Farmers can tally the cost of crops left to rot as workers flee. Governments can calculate the loss of revenues when taxpayers flee. It’s harder to measure the price of a ruined business reputation or the value of investments lost or productivity lost as Alabamians stand in line for hours to prove their citizenship in any transaction with the government. Or what the state will ultimately spend fighting off an onslaught of lawsuits, or training and deploying police officers in the widening immigrant dragnet, or paying the cost of diverting scarce resources away from fighting real crimes.

A growing number of Alabamians say the price will be too high, and there is compelling evidence that they are right. Alabama is already at the low end of states in employment and economic vitality. . .

Its business-friendly reputation took a serious blow with the arrest in Tuscaloosa of a visiting Mercedes manager who was caught driving without his license and taken to jail as a potential illegal immigrant.

Sheldon Day, the mayor of Thomasville, has aggressively recruited foreign companies to his town, including a Chinese company — Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube Group — that plans to build a $100 million plant there, with more than 300 jobs.

Mayor Day is now worried about that project and future prospects. He was quoted by The Press-Register in Mobile as saying business inquiries had dried up since the law was passed. “I know the immigration issue is being used against us.”

Alabama’s competitors certainly won’t waste any time. After the Tuscaloosa incident, the editorial page of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch invited Mercedes to Missouri. “We are the Show-Me State,” it said, “not the ‘Show me your papers’ state.”

Considering that the immigration law enacted by Georgia this year is very similar to Alabama’s, you can ponder the possible costs to this state as well. It’s already been projected that the labor loss attributed to Georgia’s immigration law has had a financial impact of more than $400 million on the agriculture and restaurant/hospitality sectors of the local economy.

That’s billion, with a “B.”

You may have thought that no one could top that level of generosity to our under-privileged business community, but you would be wrong.  It was reported in today’s edition of the Mobile Press-Register that state and local governments in Alabama are putting together a package of financial incentives for a major corporation that will total $1.073 billion.  That’s also billion with a “B.”

Here’s how the newspaper reported it:

The Mobile County Industrial Development Authority voted Wednesday to increase the amount of property tax breaks for the ThyssenKrupp AG steel mill, pushing the total of local and state aid to the $5 billion complex above the $1 billion mark.

The authority, which can grant sales and property tax breaks to industrial projects in unincorporated areas of Mobile County, voted 3-0 to raise the total amount of tax abatements to almost $612 million over 20 years, up from the $444 million approved in 2007.

That first set of breaks was based on a $3.7 billion investment, not the $5 billion that ThyssenKrupp now plans to spend on its steel complex. State and local governments, including the authority, agreed to the abatements in the incentive agreement they signed with ThyssenKrupp in 2007.

“What we’re doing is just kind of truing up the numbers on the capital investment,” said Warren Matthews, a Montgomery lawyer who has handled ThyssenKrupp’s incentive talks.

The breaks now include $487 million in non-school property taxes and $125 million in sales taxes on construction material and equipment. Normally, companies can get property tax breaks for up to 10 years, but the Legislature passed a law when the state was courting ThyssenKrupp allowing big industrial projects to receive up to 20 years of property abatements.

State and local governments also agreed in 2007 to give ThyssenKrupp cash, training services and work worth $461 million. Combined with the increase in property tax abatements approved Wednesday, that pushes the total amount of state and local aid to $1.073 billion — far and away the largest incentive deal in Alabama history.

ThyssenKrupp currently employs just under 2,000 people with plans to create about 2,700 total jobs. Under the deal it signed with the state, the steelmaker has to get to 2,000 workers and maintain that employment for two years, or else give some of the money back.

At 2,700 employees, Alabama taxpayers will pay more than $400,000 per job. That’s almost seven years’ worth of the average salary of $58,037 per worker that ThyssenKrupp pledged in documents Wednesday.

Now that, by golly, is what you call corporate generosity.  It even surpasses the generosity displayed by our former governor, Sonny Perdue, towards a Korean auto company several years ago.

When Perdue was first elected governor in 2002, one of the unresolved issues he had to deal with was the finalization of an agreement between the state and DaimlerChrysler for the location of an auto assembly plant on a state-owned site in Chatham County.

Outgoing governor Roy Barnes had pulled together a package of financial incentives to persuade the German-American automaker to open a factory that would employ 3,400 people.  Shortly before he was sworn in as governor, Perdue was given the details of the Barnes package:  it was worth $320 million, which amounted to $96,000 per job.

