme anti-immigrant law has been obvious for months: children denied benefits and scared away from school, families denied water in their homes, crops left to rot without enough workers. The clear damage from HB 56 should have spurred officials in Alabama to work to change the far-reaching immigration enforcement provisions soon after the law went into effect last fall. Lawmakers in the Alabama House and Senate opened the legislative session in February by proposing changes to HB 56, to no avail.

Now, months after they should have acted, Alabama legislators finally introduced a rewrite of HB 56 to address the immigration bill’s severe flaws — only to add another provision that makes the bill even worse:

Long-promised revisions to the state’s controversial immigration law were filed Thursday afternoon, with one significantly expanding provisions allowing officers to detain those they have “reasonable suspicion” of being in the country unlawfully.

Under the current law, police could apply “reasonable suspicion” to the individual arrested or cited during a traffic stop. The new bill would allow law enforcement to detain anyone else in the vehicle.

Police would only be able to ask about a person’s immigration status during traffic citations or arrests instead of at any stop, but this is still an invasive addition to the law to allow police to question anyone in a car, not just the driver. Todd Stacy, spokesman for House Speaker Mike Hubbard (R), said law enforcement officials requested the expanded interpretation of “reasonable suspicion.”

To be fair, the rewrite of HB 56 also revises two of the most troublesome provisions of the original law. The rewrite changes a “business transactions” provision that had been used to prevent people who could not prove their legal status from receiving utilities like water and gas. Under the revised bill, people will only be asked to prove their citizenship when applying for a car tag, business license, or driver’s license. The changes also eliminate a provision that required schools to collect enrolling students’ immigration status, which had scared children into not going to school when the law first went into effect.

But taking out the worst of the enforcement measures in HB 56 — provisions that courts have already suspended — does not change the damage the state has already seen because of HB 56. One study estimates that Alabama could lose more than 100,000 jobs and billions in GDP because of the immigration law.

Despite the problems, Republican officials yesterday emphasized that the tweaks would not change the purpose of HB 56. “The essence of the law will not change: Anyone living and working in Alabama must be here legally,” Gov. Robert Bentley (R) said. And Hubbard scoffed at the idea of removing such a harmful law from the books entirely. “Some activist groups don’t have a problem with illegal immigration and will only be happy if the law is repealed,” he said. “That’s not going to happen.”

HB 56 is hurting the state’s residents as well as its image to the rest of the world. Fully repealing the bill would be the best option — several lawmakers introduced a bill to do just that — and taking out some of the most harmful provisions helps. But adding another layer to HB 56 that puts more people at risk of being profiled is a big step backwards.

The Mississippi House passed an anti-immigrant bill on Thursday, putting the state one step closer to having a controversial, Alabama-style immigration policy. Gov. Phil Bryant (R) has endorsed this measure to deal with what he calls the nation’s “massive, uncontrolled” immigration policy,” and will likely sign it if the Senate passes it as well.

Lawmakers took out several controversial provisions before approving the bill 70-47, including one that required schools collect data on a new student’s immigration status and another that allowed officers to ask a person’s immigration status during a traffic stop. After HB 488 had failed at first, a Republican took out a provision that could have let public utilities refuse service to undocumented immigrants — a federal judge recently blocked the same policy in Alabama — so that legislators would approve it. And before debate had started, they stripped a clause that would have allowed police to arrest people for not carrying identification. But the changes were not enough for opponents of the bill, no matter how many times supporters insisted it was a good measure:

House Judiciary B Committee Chairman Andy Gipson, a Braxton Republican, denied opponents’ claims that the measure was racist or immoral, saying it was about enforcing the law. Gipson said he tried to craft a bill that would survive court challenges and allow charity toward migrants.

“It’s about the rule of law,” he told House members. “We want to say you’re welcome here, we just want you to follow the proper procedures, the proper protocols.”

Opponents warned families would be shattered by deportations and that the bill would reinforce outsiders’ stereotypes of Mississippi.

“If we pass this bill, it will set Mississippi back 60 years,” said Rep. Sonya Williams-Barnes, D-Gulfport. “Let us show America we are not the narrow-minded people they say we are.”

