Pitch black. Visibility: zero. Gene and I are waiting in ambush on a craggy mountain bluff not far from where the San Pedro River flows north to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. The temperature is mild and the landscape is verdant. But I can’t see more than three feet in front of my nose.
“Turn that light off!” Gene reacts, as I fumble to locate the switch I flipped. “How do I know you’re not trying to get me shot out here! Did you even tell me who you were? Who are you with?”1
Like Gene, I came to Arizona from back east to witness the reality along the border. Whereas Gene is a self-styled vigilante with designs on detaining undocumented border crossers, I am a documentary filmmaker chasing only a story. Gene carries a side arm. I prefer cameras.
When Joseph Mathew and I began production for the documentary Crossing Arizona in 2004, the state was fast becoming the flashpoint for the nation’s ideological struggle with the issue of illegal immigration. Flanking “border enforcement” operations in California and Texas had pushed the flow of illegal immigration to the Arizona border.2 The funnel effect was predictable, but policymakers in Washington calculated that Arizona’s desert would act as a natural deterrent to immigrants and human smugglers. They were wrong. The strategy did nothing to reduce the overall flow of immigration, and the routing of migrants away from California and Texas saddled Arizonans with a unique burden. As filmmakers, we took it upon ourselves to document the local response.
Near the border, inside the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation, Native American Mike Wilson loads the unsteady base of a red wheelbarrow with multiple containers of drinking water from the back of his pickup truck. “¿Necesitan agua?” He shouts down the sun-soaked road to a small group of weary travelers emerging slowly through a rising haze of dust and heat. Chased by Border Patrol, they had separated from a larger group of thirty to avoid being caught. Exhausted, lost, and without water, the men are lucky to find Wilson. Although a person can carry only enough water to survive a one-day desert trek, migrants routinely risk walking five days for the promise of earning U.S. wages.
“Approximately three to four miles south of here, and between the village of Little Tucson and those foothills, there have been a cluster of anywhere from twenty-five to thirty migrant deaths each summer,” explains Wilson, now working to replenish the water at one of the several makeshift water stations he maintains. His work is hard, but the reality that so many people die attempting to cross a political border is even harder.
The sky is moonless the night I am stuck on a trail with Gene. Perched on the ridge of a mountain overlooking Mexico, I do my best to listen for footsteps and keep a low profile. Wearing blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a leather hat, Gene is the newest recruit to Chris Simcox’s Civil Homeland Defense, one of a handful of citizen brigades now operating to intercept border crossers in southern Arizona.
The sprouting of vigilantism along the border caught our attention immediately. A group named Ranch Rescue, whose members dressed in full camouflage and carried assault rifles, patrolled their property near the border, claiming to protect it from criminal drug smugglers. While the stated aim of Ranch Rescue was to fight criminality and uphold private property rights, their activities on the border revealed a tendency to terrorize border crossers by holding them hostage at gunpoint and, in some cases, attacking them. Ranch Rescue’s unlawful activities were finally challenged in a civil rights lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which ended with a court awarding the group’s seventy-acre Camp Thunderbird Ranch to a pair of undocumented immigrants who came forward as the actual targets of abuse. Ranch Rescue confirmed that the presence of untrained, uncertified law enforcement at the border is a recipe for disaster.
The night we were out with Civil Homeland Defense the group came out empty-handed. Still, the time we spent with them revealed the underlying fears behind the vigilante imperative to secure our borders. As Chris Simcox led a ragtag group of locals on their mission, his fixation on issues of legality and social order was evident. Simcox told us, “I’ve got nothing against immigrants. As long as you come in legally, you’re welcome. I’ll be the first one there to shake your hand and welcome you to America.” But even if Simcox is sincere, he still apparently fails to grasp the complicated web of push and pull factors that have always drawn people across the U.S. border. The law and order framework to which Simcox clings is the same ineffective framework used by our government. Law and order doesn’t work because it does not stem immigration. And if law and order doesn’t work, we must ask why politicians and vigilantes continue to evoke it. As the sun escaped beyond the horizon, Simcox revealed deeper anxieties about the people who cross our border, telling us, “These people are just coming and spitting on our citizenship, just trampling on it, cheapening it.” To Simcox, the immigrants entering our borders are tarnishing the image of America and threatening the identity of his country. Perhaps this fixation on “law and order” is an attempt to manage, unequivocally, what is perceived to be a loss of control over national identity.