“When Sonny read the secret details of the contract, his jaw hit the floor,” Perdue’s communications director, Dan McLagan, said.  “However, the state had made a commitment. All we could do was honor it while muttering under our breath, ‘Never again, never again.’”

“Never again,” as it turned out, didn’t really mean never again.

Fast forward to the year 2006. DaimlerChrysler had decided it would not move ahead with that auto assembly plant.  Perdue was running for a second term as governor and anxious to close a major deal that would bring economic development to the state.  On a Tuesday afternoon in March of that year, Perdue formally announced the state had reached an agreement to give Kia Motors a package of incentives worth $410 million to open a factory in West Point that would employ 2,500 people.

Perdue’s package averaged out to more than $160,000 per employee – about 70 percent higher, on a per-job basis, than the Barnes offer to DaimlerChrysler that supposedly caused Perdue’s jaw to “hit the floor.”

Perdue then had the chutzpah to tell reporters at the news conference announcing the Kia deal that the state had not overpaid to bring that factory to Georgia. “We have never tried to buy businesses and we didn’t in this instance,” Perdue said.

Yes, of course.  And your check is in the mail.

At the time, it looked like Perdue had set a record for corporate generosity that would never be broken in our lifetimes, but the elected officials of Alabama have now stepped up to the plate and opened up their coffers even wider.

Of course, the folks in Alabama have never hesitated to lay out the big money in hopes of some future financial return.  Remember, it was local officials in Jefferson County (Birmingham) who got fleeced by a pack of Wall Street speculators and saddled the county with debts totaling more than $5 billion when they built a new sewer system.  It was also in Alabama where, according to a federal indictment, a group of lobbyists were allegedly promising as much as $2 million apiece to persuade some legislators to vote for the legalization of electronic bingo.

Here in Georgia, we’ve obviously got some catching up to do.

It will more than likely win overwhelming approval from Georgia’s voters; I’d be surprised if more than 40 percent of the votes go against it.

With that vote, Georgia will have heeded George W. Bush’s call to protect the “sanctity of marriage” by denying the benefits of the institution to any couples that don’t include at least one man and one woman.

Such a vote would put Georgia on the same side of that divisive social issue as most of the 50 states. But it would also put the state on the wrong side of history.

The demographics and social forces in America are moving slowly but inevitably toward the legalization of same-sex marriages. Several states and cities across the country have allowed same-sex couples to join together either in full marriage or civil union. Major corporations, many of them doing business in Georgia, are granting insurance coverage and other “domestic partner” benefits to employees who happen to be gay. While a majority of Americans now tell pollsters they oppose gay marriage, that opposition is strongest among the older segments of the population. Among people under the age of 40, tolerance of same-sex couples is growing.

As many commentators have pointed out, the arguments used against the legalization of gay marriage are virtually identical to the arguments used many decades ago against interracial marriages. Back in 1911, Georgia Congressman Seaborn Roddenberry proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have banned interracial marriages and said, “Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit. It is abhorrent and repugnant. It is subversive to social peace. It is destructive of moral supremacy, and ultimately this slavery to black beasts will bring this nation to a fatal conflict.” That language would sound very familiar to anyone following the current debate on gay marriage.

Society’s position on sensitive issues like this can change, and that change can happen quickly. In 1958, the Gallup organization conducted its first poll on the issue of interracial marriage and found that 94 percent of the white respondents were opposed to these marriages. Just nine years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state laws prohibiting interracial marriages were unconstitutional (at one time, such unions were illegal in 41 states).

I was correct in predicting that the anti-gay marriage amendment would be approved by Georgia’s voters, although I overestimated the percentage who would vote against it. When the ballots were tallied that November, 76.2 percent of the state’s voters approved the amendment and only 23.8 percent voted against it.

The march of time, however, has showed that Georgia was indeed on the wrong side of history, voting to uphold a prohibition against its gay citizens that slowly but surely is being eliminated in other jurisdictions.

The latest developments this week came from the White House, where President Barack Obama instructed Justice Department attorneys to stop defending in court the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which puts the prohibition against same-sex marriages into federal law.

Coincidentally, in the state of Obama’s birth, Hawaiian Gov. Neil Abercrombie this week signed a law that provides for same-sex civil unions and gives gay and lesbian couples the same state rights as married partners.

Starting next Jan. 1, Hawaii will become the seventh state to allow civil unions or similar legal recognition of gay couples. Same-sex marriage is legal in five other states and the District of Columbia.