Williams-Barnes is right. No matter how many tweaks legislators make, this is still a bad, discriminatory policy that unfairly targets immigrants. Taking out the absolute worst provisions does not change the fact that this bill is designed to make the lives of undocumented immigrants unbearable in Mississippi so that they’ll leave. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Becky Currie (R), has said the goal of the immigration policy is to ensure that all workers are legal, but she clearly has not learned from Alabama’s mistake.

By making the state hostile to immigrants, Alabama is facing billions in economic losses and thousands of jobs gone. Farmers lost their crops without enough workers, and families have suffered greatly.

If the Mississippi Senate does not pass this immigration bill, then the state has a chance to avoid Alabama’s fate. Because as one immigration advocate asked, “Can Mississippi afford such a law?” The state should not have to learn the answer.

Previously, the Eleventh Circuit court of appeals blocked several parts of Alabama’s immigration law, including a provision requiring teachers or principals to determine the immigration status of their students. Today, a Federal appeals court blocked two more sections of the law, known as H.B. 56:

A federal appeals court on Thursday temporarily blocked two sections of Alabama’s tough new law targeting illegal immigration pending the outcome of legal challenges.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order blocking a section that says courts can’t enforce contracts involving illegal immigrants and another that makes it a felony for an illegal immigrant to do business with the state.

Alabama’s law was challenged last year by both the federal government and a coalition of activist groups, and the cases have been appealed to the 11th Circuit. A three-judge panel in that court heard arguments in the case last week but said it won’t rule on the challenges to Alabama’s law and another in Georgia until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on a federal challenge to a similar law in Arizona.

As defined in Alabama’s law, denial of business transactions with undocumented immigrants meant that families could not get water in their homes, and they were not even allowed to do something as simple as get a library card. Even children who were U.S. citizens were unable to get food stamps,

The same provisions could have made it so that it would have been illegal to rent to an undocumented immigrant. No other state or nation has a ban like Alabama’s against contracts.

In an interview with the AP, Sam Brooke from the Southern Poverty Law Center, who argued before the court last week, said “We are very pleased that the Eleventh Circuit understood the harms these provisions were causing in Alabama, and saw fit to enjoin them… This is a great day for the residents of our state.”

The order handed down today, which can be read in full here, is more wide-reaching than any previous court decision. And while Alabama has considered new legislation that would change H.B. 56, none has made it very far.

The Governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, has already acknowledged that the law “need[ed] revision.” But ThinkProgress has argued that the law should be repealed. This ruling proves even more how important repeal is.

Over and over, the damage from HB 56, Alabama’s extreme immigration law, has been documented. But the clear warning signs against the policy that targets undocumented immigrants have not stopped Mississippip lawamkers from supporting a proposed bill that would implement a harmful immigration law modeled after Alabama’s unconstitutional law. Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) publicly threw his support behind the measure on Wednesday:

Governor Phil Bryant believes not enough has been done locally or nationally to deal with what he calls a “massive, uncontrolled” immigration policy.

“Perhaps it’s boat-rocking time in Mississippi,” Gov. Bryant said Wednesday at the State Capitol, surrounded by other supporters of House Bill 488. [...]

“There is a way to get a temporary worker here in the U.S. The people we’re talking about don’t want to go through that process,” Gov. Bryant said.

One House committee has already approved the measure. Rep. Becky Currie (R), the bill’s sponsor, has brushed off concerns about the measure. “This is just a way of saying you’re welcome to live in our country; you’re welcome to work in our country, but be legal,” she said. “That’s all we’re asking. Be legal.”

But Currie’s legislation mirrors Alabama’s law in that it seeks to create an enviroment so hostile to undocumented immigrants that they flee the state. In Alabama, the result of that exodus could cost the state billions in GDP losses and thousands of lost jobs. With similar effects likely in Mississippi, Bill Chandler, executive director of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, said it would hurt the state far more than it would help. He asked, “Can Mississippi afford such a law?”

Since HB 56, Alabama’s extreme immigration law, went into effect last fall, children stayed home from school out of fear that their parents would be deported, and U.S.-born children have been denied food stamps because of their parents’ immigration status. Public utility companies denied service to anyone who did not provide ID to prove they were legally in the U.S. Farmers watched their crops rot in the fields after their workers left Alabama. In all, one study shows that the damage from HB 56 could end up costing Alabama about 100,000 jobs and billions in GDP losses.

