While the most controversial parts of the law are on hold, including a section that would require police officers who are enforcing other laws to question the immigration status of those they suspect are in the country illegally; the federal government has won an injunction blocking the provisions and Arizona is awaiting a decision on its appeal.
Civil rights groups organized a boycott to slow the state's economy, and to deter other states from following suit. After Arizona voters approved the law, groups called on people not to fly Tempe-based US Airways or rent trucks from Phoenix-based U-Haul. There even was talk of fighting Major League Baseball's plans for holding the All Star Game in Phoenix next year.
But, seven months after Senate Bill 1070, the boycott's effects are coming into focus, showing it has been a disruptive force but nowhere near as crippling as originally feared.
Most protests haven't come to fruition. A spokeswoman for US Airways said the company saw no effect from the boycott call, and a U-Haul International executive said the same thing.
The state's economy hasn't come to a screeching halt — as some who organized the boycott hoped. In fact, more people went to the Grand Canyon this summer than last year, and more stayed in Arizona's hotels and resorts.
But businesses have lost lucrative contracts and conventions have relocated, performers called off concerts, and cities and counties in about a dozen states passed resolutions to avoid doing business with Arizona.
Observers believe the irony of the boycott is that it has hurt those it was meant to defend — the Hispanic work force.
"I don't think it really meets their objectives of trying to help people in the Hispanic community, for example, or the average working person," said one business owner, anonymously, explaining that many Hispanics lost their jobs in the hospitality industry when hotels had to cut back on their employees.
A report released Thursday by the Center for American Progress, a group which opposed Arizona’s hard-lined approach to illegal immigration, says the boycott has cost the state $141 million in lost meeting and convention business since Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed the law in April, and that the state will receive an overall hit of over $750 million.
Russell Pearce, the Arizona Republican State Senator who sponsored the law to encourage illegal immigrants to leave the state, dismissed the report as “fiction” and said illegal immigrants were costing the state billions.
“I get tired of this,” he told reporters. “Arizona is not the bad guy. Arizona didn’t make illegal illegal. We’re enforcing the law.”