By The Editors

A new study released last week and the recent rejection by the Arizona Senate of proposed legislation as harsh as the controversial measure it enacted last year may represent a critical turn in the furious debate over illegal immigration.

The report asserts that undocumented immigrants make a substantial positive economic contribution to Arizona’s economy and that any attempt to deport them would produce “devastating economic consequences” that would cost the state nearly 600,000 jobs and shrink the state economy by nearly $49 billion.

The point of the study, “A Rising Tide or A Shrinking Pie: The Economic Impact of Legalization versus Deportation,” is to prove that, as it states, Arizona’s currently punitive immigration policy “is economically self-destructive.” By contrast, it asserts, policies which enable undocumented immigrants to over time become legal citizens could substantially boost the state’s economy.

The study was produced by the Center for American Progress, , a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., and it seeks to disprove the widespread belief that undocumented immigrants are a drain on the nation’s and the states’ economies.

On the contrary, says Professor Raul Hinojosa Ojeda, of the University of California at Los Angeles, one of the report’s authors, undocumented immigrants perform a dynamic and productive economic role. They “don’t simply ‘fill” jobs; they create jobs,” the report states. “Through the work they perform, the money they spend, and the taxes they pay, undocumented immigrants sustain the jobs of many other workers in the U.S. economy, immigrants and native-born alike. Were undocumented immigrants to suddenly vanish, the jobs of many Americans would.”

The report could be one sign that the impact of dollars and cents may be injecting a dose of common sense into the immigration debate in state legislatures across the country – as underscored by new developments in Arizona.

There, in mid-March the state senate, whose enactment last year of a harsh measure intended to drive undocumented immigrants from the state precipitated a national controversy and a legal confrontation with the Obama administration, rejected five proposed bills of similar intent.

Its action followed a pattern in several other state legislatures which last year were boiling with heated demands from conservative legislators to crack down on illegal immigration but in which this year such measures have either been tabled or defeated outright.

For example, in Kansas two bills that, respectively, would have denied in-state tuition for children of undocumented immigrants at schools of higher learning and would have compelled government agencies to aggressively search for undocumented immigrants were bottled up in House and Senate committees, respectively.

Earlier this year similar harsh measures were defeated or tabled in the Virginia, Colorado and Kentucky legislatures.

By no means do these developments mean the virulent sentiment on the right against undocumented immigrants has disappeared; nor that conservative legislators have given up their efforts to maneuver draconian measures into law. But the dramatic negative impact on Arizona’s economic well-being caused by the state legislature’s enactment of S.B. 1070 last year has clearly marked out the literal cost of the extremist position on illegal immigration for all to consider.

The scope of that impact began to be felt in Arizona almost immediately last spring in the form of cancellations of conventions and business meetings, a decline in tourism bookings and proposed boycotts of Arizona company products by organizations and municipal governments across the country. A report, also sponsored by the Center for American Progress and released in December determined that the state had suffered a loss of $45 million in direct lodging revenues, and another $141 million in ancillary revenues that hotel stays produce. However, the report went on to state that in fact the total economic damage was even more extensive: 2,800 in lost jobs; $86 million in lost wages; more than $9 million in lost tax revenues that was part of a total lost economic output of $253 million.

Business leaders there have gotten the message. This month a coalition of 60 leading executives from major farming companies, hospitals, construction and technology companies and other major businesses sent a polite but pointed letter to Republican Senate President Russell Pearce expressing their concern that the “unintended consequences” of S.B. 1070 and the harsh rhetoric of its proponents are “adversely impacting our already struggling economy and costing us jobs. … It is an undeniable fact that each of our companies and our employees were impacted by the boycotts and coincident negative image.”

Political analysts in the state said the letter from the state’s most prominent business leaders signals the business lobby’s intent to prevent the immigration debate from causing further economic harm to the state, which could be both a moderating influence on legislative actions in individual states and a prod to Congress and the Obama administration to tackle the issue at the national level in earnest.