the value of just the continued presence of illegal immigrants in Arizona.

It is certainly not surprising that FAIR would criticize the report since its whole purpose is to encourage a reduction in all immigration, legal and illegal.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is a non-profit tax exempt organization in the United States that advocates changes in U.S. immigration policy that would result in significant reductions in immigration, both legal and illegal.

In December 2007, FAIR was designated a "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_for_American_Immigration_Reform

Hinojosa-Ojeda said the report -- one of seven states studied by the center -- aims to "strip away" misconceptions about the contributions illegal immigrants make. He said arguments that large-scale deportation will help the economy have "no basis in reality" and that advocates should stop cloaking their anti-immigration sentiments in economic arguments.

But Mehlman (spokesperson for FAIR) challenged the notion that the state economy would be hurt if illegal immigrants left. Just the opposite: He said U.S. workers would easily replace departed immigrants, wages would rise and less money would leave via remittances sent back to immigrants' home countries.

"All jobs … Americans are prepared to take," Mehlman said. "It is the wages and conditions that they reject."

"These are based on a selective set of assumptions," said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. "I don't know how he came to these numbers."

Other immigration and economics experts were not as critical of the report, but said that the underlying assumptions for any immigration claims need to be taken into account.

not the best movie but it`s an interesting premise

If a state has 100,000 illegal immigrants, that's 100,000 people who need to buy food every day, who need to buy shoes, etc.

And much of it doesn't contribute to much more than making numbers bigger.

Let's have 1 billion people move into Arizona. Imagine what would happen tax revenues and economic activity. Even if 700 million of them were unemployed, tax revenues would soar.

Why, all we have to do is look at the average amount of taxes and economic activity produced by any given person.

It's a very conservative mind-set with a faux-liberal twist, reduced to an absurdity: The final determinant of human value is economic activity, money; and the most important figure is tax revenues. The absurd part (as though we needed more)? That if we make a single change, only that change happens and there are no systemic responses.

It's advocacy research. Like "military intelligence," "advocacy research" is an oxymoron. "Military intelligence" retains some meaning by having "military" keep its usual meaning and "intelligence" refer not to cognitive faculties but as the label for a bureaucracy. "Advocacy research" is likewise coerced to have a non-intuitive meaning if it's to have a real-world referent: "advocacy" keeps its usual meaning but "research" refers not to a disinterested search for truth and the development of an argument subjected to criticial thinking and testing but to "a derivative written text with footnotes and a cover page."

Omg, if that isn't the pot calling the kettle black! FAIR is notorious for pulling numbers out of their asses; they're even nicknamed the center of irreproducible results, since they use the most twisted and skewed methodologies imaginable to arrive at predetermined conclusions which they have to pay hacks to substantiate. No respectable scholar has ever been able to reproduce the skewed numbers FAIR comes up with and they are questioning someone else's methodology? Now that takes some cajones.

And if we agree with the OP, then we have a choice.

Choice one is to say that FAIR has a perfectly good and valid methodology, one that we support and approve of.

Choice two is to say that saying we're right is more important than truth, and revel in the hypocrisy of saying we demand truth from them but rather like falsehood from ourselves.

That's if FAIR's claim is right. Don't much know FAIR. Not going to take the time to ponder the OP's validity. Too much work to critique it--to check its assumptions and sources and methodology to see if I think they're reasonable. Without that the conclusion's just a bunch of black dots on the screen without meaning.

FAIR, an entity appropriately designated as a hate group by Southern Poverty Law, is criticizing the UCLA/CAP finding that immigrants' contributions to taxes and secondary economic activity outweigh the costs they generate, resulting in a substantial net gain for states. Their claim is that such a conclusion is founded upon biased methodologies, which is what I find so hysterical coming from an entity like FAIR, that has such a notorious reputation for employing skewed methodologies, push polls, and statistical manipulations to arrive at distorted conclusions. I haven't analyzed this particular report, but I did work for many years as an immigration policy analyst in DC thinktanks and can say that the UCLA/CAP claim is consistent with numerous other studies done on the same topic. I have also read a great many FAIR "reports" over the years and am personally acquainted with the highly dubious methodologies FAIR employs in pursuit of their anti-immigrant agenda. There is thus a third choice if one happens to agree with the OP's assertion that immigrants constitute a boon to state economies: namely, that the OP's conclusion is consistent with the findings of other reputable scholars while FAIR's credibility in criticizing that finding suffers from their extensive and well-documented history of knowingly publishing disinformation in furtherance of a racist agenda.