One year after my evening with Gene, in April 2005, the national news media rushed to cover the launch of the Minuteman Project. At the helm, Simcox fielded interview requests from every major news outlet in the nation, and now we had to wait in line. What could we do? Turn our cameras on the media, of course! We watched as Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly interviewed Simcox live via satellite feed. CBS, NBC, ABC, and even Country Music Television fixed their gazes on the gun-toting, binocular-wielding volunteers that Simcox had recruited from around the country to help patrol the border. Armed with rifles, flags, and Rubbermaid coolers, the Minutemen (and women) presented themselves as patriots on the front line of America’s battle against the “illegal” immigrants who threaten “our way of life.” The Minutemen co-opted the language of protest and freedom to legitimize their campaigns against illegal immigration. Ironically, the Minuteman Project’s brand of protest fights to curtail rather than extend the definition of America. It is no surprise that the nation’s corporate news media—given its tendency to homogenize public opinion—was tantalized by the spectacle. Simcox, the mastermind behind the Minuteman Project’s skillfully crafted symbolism, was able to use the coverage to amplify his call to seal the border.
“Two months later, when it’s 110 degrees and twenty-five dead bodies turn up within fifty miles from here, all the cameras will be gone,” said Ray Ybarra, who works for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Ybarra lamented that the Minutemen “are controlling the debate; they’re controlling the dialogue. The human rights issue—the fact that people are suffering and dying—has been pushed to the back.”
Throughout the United States, many people blame the federal government’s inaction for the country’s immigration woes. Strangely, the one strategy to which public officials have committed—border enforcement—is precisely what makes Arizona the battleground for immigration that it is today.
As federal border policy turned Arizona into the major gateway for undocumented immigration, the regional economy grew. Arizona’s construction boom, low housing costs, and proximity to the border—all part of the regional economy—made the state an attractive destination for migrating workers and business owners alike. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, about 500,000 undocumented immigrants reside in Arizona. Undocumented immigrants account for about 8% of the state’s workforce. Maricopa County, which includes the city of Phoenix, is the fastest-growing county in the nation with 3.8 million people. Between 2000 and 2006 it added 700,000 new residents, with Latinos accounting for half of that growth. In Phoenix, according to the latest Census Bureau statistics, Latinos make up about 42% of the population. From the increased use of the Spanish language to the day laborers hustling work on the street corner, there is no denying that Latinos have transformed the region’s cultural landscape. This is an unwelcome shift for many who cannot adjust to the rapidly changing world around them. Under the pressure of a national economic downturn, the immigrant workers who made Arizona’s economic growth possible have become the focus of the state’s collective anxiety about its declining economy. Seizing the moment, a handful of local politicians have begun to exploit this anxiety by latching onto the immigration issue.
In 2004 local politicians, including State Representative Russell Pearce, campaigned and pushed for the passage of Proposition 200. Modeled after Proposition 187 in California (which was eventually declared unconstitutional by a U.S. district court), this initiative aimed to prevent undocumented immigrants from receiving public services such as adult education, children’s day care, and health care. Proposition 200 passed, in great part, because of the late organizing efforts of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a D.C.-based lobbying group that advocates for strict measures of immigration control. Recognizing Arizona as an opportunity to plant seeds for its agenda, FAIR descended on the state at the height of the proposition’s campaign. A memorable scene from Crossing Arizona features anti-immigration firebrands like Tom Tancredo and Terry Anderson as the keynote speakers at an event FAIR sponsored in the effort to recruit paid signature gatherers.
Arizonans passed Proposition 200, creating a good deal of confusion among immigrants, many of whom began to go without health care for fear of being caught. Pregnant women stopped going to prenatal medical checkups, and immigrants were forced to ignore their basic health-care needs. The scope of Proposition 200’s impact was subsequently limited—to a couple of free lunch and neighborhood aid programs—by an Arizona attorney general’s opinion, but its political significance went beyond the chilling effect it had on immigrant communities. Conservative politicians in the Republican-controlled state legislature used it as a mandate from their constituents to crack down on the “illegals.”
Since that time, several new anti-immigrant ballot measures have been passed in Arizona. The voting public chose to make English the state’s official language and simultaneously cut state funding for adult English-education classes. Voters also passed measures to deny undocumented persons the right to post bail and collect damages from an employer if injured on the job. One measure completely eliminated state financial aid for undocumented students and required them to pay out-of-state tuition, a measure that tripled the cost of their education. The law known as Proposition 300 also banned state-funded child-care services for the children of undocumented parents.
