But the law unleashed a flurry of unintended consequences, many of them damaging to the state’s economy or embarrassing to its image. It suffered a backlash from law enforcement, which did not appreciate legislators dictating their priorities, and from two of Alabama’s most powerful business constituencies — agriculture and auto manufacturing — seriously undermining support for the law.
Initially, HB 56 succeeded in driving undocumented immigrants out of the state in droves. This exodus laid bare the rarely acknowledged fact that farms in Alabama, as in most states, depend on cheap labor from undocumented immigrants. Deprived of many of their workers, farmers lashed out against the law, and Republicans in the state started having second thoughts.
Then, in a widely publicized, awkward incident in November of 2011, cops in Alabama stopped a Mercedes Benz executive driving a rental car and were forced, under the new law’s provisions, to arrest him when he couldn’t produce acceptable ID. The executive was driving near Tuscaloosa, where Mercedes Benz has a manufacturing plant — Alabama, like many Southern states, has bent over backward in recent decades to attract foreign automakers by giving them generous tax breaks and other incentives.
