Bad Combo of Fear and Desperation in Arizona

The recent Arizona anti-immigration law (full text here) is understandable, but is likely unconstitutional, and just plain bad policy.

It is understandable because Congress has been dithering for years on this issue while others have been bearing the brunt of the costs of unauthorized immigration. I call it unauthorized—as does the Department of Homeland Security—because I don’t associate myself with those who see such immigration as a criminal act, as if someone coming to do cheap labor is on the par with, robbers, murderers, or the thieving executives of Enron and Tyco.

I witnessed these costs several years ago during a visit to Cochise County, Arizona. While walking the trails at Coronado National Forest on the border between Arizona and Mexico, I came upon garbage (discarded clothes, plastic jugs, etc.). Turns out, according to the park ranger (formerly in the Border Patrol), the park has to clean up tons of garbage each year. Moreover, the smuggler trails cross through environmentally sensitive areas, degrading habitats for plants and animals (you can find related 2006 congressional testimony on this matter here). Cochise County sheriffs sat me down with a folder of pictures—dead bodies their office was responsible for recovering—the result of federal deterrence efforts (like increasing surveillance and building more fences) that did not deter, but only drove migrants to cross through more remote areas, and, hence, higher death rates. It cost the County two to four thousand for each body recovered they said. Moreover, the sheriffs told me, the Border Patrol routinely refused to cite a suspected unauthorized immigrant if she or he was injured. Rather than take on the healthcare costs, Border Patrol agents would simply drop them off at hospitals and clinics, shunting the cost from federal coffers to local ones (though I should add that I heard numerous stories from undocumented Mexicans in Indiana that Border Patrol agents had saved them or a relative after they become separated from their coyote—or abandoned by him—and were wandering lost in the deep desert).

And there was the cost to the Douglas High School—with so many children from mobile migrant families, a significant number of students who were there at the beginning of the school year were gone by the time of testing required by the No Child Left Behind act (NCLB), and therefore the school could not meet the NCLB requirement that at least 95% of students take the standardized tests. And, of course, there are the other more dramatic costs that typically get more attention—the violence associated with narcotrafficking.

Along with bearing the costs of being the conduit for cheap labor for employers elsewhere in the country, unauthorized immigrants make up a relatively high percentage of Arizona’s total population (see table below). Though their number is far lower than those of California and Texas, Arizona’s relatively low population means their presence is harder to ignore.

State	Population (2009 est)	Unauthorized Immigrants (2009 est)	Percentage Unauthorized
California	36,418,000	2,600,000	7.1%
Texas	23,846,000	1,680,000	7.0%
Florida	18,182,000	720,000	4.0%
New York	19,429,000	550,000	2.8%
Illinois	12,829,000	540,000	4.2%
Georgia	9,509,000	480,000	5.0%
Arizona	6,344,000	460,000	7.3%

Sources: US Census Bureau, Factfinder, at http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en; and Department of Homeland Security, “Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population residing in the United States, January 2009 (January 2010), at http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publications/ois_ill_pe_2009.pdf

That said, the policy is wrong-headed, reflecting the apparent US tendency to resort to force to resolve challenges or turn back perceived threats. Every time the US has increased border enforcement (with fences, more Border Patrol, etc.), the area of increased enforcement has simply meant the redirection of human trafficking, along with an escalation of violence. And US Americans need to keep in mind that migration is not just a domestic issue, it is a foreign policy matter. Migration law is within the constitutional jurisdiction of the federal government, and it needs to act now in order to prevent an array of disparate migration policies that will make overall migration policy even more irrational than it already is. The Arizona law is also impracticable, dumping a gargantuan task on local law enforcement agencies in an economic environment of state and local retrenchment.

And there’s the issue of racial profiling that will undoubtedly result. Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me’s Peter Sagal lampooned the notion that the law has nothing to do with race or ethnicity:

Peter Sagal: “What might make the police think someone is illegal? Not their skin color or accent, no, no, that would be racial profiling. Instead, the police will be looking for people who seem reeeally homesick. . .

Amy Dickinson: “Writing postcards. . .”

Peter Sagal: “Exactly. Just standing there, looking in the distance, saying, hmm. . .

Amy Dickinson: “Oh, if only. . .”

Roy Blount, Jr.: “In Arizona you should probably not go to a policeman and ask for directions.”

Amy Dickinson: “Right. That’s out. . .”

Peter Sagal: “One defender of the bill, one Californian Congressman named Brian Bilbray said ‘No, it’s not about the skin color or anything else. You can tell people are illegal by the way they dress.’ That’s what he said. And he’s right of course because as we all know they often wear T-shirts that say ‘I’m with undocumented.’ Or here’s a favorite, ‘My mother smuggled me across the Sonoran desert and I’ll got was a low-paying job you people don’t want.’”

If you still doubt that race and ethnicity do not really matter in Arizona’s militant anti-immigration policy, consider a new state law that conflates sedition and studies of particular ethnic groups. The law bans public school courses that

Promote the overthow of the United States government.

Promote resentment toward a race or class of people

Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.

Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.

Well, who in the world in Arizona public schools is promoting the overthow of the US government? Do they have fringe elements of the Hutaree militia or Tea Party movements teaching there? No, the implication is that there is a connection between a multicultural education program and sedition. Evidently, the state that resisted celebrating MLK is again fighting the outcome of the Civil Rights movement. Multiculturalism was a result of that struggle, and really took off in the 1980s as educators worked to make history less a story of white people, and more an account recognizing the presence of people of color, and women, in our country’s history. Ethnic studies programs are also the result of ongoing specialization in academia—every discipline has experienced an explosion of sub-disciplines.

What the lawmakers present as egalitarian individualism is really part of a incoherent project to fashion Arizona into what Sarah Palin called “real America,” a place where whites can again be unconscious of their entitlements, not troubled by the seamier side of our country’s history (hey—a shout-out to the Texas Board of Education!), and where everyone speaks American--the Arizona Department of Education has ordered schools to no longer allow teachers with “heavy” or “ungrammatical” accents to give English courses.

So the Arizona government will take care of the unauthorized immigrants at the point of a gun, and can deal with the critics by shutting down certain kinds of inquiry and teaching, and by calling them treasonous. Along with Sagal’s advice to suss out the illegals by looking for the homesick, Arizona could try testing anyone entering the state for her or his fluency in spoken American. The state will lose some potential retirees from, say, Boston and New York City, but freedom from fear of the other don’t come cheap.

By the way, Arizona made think of the depiction of Topeka, Kansas in the cult Sci-Fi classic, A Boy and His Dog. . .