“[N]ow just the mention of an anti-immigrant referendum will garner 75 percent of the votes in favor of whatever the topic is… whether it violates fundamental rights, human rights, tears apart families, or not is irrelevant to the voters. They hear the word anti-immigrant. The atmosphere now is—is poisonous, just poisonous. And politicians are afraid to even mention that they disagree with some of the most rabid anti-immigrant forces for fear of not being elected their next time,” said Dan Pochoda, litigation attorney and legal director for the ACLU’s Arizona chapter.
Arizona’s choir of anti-immigration ideologues and political figures has fed the public fear and anxiety over an illegal immigration “invasion.” “These people are illegals. They crossed the border and violated the law,” said Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.3 Day laborers found during ordinary traffic stops and mobile corn vendors were among some of those arrested as a result of tips to Arpaio’s specially created hotline to report undocumented migrants. His hotline is advertised throughout Maricopa on county-owned law enforcement vehicles, which display the traditional “do not enter” decal with the word “illegally” written over it.
In his efforts to arrest immigrants, the sheriff has even begun to deputize ordinary civilians. His volunteer sheriff posse of over three thousand receives training on how to use weapons and handcuffs. They dress like sheriff’s deputies, and their cars look like ordinary patrol vehicles. Volunteers have to undergo extensive background checks and even a lie detector test, but so far nothing has kept some prominent members of the Minuteman Project and United for a Sovereign America, a-self described anti-illegal immigration group, from joining the posse.
“I use the posse to go after hookers, deadbeat parents, animal cruelty, and now I’m using the posse to help us on illegal immigration,” said Arpaio.
When it comes to immigration enforcement, Sheriff Arpaio has even greater weapons. Under his direction, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) has become the largest police force trained on the enforcement of immigration law in the nation—a situation made possible by a memorandum of understanding between his office and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the investigative branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). “We have an excellent relationship with ICE. We work closely together. A hundred and sixty of our officers have been trained. Technically they become ICE agents when they put on that hat,” Arpaio told me. In the fifteen months between March 2007 and June 2008, Sheriff Arpaio’s agents arrested more than eleven hundred undocumented immigrants. ICE celebrated Arpaio as a new ally, and thanks to this new training, by June 2008 his jailers had already identified and turned over fourteen thousand undocumented immigrants.
Recently Sheriff Arpaio seized the spotlight on primetime television when he started rounding up undocumented immigrants in Latino neighborhoods. He set up a base to carry out what he called “crime suppression patrols” in one of the most frequented and heavily populated civilian spaces in America society: the strip mall. The command center was anchored by mobile detention trailers and makeshift interrogation desks at which ICE-certified deputies worked to ascertain the status of handcuffed detainees who were escorted from a steadily arriving sequence of marked and unmarked patrol vehicles. Deputies and posse members brought in the detainees after they swept the surrounding neighborhood looking to catch drivers on minor traffic violations, such as cracked windshields and broken taillights. Once they stopped someone who did not speak English or have a license, they demanded both the driver’s and passengers’ proof of citizenship or immigration status.
Lawyers used megaphones to project beyond the traffic barricades and yellow tape surrounding the operation. “Tiene derecho a permanecer callado, pida la presencia de un abogado (You have a right to remain silent; request the presence of an attorney),” they shouted. Most of the people arrested were brown-skinned men—mechanics and landscapers stopped on the way back from work. Bound with pink handcuffs, the newly arrested were paraded in front of the television cameras in time to make the evening news.
The operations always drew a crowd. Supporters waved signs in praise of “Sheriff Joe,” while detractors likened the sheriff to Adolf Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan. At a recent outing, small children bore signs that read, “Don’t Deport My Daddy, Keep My Family Together,” while the opposing crowd shouted, “Deport them all.”
The sheriff’s sweeps have brought him tremendous popularity with voters who want action on illegal immigration, but others have taken issue with his tactics. Among his opponents was Mesa chief of police George Gascón, a first-generation Cuban immigrant. Gascón denounced the sweeps as a waste of resources that could be put to better use by keeping the real criminals off the streets. To him, Arpaio’s raids are making communities unsafe by contributing to an underreporting of crime. “The level of fear runs high, we’ve been able to confirm it through some of our officers, who are telling us people in the community who used to report crimes and suspicious activity are not doing it anymore,” said Gascón.
