Alabama’s Immigration Law, 36 Days Later

80% - Percent increase in Latino children absent to school on Monday, October 31 compared to last year’s average.
25% – Percent of construction workers in Alabama thought to have left the state since HB 56 went into effect, seven months after tornadoes devastated many Alabama towns.
3,000+ – Number of calls an Alabama civil rights group has received over to their emergency hotline since HB56 was enacted.
10% - Success rate of busing unemployed workers to farm fields to replace workers who left.
860% - Amount by which undocumented immigrants were more productive in the tomato fields than their replacements.
$5.5 Billion – Size of Alabama’s agricultural industry.
$130 Million – Amount in taxes undocumented immigrants paid in Alabama in 2010

The U.S. Justice Department has demanded that Alabama schools begin to gather data on attendance and withdrawals since the law was implemented in order to better measure the effects of the law. The response from the Alabama attorney general has been to question the authority of the federal government to ask for such data.