Last week, Arizona GOP Gov. Jan Brewer, the main promoter of the state’s infamous new anti-immigrant law, was caught in a lie when she claimed that her state’s deserts were littered with the corpses of victims of blood-thirsty illegal immigrants. The bodies, she said, were “either buried or just lying there that have been beheaded.”

But local media did a survey of coroners around the state and found not a single instance of decapitation in which an illegal alien was a suspect. Reporters’ calls to the governor’s office requesting documentation to back up her claim that her state was in the throes of an epidemic of decapitations were not returned.

Now the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reports that a study two months ago by the state’s largest newspaper, the Arizona Republic (see the paper’s report here), found that the entire premise of the new law — that illegals have driven up the crime rate along the border — is a lie:

[According] to statistics from the FBI and Arizona police agencies, crime in Arizona border towns has been “essentially flat for the past decade.” For example, “In 2000, there were 23 rapes, robberies and murders in Nogales, Ariz. Last year, despite nearly a decade of population growth, there were 19 such crimes.” The Pima County sheriff reported that “the border has never been more secure.”

FBI statistics show violent crime rates in all of the border states are lower than they were a decade ago — yet Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) reports that the violence is “the worst I have ever seen.” President Obama justifiably asserted last week that “the southern border is more secure today than any time in the past 20 years,” yet Rush Limbaugh judged the president to be “fit for the psycho ward” on the basis of that remark.

It’s freakishly unusual for governors and senators to smear the reputations of their states by exaggerating crime statistics. Milbank archly suggests that Brewer is trying to “repel every last tourist dollar from her pariah state.” He says that McCain is “second only to Brewer in wrecking Arizona tourism — telling NBC, ABC and CNN that Phoenix is the ‘No. 2 kidnapping capital of the world’ behind only Mexico City.” Higher than, say, Bogata, Senator? Please.

Milbank again:

Next, there’s Brewer’s claim that “the majority” of people immigrating illegally “are coming here and they’re bringing drugs, and they’re doing drop houses and they’re extorting people and they’re terrorizing the families. That is the truth.”

No, it isn’t. The Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector has apprehended more than 170,000 undocumented immigrants since Oct. 1, but only about 1,100 drug prosecutions have been filed in Arizona in that time.

The claim that illegal immigrants are behind most killings of law-enforcement personnel is also bunk. Arizona state Sen. Sylvia Allen claimed that “in the last few years 80 percent of our law enforcement that have been killed or wounded have been by an illegal.” A Phoenix police spokesman told the Arizona Republic’s E.J. Montini that the real figure for killings is less than 25 percent, and that there are no statistics on wounded officers.

So what is this “terrible border security crisis” that Brewer says has only “gotten worse”? She complained recently to Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren about the Obama administration’s handling of the border: “They haven’t did [sic] their job.”

Milbank concludes, “the person who hasn’t did her job is Brewer.”

The fact that the Arizona law is premised on a pack of lies is proof that its purpose is purely political — that it is just another attempt by Republicans to gin up votes among their racist base. As with California’s Proposition 187 in 1994, it will almost undoubtedly work in the short term. Gov. Brewer and Sen. McCain will likely win big this fall, just as Gov. Pete Wilson did on the coattails of Prop 187 when it passed with 59 percent of the vote 16 years ago.

But if what happened in California is a guide, over the long-term, this bogus law could permanently alienate conservative and independent Latino voters from the GOP for generations to come.

It’s also possible that the law could have unintended consequences on the state’s economy beyond the loss of tourism and convention dollars it is already experiencing. A University of Arizona study in 2007 found that undocumented workers add billions of dollars to the state’s output:

If all undocumented workers were removed from Arizona’s workforce, economic output would drop annually by at least $29 billion, or 8.2 percent, according to a University of Arizona report released Wednesday.

The study is based on Census Bureau and other data from 2004, the most complete year available, and assumed most non-citizens in the state are undocumented.

It also found that Arizona’s documented and undocumented immigrants generate nearly $44 billion in output annually.

“Output” includes the value of goods produced in industry, wages and profits.

Speaking of pariahs, if these political shenanigans cause Arizona to lose billions of dollars in revenue — and GOP candidates find they can’t win elections in the state — it’s likely that Gov. Brewer and Sen. McCain will find themselves in the same position former Gov. Wilson is in today in California — as personas non grata, both inside their parties and out.