Governor Janet Napolitano reallocated at least $1.6 million of funding the sheriff had earmarked for his “saturation patrols.” In a savvy political move, through an executive order she redirected the monies toward a task force to apprehend fugitives on felony warrants. The funding was originally meant as part of the Illegal Immigration Prevention and Apprehension Co-op (IIMPACT), a multiagency taskforce created to fight human smuggling and gangs. But Arpaio decided to play it solo, by using part of the funding for his sweeps.
“This is an incredible waste and threat to our public safety. This is a dog and pony show if there was ever one, and it’s all happening at taxpayer expense,” said Dan Saban, Democratic Maricopa County sheriff candidate in 2008 and former police chief in Buckeye, Arizona, during one of the sweeps in Mesa.
Dan Pochoda argues that Arpaio is violating basic civil rights. Pochoda believes the sweeps are based on racial profiling. Part of the reason is their location: “He’s not going to places that have the highest crime rates. He’s not making a selection on anything but the criteria of where he will find people of color.” Pochoda also suggested Arpaio’s deputies are violating the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution—freedom from search and seizures without reasonable cause—by pulling people over and questioning passengers for an ID without probable cause that a crime was committed.
Phoenix mayor Phil Gordon has demanded an FBI investigation on possible civil rights violations. In an April 4 letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Mayor Gordon asked the agency and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to examine what he called discriminatory harassment and improper stops, searches, and arrests by sheriff’s deputies.
The Latino communities who live and work in the Phoenix vicinity are not holding their breath for anyone to stop the sheriff. In difficult times like these, people do their best to stay completely under the radar. Some have begun riding a bike to work; others are taking the bus. Most are limiting their family outings and even grocery store trips to diminish maximum exposure to a sweep.
Two days before the sheriff’s planned operation in Mesa, the most popular Spanish television network in the state, Univision, alerted the public. Word went out over the radio too. By the time the sheriff arrived, the city had become a ghost town. The stores on Southern Avenue—a popular business corridor for Latinos—were empty, as their likely undocumented owners decided to shut down for the day.
“You’re my third customer today,” said a young waitress when a group of reporters entered her restaurant. “Me da miedo estar trabajando hoy sin papeles, pero tengo que darle de comer a mis hijos (I’m afraid to be working today without papers, but I have to feed my family),” said the girl, who asked for her name to be withheld. Her ankles were black and covered in scabs. She was wearing flip-flops revealing her blistered toes, which were covered with a blue disinfectant. Arpaio’s raids were no match for the personal ordeal she had just faced. It was her third day back at work since she had completed a hard trek across the desert in the middle of June when temperatures reached 125 degrees.
“Getting at the overall solution of a humane border [immigration] policy, of seeing our neighbors as human beings not just workers who can come here for a couple of months, is extremely difficult, and it’s not going to be easy,” said Ray Ybarra, founder of PUEBLO, a grassroots organization that helps immigrant communities. “The way the civil rights movement came about is the same way the undocumented community is going to someday improve this society, when they start saying we’re equal, we have the right to be here, then there will be change.”
Contrary to popular belief, undocumented immigrants have rights. In the 1981 decision Plyler v. Doe, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that undocumented immigrants are “persons” and have the right to the equal protection of the law granted by the Fourteenth Amendment. Other court decisions state that migrants cannot be subject to search and seizure without probable cause and that they are entitled to due process.
“People don’t seem to grasp that there are some serious social and constitutional issues here at stake. If we allow one group of people to be treated with less than the full rights [within] our constitutional framework, then we all lose,” said Police Chief Gascón.4
Gascón also rejected the notion perpetuated by Arpaio during his raids that most undocumented immigrants are hardened criminals coming to destroy American society. The truth is that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a level proportionate to their numbers in the population, said Gascón. Not all immigrants Arpaio is watching are criminals in the strict sense of the word. The act of crossing the border illegally is classified as a criminal misdemeanor offense punishable by imprisonment up to six months and deportation.5 Illegal presence, however, is not a criminal offense; it is a civil offense punishable by civil sanctions and deportation.6
Arizona’s politicians have already found ways to criminalize undocumented immigrants within their communities. The mug shot of the “Crime of the Week” for July 2007 on the home page of MCSO’s website does not display a picture of an alleged robber or a sexual predator. It is the face of a brunette in her mid-thirties. Her eyelids weigh heavy, and she wears a defeated expression. The accusation: “She’s conspired to her own smuggling.”