After officials began enforcing HB 56, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) set up a hotline for Alabama residents to report how the law affected them. Thousands of calls poured in, and the SPLC has collected some of the most egregious stories: undocumented immigrants denied pay, U.S. citizens harassed because they look like immigrants, a family surviving without water in their home. “The result is a crisis that harkens back to the bleakest days of Alabama’s racial history,” according to the report, which highlights 10 of these stories:

[The stories] illustrate the devastating impact HB 56 has had on Alabama Latinos, regardless of their immigration status. The stories also illustrate that HB 56 has unleashed a kind of vigilantism, leading some Alabamians to believe they can cheat, harass and intimidate Latinos with impunity. These consequences were easily foreseeable.

The law was forged within a legislative debate rife with stereotypes, misinformation, incendiary rhetoric and bigotry. The Senate sponsor told colleagues they needed to “empty the clip” to deal with immigrants. The House sponsor, Rep. Micky Hammon, cited the increase in Alabama’s Latino population to illustrate the growth of the state’s undocumented population. Hammon’s conflation of “Hispanic” with “illegal immigrant” during the legislative debate was so egregious that a federal judge cited it in a recent opinion.

When legislators supporting HB 56 can’t distinguish between ethnicity and immigration status, it should be no surprise the law brings the chaos and confusion described in the following pages. As the Latinos whose stories are told here can attest, HB 56 has been a dangerous, failed experiment—a humanitarian disaster.

“There is no fixing this law,” said SPLC legal director Mary Bauer. “It does not need to be re-written or tweaked at the margins, as some Alabama legislators have suggested. It should be repealed.” State Sen. Billy Beasley (D) described the repeal effort as an “uphill battle.” Three other senators are supporting Beasley’s proposed legislation that would repeal the bill entirely, and a Republican state senator has introduced a bill that would repeal some of the worst parts of the law.

Alabama lawmakers have had a few months to see the irrevocable damage HB 56 has already done to their state. Gov. Robert Bentley (R) should have called a special session sooner for the legislators to do something about this harmful immigration law, but the SPLC’s new report simply highlights how necessary it is that legislators roll back at least the worst parts of HB 56, if not the entire law — and soon.

Because a portion of Alabama’s harmful immigration law makes it a felony for undocumented immigrants to enter into a “business transaction” with the state, some public utility companies have interpreted this measure so broadly that they have prevented undocumented immigrants from receiving water or power at their homes. And a library has even required people show proof of citizenship before they can sign up for a library card because of the “business transactions” provision.

Now U.S.-born children with undocumented immigrant parents even have been denied food stamps because of this portion of the anti-immigrant law. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reports that five people have called the group’s hotline to report that they were denied food stamps under the law because of their immigration status even though the benefits are for their American citizen children. SPLC President Richard Cohen said the civil rights group is considering suing the state over the denial of food stamps because of the “business transactions” portion in HB 56. Barry Spear, a spokesman for Alabama’s Department of Human Services, told Yahoo News that demanding proof of citizenship from the guardians of Americans who need food stamps is not the agency’s policy. “We are unaware of any violations of the policy,” Spear said.

But last month, Kansas changed its food aid program to deny benefits to children who are citizens if their parents are undocumented, removing more than 1,000 mixed families. “This policy not only hurts these families, it hurts us, too, especially because we’re talking about U.S. citizen children,” said Elena Morales, who works at El Center, an anti-poverty agency in Kansas City.

In the U.S., roughly 4.5 million American citizens under 18 years old have at least one undocumented parent, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. So while undocumented immigrants cannot access most welfare programs, their children are still able to access the programs as citizens. Policies like the one in Kansas and the interpretation of Alabama’s immigration law only serves to harm these American citizens who, through no fault of their own, happen to have undocumented parents.

When Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) and Attorney General Luther Strange (R) both called for changes to the state’s anti-immigrant law last year, it was a hopeful sign that the state might roll back the law’s most harmful effects. According to one projection, the state GDP could decline by $2.3 to $10.8 billion because of HB 56, and the state could lose up to 140,000 jobs.

