[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]
When reality catches up to Arizonans for their passage of their
misbegotten police-state immigration law, it's going to be ugly and
unpleasant. If other states really are considering passing similar laws,
they will want to watch what happens to Arizona -- and they will
inevitably wind up thinking twice.
We've
pointed out previously -- as have
the nation's police chiefs -- that the law is almost certain to in fact
increase violent crime and dilute law enforcement's capacity to deal with it in Arizona.
And that will only be the first consequence (and a decidedly ironic
one, since this law was sold as being a means to crack down on violent
crime). The longest-lasting and most significant, however, will be the
economic one: When the Latino workforce flees Arizona, their economy
will suffer a dramatic downturn unlike any they've seen in decades.
It's
already starting to happen:
Arizona’s hard-hitting immigration law is driving
Hispanics out of the state weeks before the controversial law goes into
effect.
Although concrete figures are not available, anecdotal evidence
suggests Hispanics, both legal residents and illegal immigrants, are
starting to flee.
Schools in Hispanic neighborhoods are reporting abnormal enrollment
drops, and businesses that serve Hispanics also report that business is
down, according to a USA Today report published Wednesday.
The report suggests that the immigration law is compounding
demographic trends that have already significantly curtailed illegal
immigration during the past two years. The bad economy has been the
primary deterrent to many Hispanic immigrants seeking to enter Arizona,
says Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center in
Washington.
“If you have a bad economy and a hostile environment, then that’s
likely to cause people to think twice about coming, and possibly even to
leave,” Mr. Passel says.
... Any loss, however, will be a loss for the Arizona economy, [David
Gutierrez, a professor of immigration history, at the University of
California San Diego] suggests.
“Latinos...are a highly flexible, highly exploitable work force, a
buffer to economic downturns,” he says. “Many of the industries here –
agriculture, service industries, low-end manufacturing, construction –
are massively dependent on undocumented workers.
“If I were able to conduct an experiment and pay all of Arizona’s
undocumented workers to not work for two weeks, the economy would come
to a screeching, crashing halt instantaneously.”
This brought to mind a video forwarded to me from my friend
Jimmy at McCranium, an Eastern Washington blog, of a
Pasco immigration attorney named Tom Roach giving an informational talk to group of local citizens in Kennewick on May 29.
The talk is excellent, and I recommend watching the whole thing if
you're interested. Because Roach effectively drills down to the heart of
our dilemma with immigration -- namely, our current laws are so screwed
up they have no chance of meeting the nation's economic needs or
effectively dealing with natural immigration pressures that are driven
by not just the economy, but the American Dream itself:
Roach: And then at the bottom of the food chain, as you
can see, there are low-skilled workers. So those low-skilled workers are
farm workers, janitors, chambermaids, busboys, dishwashers, gardeners,
nannies, domestics.
Okay, so every year, the government, the U.S. government, hands out
green cards to 5,000 people in that category, low-skilled workers, for
the entire country. Five thousand a year. And up till about 18 months
ago, this economy created something on the order of 500,000 low-skill
jobs. Five hundred thousand low-skill jobs, but only 5,000 green cards.
So if you don't learn anything else tonight, take this home, and that
cranky next-door neighbor keeps saying, 'I don't understand why the
Mexicans just don't get a green card' -- I think it was in the Tri-City
Herald today [actually, it ran May 26,
there was a letter to the editor: 'Jeez, why don't they just get a
green card before they come up?' It's impossible! It's impossible! It's
impossible! OK?
Roach goes on to explain in "500 words or less" -- actually, it's a
good deal more, but that's OK, because it still makes great sense -- why
we now are faced with a situation where we have 10 million undocumented
immigrants in this country: namely, the vast majority of those
unskilled jobs are not jobs that native-born Americans are willing to do
any longer: harvesting agricultural products, landscaping work,
janitorial and other services.
I am reminded of a woman I met on
the Dreams Across America train
in 2007 who ran a landscaping business in northern California. She told
me that when she attempted to hire only documented citizens, she
received only three applications for 14 positions, and two of the three
quit on the first day, and the third quit on the next. She now hires
undocumented workers regularly because they're reliable, hard-working,
and do excellent work.
I learned this lesson myself at a relatively early age. When I was in
high school in the early '70s, I earned my summer college money by
working on farms in southern Idaho -- specifically, I used to be part of
an irrigation-pipe hauling crew on a potato-wheat-hay farm near
Shelley. It was a formative experience in a lot of ways, because it
taught me how to work, and imparted a work ethic I maintain to this day.
But it was a hard learning experience -- at the beginning of the
summer, like most of my workmates, I hated the job (which entailed
hauling twenty-two pieces of twenty-foot-long irrigation pipe twenty
yards and forming a new line, for which we were paid $1.25). I had to
learn how to shut out the distractions and focus on my work, so that I
was eventually able to whip out two lines an hour, and ten lines per
morning and evening each. It wasn't a lot of money, but it eventually
added up.
Still, as a crew, we seriously sucked. We were unreliable -- some of
my workmates never really learned how to put their heads down and work,
and whined incessantly, and often just didn't show up, leaving the rest
of us to pick up their slack. And the quality of our work was equally
unreliable; if a line wasn't properly laid, it would burst when filled
with water, meaning the boss had to run down the
line and fix it. It
seemed he had to do that a lot.
Two years after I graduated from high school, in 1976, I drove out to
the farm to visit my old boss. (By then, I had graduated to a
high-paying road-construction job for summer college-money work.) I was a
little surprised to find that he had replaced his old high-school pipe
crews with a crew of Mexican laborers, most of whom I gathered were
undocumented. He grinned broadly as he told me how much more reliable
they were, how much better workers they were, and how much he enjoyed
working with them. It beat spoiled white high-school kids any day.
I understood and sympathized. The reality was that we
were
relatively spoiled, and were poorly fit for that kind of labor. And we
were that way for a reason: because our parents, all our parents, were
trying to live the American Dream.
Part of that dream means building a better life not just for yourself
but for your children. You want them to have a better life than the one
you had, to grow up and get a better job than yours, to move up the
ladder just as you have done. So you prepare them to excel in academics
and technology and other pursuits -- not in performing hard, low-skill
labor. That's the life you want them not to have to lead.
But because we pursue the American Dream, we will always have a need
for immigrants, particularly those who perform unskilled labor. As the
economy grows, so will the demand for that kind of labor. And we need
immigration laws that will help fill that demand rationally and in a
controlled way, not through the induced illegality of our current
system.
Blaming the immigrants themselves, as the Arizona law does, is not a
solution: it only worsens the problem. When Arizona businesses start
failing because they cannot obtain a legal workforce under their new
regime, the rest of the nation will get to see why just "enforcing the
laws we have on the books" is no longer a viable option -- socially,
legally, or economically.