Maricopa County is the first place in the nation to treat undocumented migrants as felons. When federal authorities stepped up enforcement on the border in the 1990s, Maricopa became the major corridor for human smuggling. As a result, Phoenix became home to hundreds of “drop houses,” where smugglers, known as coyotes, hold their migrant cargo until they are paid in full for their service. The trade has become so lucrative that rival smuggling operations have a powerful incentive to hijack one another’s human cargo. The trend, which has led to open gunfire conflicts on streets within Phoenix city limits, has caused great concern among many fearful residents.
Smuggling illegal immigrants is a federal crime. Arizona politicians made it a state crime with a twist. In 2005, frustrated with the federal government’s inaction, the state legislature passed a law to penalize smuggling and trafficking—the practice of forced labor or modern slavery. The Arizona anti-smuggling statute was meant to scale down violent acts by human smugglers, but a legal opinion from Andrew Thomas, county attorney, said it could be used to prosecute the immigrants who used their services. Thomas ran his political campaign for county attorney on the promise of putting a stop to illegal immigration, and for those who did not believe that a local county elected official could deal with the issue, he proved them wrong. Now a migrant who hires a smuggler can be charged with the same offense.
So far, no other law enforcement agency has followed his interpretation. Local police have been too busy dealing with bajadores, ruthless smugglers who kidnap one another’s human cargo. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is the only agency currently taking pride in treating illegal immigrants as conspirators. To that end, deputies patrol remote areas along the county’s border trying to spot vehicles overcrowded with migrants. They charge the drivers—often migrants who received a discount from the smuggler they hired—with human smuggling and their cargo for conspiring, a Class 4 felony.
One of the first people brought to trial for conspiring in their own smuggling was Rosa Dias Godines, a seventeen-year-old woman who was told to lie about her age by a smuggler. Despite being underage, she spent three months in the county jail sleeping amid hardened criminals awaiting trial. It cost county taxpayers about seven thousand dollars for this detention and nine hundred dollars for a defense attorney. In the end, the court found that Rosa was not a conspirator in her own smuggling but a victim of a violent crime in Mexico. Because she was fleeing from her abuser, she was qualified under U.S. immigration law for a remedy, a Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) visa given to unaccompanied minors who cross the border escaping from abuse, abandonment, and neglect. She was lost in the system and could have been deported as a felon, had a local activist not discovered her. Godines was unaware that even if she had crossed the border illegally she still had protections under the law. Arpaio’s people did not bother to check. A spokesperson at the time said, “We don’t investigate the reasons that make these people come across the border illegally.” Some immigrants, regardless of their status in the country, might qualify for political asylum or be considered refugees. But these exceptions may never come to light if detained immigrants are not allowed to have legal representation or to see an immigration judge. The sheriff’s people were not prepared to deal with the nuances of immigration; they apply a one-size-fits-all punitive approach.
There was no evidence that the implementation of the anti-coyote law was proving an effective tool in deterring human smuggling or that it has dismantled any human smuggling ring, mainly because policies were aimed at the small fish rather than the masterminds of the smuggling operation. Violence continues to be brutal in drop houses, and smuggling is still prevalent in Maricopa. Meanwhile, the anti-coyote law is clogging up the legal system at the local taxpayers’ expense. Taxpayers pay around fifteen thousand dollars for 190 days, the average length of time one apprehended migrant spends incarcerated. Between March 2006 and June 2008, over a thousand cases flooded the courts. Often authorities would sit fifteen to twenty defendants on the jury box—for lack of space—in an attempt to expedite the court proceedings, taking multiple plea agreements at time. The exponential surge in immigration cases has brought many Arizona residents to the court for jury duty.
“Contraté a una persona para que me trajera ilegalmente,” said defendant Félix Alonso Peralta as he entered a guilty plea.7 A court interpreter translated the words for superior court judge Thomas O’Toole: “I hired someone to bring me illegally across the border.” Peralta was hesitant inside the courtroom; he changed his mind twice over the guilty plea. “I beg you for the rest that will come in front of you, to be fair. We did this for our families,” his voiced trembled. “We know your laws are right but they harm many. There’s those that come and break them. But we are here to work.”
