Farmers have complained in recent weeks that their crops are rotting in the fields and orchards because migrant workers afraid of deportation are bypassing Georgia in droves, even though the law doesn’t take effect until July 1.
Deal, who signed the legislation last month and has been a strong supporter of immigration reform, said he wants to get beyond anecdotal evidence and look at actual numbers.
As Stephen Taylor points out at OTB, it would have been nice to look at the numbers before the legislation passed, but Republicans were in a too big a rush to verify their brown-hating bona fides.
Meanwhile, over in Alabama, a new law that makes it a crime to give an illegal immigrant a ride and requires schools to verify the immigration status of students was probably passed after careful study of that law’s impact on chicken processing plants and orchards.