And state Sen. Gerald Dial (R) agreed with the governor and attorney general and other legislators who called for changes to the law. “It’s just common sense. Let’s step up and say we’ve made some mistakes,” Dial said in November. Now he has filed a bill that proposes some of the broadest changes to HB 56 that, while far from perfect, would address some of the most harmful aspects of HB 56:

• Would Not Require Schools To Collect Data: Dial’s bill removes a provision that requires schools to collect data about the citizenship or legal resident status of newly enrolled students. Following the implementation of HB 56, schools reported a spike in absenteeism among Latino students because some current students feared that their parents could be deported if they were asked about their citizenship.
• Redefines “Business Transaction”: HB 56 includes a measure that prevents the state from entering into a “business transaction” with undocumented immigrants. Some public utility companies took this to mean that they could not provide service to anyone who cannot prove they are a citizen or legally in the United States. It effectively made it a felony for undocumented immigrants to take a bath in their own homes. Dial’s bill redefines “business transaction” more narrowly to include issues related to driver’s licenses or non-driver identification cards, license plates, or business licenses.

Dial’s bill also repeals a provision that would deny bail to undocumented immigrants, but he does not propose any changes to a section of the law that requires Alabama police officers “to ask for immigration papers from anyone they come in contact with who looks or sounds foreign.” The Supreme Court will hold a hearing this spring on SB 1070, Arizona’s extreme immigration law with the same “papers, please” requirement as Alabama’s law.

Fully repealing the state’s immigration law — Democrats have filed bills in the Alabama House and Senate to do just that –would be the best option for Alabama. But that option is unlikely while Republicans control the Alabama legislature along with a Republican governor. Nevertheless, Dial’s bills are an important admission that the state erred when enacted HB 56′s declaration of war on immigrants — the state should not hesitate one second before rolling back as much of the law as it can.

In an interview with ThinkProgress yesterday, Kris Kobach, the anti-immigrant Kansas secretary of state who drafted Arizona and Alabama’s harmful immigration laws, claimed that his handiwork leads to no harmful effect on state economies. “I don’t think there is any negative impact,” Kobach claimed. “I think the studies have yielded one overwhelming conclusion and is that unemployment drops when states develop some of these laws.”

The facts are not on Kobach’s side, however. Numerous studies and reports have shown the economic harm from HB 56, Alabama’s anti-immigrant law. Farmers are losing their crops or not planting as much because they don’t have workers, and even the state’s own governor has said that the state’s dropping unemployment rate cannot be pegged on the immigration law.

In the fall, preliminary research from the Center for Business and Economic Research showed that, conservatively, HB 56 could cost the state $40 million. Now that the researcher behind that original estimate has had more time to study the law’s full impact, however, he concludes that this initial estimate is far too low. According to a new study, Alabama’s law will cost the state up to 140,000 direct and indirect jobs. And state GDP losses could total $2.3 to $10.8 billion and reduce local sales taxes by $20.0 to $93.1 million.

One key problem is any benefit for businesses from the exodus of immigrants is counteracted by the loss of demand. And the report points out that clearly legal residents are not filling all the jobs left behind:

It is generally accepted that unauthorized immigrants work for low wages. As such, the absence of illegal immigrants is likely to improve competitiveness for businesses that found it extremely difficult to compete because they do not use such labor. This might make the business climate attractive for out-of-state businesses that do not use illegal immigrant labor to consider relocating to the state. Such benefits for some businesses do not translate into a benefit for the aggregate economy because they cannot fully make up for the reduced demand caused by the absence of unauthorized immigrant workers.

It is also argued that illegal immigrants take jobs that should have gone to citizens and other legal residents. If that were true, farmers and businesses that employed these workers and other business interests as well should not have complained about the law especially given the state’s high unemployment rate. There was very little worker substitution and most of the few that considered the jobs previously performed by unauthorized immigrant workers did not have the requisite skills and productivity. With a focus on preparing the workforce for high-skill, high-wage and fast-growing jobs, it is unreasonable to expect people to flock to lower wage jobs that are performed under tough conditions.

Backers of Alabama’s law and similar versions in Arizona, South Carolina, and Georgia will continue to argue that making conditions horrible for undocumented immigrants so that they, in Mitt Romney‘s words, “self-deport,” will be a boon for the economy. But as reports tally the economic damage in Alabama, these supporters are only burying their heads in the sand to avoid the economic ruin that follows in these anti-immigrant laws’ wake.