Many defendants chose to plead guilty to a smuggling felony rather than spend the time in jail needed to fight the charges. Pleading guilty to a felony or staying in jail to await trial on an innocent plea are the only two options accorded to undocumented immigrants as a result of the passage of Proposition 100. The law, supported by Thomas, was created to deny bond to undocumented immigrants accused of violent crimes, but it has become an effective tool in the deportation of migrants with charges as minor as shoplifting. To date, fewer than 5% of the cases brought under the anti-coyote law have been tried in court (or brought to trial), yet Thomas celebrates what he calls a 90% conviction rate. The intention of Thomas’s law was to leave a permanent record on an immigrant’s file that would irrevocably rule out the possibility of migrating legally into the United States. Once immigrants are deported with a felony conviction they can face up to two years in prison should they try to return.
Concomitant with the human smuggling statute that allowed immigrants to be treated as felons a newly created law sanctioning employers entered the equation. Days after Congress suspended all discussions on immigration reform, Arizona decided to take matters into its own hands. On July 2, 2007, Governor Napolitano signed one of the toughest employer sanctions laws in the nation. She wrote, “Immigration is a federal responsibility, but I signed HB 2779 because it is now abundantly clear that Congress finds itself incapable of coping with the comprehensive immigration reforms our country needs. I signed it, too, out of the realization that the flow of illegal immigration into our state is due to the constant demand of some employers for cheap, undocumented labor.” Napolitano aides claim the governor acted to prevent an even harsher measure from getting onto the ballot while her critics claim she signed to advance her goal of seeking higher political office in Washington.
HB 2779, or the Legal Arizona Workers Act, which went into effect January 1, 2008, and became enforceable in March of the same year, requires employers to check the personal information of new hires against an online federal database of Social Security numbers and immigration records known as E-Verify. Businesses found to knowingly employ undocumented workers can have their business licenses suspended for ten days for a first offense. The state can permanently revoke the license for a second offense.
Uncertainty and massive confusion ruled among businesses and workers as soon as the law was created. State lawmakers tried to minimize the harm by reducing the law’s scope to include only workers hired after January 1, 2008, but by then it was too late. Many suspected undocumented workers had already been fired in anticipation, and others hadn’t stayed to find out.
“They were so fearful they fired me in October,” said Martha Félix, a Mexican immigrant who was in the process of renewing her work permit. “‘We can’t wait Martha, we can’t risk losing our license,’ they told me.” Félix now works in the same company, a wholesale distributor of lenses and sunglasses, but she spent six months trying to find another job after her work permit was renewed. “Everywhere you go they are so cautious, they ask if you have papers. I do, but they still don’t call,” she said. Naturalized citizens were similarly unprotected from the law’s side effects. Abel Pacheco was among those workers turned down from a job because the E-Verify database did not recognize him. He was a citizen, but the Social Security administration connected to the database had not registered his change of status. Since then federal officials have fixed the program so new citizens’ records are updated. Even so, the E-Verify database cannot prevent identity theft from happening unless it can provide to its users a digital image of a person’s document, a new tool that the government was developing as a pilot in 2008.
On paper, the intent of HB 2779 was to punish businesses, but much like the anti-coyote statute, it has been used against workers. Based on anonymous complaints, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, for example, started investigating businesses that knowingly hire undocumented labor. Because of the civil nature of the employer sanctions law, the sheriff could not arrest employers. Nor did he choose to take any action against them. Rather, he and the county attorney’s office decided to pursue new, tougher rules against identity theft by undocumented workers. In one case, a construction contractor who did not want to be identified said sheriff’s deputies came to his business telling him he “might be a victim,” meaning that his workers had provided him fraudulent documents in order to be hired. He had no legal choice but to turn over his employment records to the sheriff’s office. To avoid being the subject of a raid, he checked his workers’ Social Security numbers and fired as many as twenty of them.
Arizona’s economy did not take long to feel the heat of the new rules. Businesses started to shut down, move out of the state, or freeze their hiring plans. Migrants took their labor and their dollars away. Phoenix and Mesa city coffers emptied when sales tax revenues went down.
The employer sanctions law is one of the two reasons some workers are leaving, said Dawn McLaren, research economist at the Arizona State University. The other reason: a recession has taken away jobs, making Arizona less appealing to immigrant workers. “The bursting of the housing bubble has created a huge problem and the employer sanctions law has made it worse by making it less attractive for business to come here,” she said. The migrant exodus hit the pockets of businesses too.
“The businesses that can leave easily are leaving,” said Jason LeVecke, owner of over sixty franchises of the Carl’s Jr. fast food restaurant. “Business owners are not expanding in Arizona.” LeVecke himself put on hold expansion plans for opening twenty new franchises.
LeVecke, a self-described conservative Republican who served in the Marine Corps for five years, said the law opened the door for some customers to confront his Hispanic workers about their immigration status, sometimes using insults. “This has definitely slowed down our hiring process. It is most costly and much harder to find workers. We just lost two employees, and I don’t have any applicants,” he said.
LeVecke believes it is impossible to separate these workers from the consumers who buy gas, go grocery shopping, and pay sales taxes that go to the state and the cities. Arizona’s Hispanic purchasing power—which includes that of immigrants—is undeniable. Hispanic-owned businesses in Phoenix grew three times faster than the national average from 1997 to 2002. Phoenix has seen Hispanic purchasing power nearly double from $3.6 billion in 2000 to $6.4 billion on 2006.8 The immigrants’ flight left its footprint on entire neighborhoods. Red vacancy signs were hung outside an apartment complex in Palomino, a mostly Latino neighborhood. Entire residential blocks were deserted as migrants loaded their cars and left in the middle of the night.
At a Central Phoenix bus depot, I saw a young mother buy a one-way ticket to Los Mochis, Sinaloa, for eighty-nine dollars. She is going back home. “Es muy duro en Arizona (It’s too tough in Arizona),” she said, while waiting to board the bus with her three children. As the crackdown on immigration continued, many immigrant families started fleeing the state in favor of relatively immigration-friendly destinations, like Nevada, New Mexico, and even Canada.
“I think self-deportation is exactly right,” said Russell Pearce, the Republican state legislator who authored the employer-sanctions law. “They should go and come back the right way.”
Pearce, who represents the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, believes that by scaling back or refusing public benefits for immigrants and cracking down on employers who hire undocumented workers, Arizona will cease to be an appealing destination for newcomers. But Pearce wasn’t satisfied with going after only the migrants. Their children legal or illegally in the country were the target of new laws that had little to do with border security and immigration enforcement. Limiting children’s education became the newest tool to scale down on illegal immigration. And the public supported it overwhelmingly. In 2006, 70% of the voters approved Proposition 300, a ballot initiative to deny state financial aid for undocumented students and force them to pay out-of-state tuition at colleges. It also banned undocumented immigrants from access to adult education and child-care subsidies.
“You have taxpayers putting an awful lot of money in those schools and educating those kids for twelve years,” said Carlos Velez-Ibañez, chair and professor of the Department of Transborder Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Arizona State University. “These kids were living an American civil life, and all of a sudden you don’t recognize them anymore as having participated in American civil life and being supported by taxpayer money. All of a sudden you are going: “Sabes qué, te vas de aquí porque no tienes la ciudadanía (You know what, now you have to leave because you don’t have citizenship). That’s criminal.”
The new law affected more than university students. “When Proposition 300 came along, our undocumented students got stuck. As a charter school, we could no longer use the state funding we received to pay for their enrollment in college classes,” said Yvonne Watterson, principal at Gateway Early College. The institution, located in the heart of Phoenix, had on its roles over three dozen students whose legal status would prevent them from receiving any aid.
“I wake up to try my hardest to succeed,” said Noemi Ariza, a seventeen-year-old student at Gateway. “And for people to tell me I have no right to be here, to look at me like a murderer—it’s so dehumanizing. All I’m trying to do is make something of myself.”
Noemi came to the United States when she was nine, with her mother and four brothers from Guadalajara. It was a struggle at first to learn English, but she later adjusted.
With an already elevated Latino high school dropout rate in the state, Proposition 300 angered many educators. “How do I explain to Noemi that they will ship someone from another country to do what she can already do? She’s already gotten an associate’s degree. She’s graduating with a nursing certificate for God’s sake! We need nurses here! It just doesn’t make any sense,” said Watterson.
But politicians such as Pearce do not see these American-raised children in the same light: “Why would I expend millions of taxpayer dollars to educate those who don’t have a right to be here and can’t work here by law? Connect the dots. It’s just silly.”
Pearce celebrates dropped enrollment in certain school districts as a success of his strategy to crack down on immigrants. “School districts are down in enrollment significantly. I’m hearing complaints of employers who cater to the illegal immigrant crowd.” He cites this as a positive sign. But what Pearce sees as success others label foolishness. Between 2007 and 2008, Mesa Public School District, one of the largest in Maricopa County, lost 5,500 children in schools where enrollment is mostly Latino. For the schools this meant a loss of millions in federal money allocated per student at a time when it faced a $20 million long-term deficit.
“What are you happy about, tontos (fools)? The best and the brightest are going away and they are taking their children to get a better job someplace else and to create wealth in California, Nevada, etc.,” said Velez-Ibañez. “Every time you lose a Mexican family, you’re losing wealth.”
Wealth creation is not a concept often inserted into discussions of immigration. In Arizona the total economic output of both legal and illegal workers was estimated at 44 billion dollars in 2004, according to a study conducted by economist Judith Gans at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy in the University of Arizona. The same study shows that immigrants had a positive fiscal impact on the economy, producing a net gain of $940 million after considering fiscal costs such as education, health care, and law enforcement. These numbers remind us that there is something beyond the moral argument that should matter to taxpayers.
“The lesson is you cannot afford to be ignorant, you cannot afford to be ignorant in order to create national policy,” said Velez-Ibañez. “But the fact of the matter is national policy is being created by hysteria, national policy is being created by lack of information, by taking a hysterical, prejudiced point of view in which Mexicans are basically a commodity to be bought and sold, without a humanity.”
In August 2008, the federal government invited all immigrants with outstanding orders of deportation to “report to deport.” Only eight people showed up. Why? The answer is simple: America is home to millions of mixed-status families that are firmly rooted here.
A cloud of irrationality surrounds the debate over immigration in this country, and with the economy facing recession, the voices advocating for “immigration control” have grown louder. As Congress and President Barack Obama prepare to address the question of what to do with the country’s failed immigration policy, the first question at hand should be what to do about the millions of undocumented immigrants who have made the United States their home. Hopefully, Arizona will be an example of what not to do.
The poverty that exists in neighboring countries south of the U.S. border is what fuels migration into the States. In many other instances, this level of poverty compels the U.S. government to provide humanitarian aid abroad. When the poverty is closer to home, and we have a greater opportunity to provide substantive solutions to problems, why have we chosen to build fences?
To fence builders, including the Minutemen, fear-mongering politicians, and pundits like Lou Dobbs, the answer is obvious: immigrants threaten our economy. They’ll argue that walls prevent our downfall. But this rhetoric contradicts what we know from history: that newcomers stimulate our economy. Any Border Patrol agent will tell you that it takes about three minutes for a person to cut through, dig under, or scale a border fence. Fences do not solve problems; they merely slow people down. Similarly, the enforcement approach to which fence builders cling does not solve problems. Since September 11, 2001, the United States has spent tens of billions of dollars in efforts to secure the border, without significantly stemming the flow of illegal immigration. And if economic logic does not lead us to rethink our approach, perhaps our conscience should. Each year more people die attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border than in the entire twenty-eight-year history of Germany’s Berlin Wall. This human rights disaster is compounded by local policies geared toward criminalizing immigrant communities, as witnessed in Arizona today. Racial profiling, slapping felony charges on undocumented workers, and denying children the right to education are civil liberties violations that tear the fabric of our democracy.
The U.S.-Mexico border is the longest international boundary drawn between a developed and a developing country. There is a long history of migration across this border. As globalization is structured to facilitate the free movement of capital and product, it prompts the international movement of people. Consider how the North American Free Trade Agreement has exposed the Mexican economy to lower-cost U.S. imports that undercut entire sectors of the Mexican domestic economy. It is well documented that trade agreements between countries of unequal economic capacity spur the international movement of people. Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, professor of Mexican-American Studies at the University of Arizona provides a good example: “The biggest migration to the United States from Europe was in the nineteenth century when England was signing free trade agreements with different European nations. The Germans were displaced; the Italians were displaced; the Irish were displaced.” Without understanding the economic forces that drive migration, a humane, comprehensive, and effective solution will remain illusive.
When policies fail to make economic, social, or moral sense they need to be changed. To determine how, policymakers must consider the root causes of immigration. Fencing is an ineffective way to address economic states of poverty. The solution rests in government willingness to enact less exploitative trade policy and in educating citizens to embrace the changing nature of our national identity. We live in an increasingly global economy. As capital, goods, and services continue to enter new markets, it is foolish to think that people will remain in one place. In this reality, the policy is the problem.