Crisis
When the sheriff’s deputies finally found Rob Krentz, his dog, Blue, was still clinging to life. Even after fourteen hours lying, wounded, in the back of Rob’s four-wheeler, Blue still fought to defend his master. But Blue’s loyalty was for nothing. Rob was dead. They found him lying beside his still-idling vehicle, with a gunshot wound in his left side. The sheriff’s office later said it had killed him within minutes.
As investigators pieced together the events that led up to Rob’s death, we learned that the day Rob died, March 27, 2010, had been a pretty typical one. It began with him out on his four-wheeler, Blue by his side, working his sprawling 35,000-acre ranch in Cochise County, about twelve miles from the Mexican border. Rob was the third generation of the Krentz family to run the ranch, and it was more than a job. The land was both his livelihood and his life. And life in the desert Southwest is water. So Rob was out that morning checking the lines that delivered water to his 1,000 head of cattle.
If the day was a typical one, the last words Rob spoke to his brother Phil were also pretty unremarkable. At about 10:00 A.M., Rob radioed to say that he had found an illegal alien on his property. He was going to help him, Rob said, and Phil should contact the Border Patrol.
Like all the ranchers along the border, Rob regularly encountered exhausted, lost, and dehydrated illegal aliens on this land. He was well known for helping these desperate souls with some water, some food, and a kind word or two in Spanish. He helped them despite the trash and the fires they left on his property, the cut fences and broken water lines, and the frightened, unsettled cattle. Rob once estimated that over a five-year period, illegal immigration through his ranch had cost him a whopping $8 million. The damage he suffered because of the unsecured border to his south was real. But Rob never lost his humanity. He was that kind of guy.
The Krentz family is an Arizona ranching institution. They have been ranching along the border since 1907. Rob worked the land along with Phil, Phil’s son Ben, Rob’s wife, Sue, and their son Frank, one of three children they had raised on the ranch. Rob had been outspoken about the threat illegal immigration posed to him and his neighbors. Their house had been broken into, they’d been physically threatened, and one of their calves had been butchered. But his was always the voice of reason, not hatred and resentment. He and Sue had repeatedly called on the federal government to do its job. That’s all: just do its job and keep them safe.
As Phil Krentz hung up the radio that day, a seed of worry began to grow in his mind. The day before, Phil had spotted marijuana smugglers on the ranch and called the Border Patrol. Border agents responded and seized more than 200 pounds of marijuana and arrested eight illegal aliens. Phil knew that the Mexican drug cartels viciously guarded their smuggling routes. Was a member of the smuggling ring planning to take revenge on the Krentz family? Was Rob just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Had he seen too much?
Rob and Phil were supposed to meet up that day at noon. When Rob didn’t show and didn’t respond to Phil’s radio calls, the Krentz family and friends took off on their ATVs to search the ranch. When they hadn’t found Rob by six o’clock that evening, they made two calls: One was to Rob’s wife, Sue, who was in Phoenix visiting family. Come home, they said. We can’t find Rob. The second was to Cochise County sheriff Larry Dever. Sheriff Dever immediately contacted his search-and-rescue squad, and the Border Patrol responded as well. But it was after dark when the Arizona Department of Public Safety helicopter finally spotted Rob by the lights of his still-running ATV.
I was at home when I got the call. It was late at night. A highly regarded rancher had been killed in the south of the state, I was told. Rob Krentz had been killed. That’s all they knew. I hung up the phone. And as I waited for my staff to get back to me with more information, I grieved, I worried, and I wondered. Everyone in Arizona, it seemed, either knew Rob or knew of him. I had met him at a couple of meetings with the ranchers. Had he been a victim of the escalating violence on the border? As I waited, I couldn’t help but fear the worst. Oh my God, what has happened? We have to get a handle on this.
I was determined to find out exactly what had happened. I called Sheriff Dever. My staff kept me updated with any news. Soon we learned that the officers who responded to the scene had found some important clues. Whoever shot Rob had done so without warning: Rob’s rifle and a pistol were found secured in his ATV. Still, Rob had managed to drive about 300 yards after he had been shot. By following the tracks of his four-wheeler, law enforcement found three spent bullet shells, and something else: the dusty footprints of one person. Trackers followed the footprints south for about twenty miles, all the way to the U.S.-Mexico border. Then they lost them. And that’s where the trail went cold.
To this day, Rob Krentz’s killer has never been found. Still, it’s difficult to overstate the impact his death had on Arizona, and on America. After Rob was murdered, politicians from Representative Gabrielle Giffords to Senator John McCain joined me in calling for President Obama and Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano to deploy the National Guard to the border. Former congressman J. D. Hayworth, who was challenging Senator John McCain in the GOP primary at the time, called Rob a “martyr” for the cause of border security. Rob’s funeral mass in Douglas attracted more than 1,000 people.
Many liberal critics in the mainstream media have attributed the passage of SB 1070 to the “hysterical” reaction to Rob’s death. The fact is, the legislation had been working its way through the legislature for months before he was killed. But Rob’s death gave the bill momentum. It’s not as if people didn’t see the killing coming. And it’s not as if government was powerless to prevent it. After Rob was murdered, the idea of doing nothing while Washington ignored the crisis was no longer acceptable. Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Sheriff Dever summed up the mood of Arizonans well: “We cannot sit by while our citizens are terrorized, robbed, and murdered by ruthless and desperate people who enter our country illegally.”
The Arizona ranchers—the cattlemen, as they are known—are the salt of the earth. They’re the men and women who built Arizona and the American West. They’re the rugged, independent-minded Americans Teddy Roosevelt looked to when he created his Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. These are some of the toughest people you will ever know, and they had been living in fear. When I was secretary of state, I attended many meetings with the ranchers on the border. Illegal immigration was the number-one topic. Families told me that they were under siege. People were afraid to let their kids play outside. They were walking around their homes armed with guns.
They can be outspoken, but Arizona ranchers like Rob Krentz aren’t complainers. They’re not takers. All they want is for the border to be secured and for their families, their neighbors, and their land to be protected. That’s all they ever asked for. That’s all they continue to ask for today. And although there are few in southern Arizona who doubt that Rob was a victim of the drug violence coming across the border from Mexico, justice has still not been done. But what’s most amazing is that these remarkable people don’t blame the ordinary Mexicans and Mexican Americans they know. They blame the leaders whose job it was to protect Rob Krentz in the first place. Rob’s family, with their usual class and humanity, said it best in a statement issued after his death:
We hold no malice toward the Mexican people for this senseless act but do hold the political forces in this country and Mexico accountable for what has happened. Their disregard of our repeated pleas and warnings of impending violence towards our community fell on deaf ears shrouded in political correctness. As a result, we have paid the ultimate price for their negligence in credibly securing our border.
We all knew what “political forces” the Krentz family was pointing to. For years, real immigration reform in Washington had been held up by demands for the euphemistically named “comprehensive reform.” But we also knew what that meant. That meant a repeat of the 1986 immigration amnesty, signed by my hero Ronald Reagan. Back then, border security and tough reforms were supposed to accompany the amnesty of millions of illegal aliens that was granted in the law. But security and reform never came, and the amnesty encouraged millions more illegal aliens to come to America, secure in the belief that amnesty for them was just around the corner. I couldn’t do anything about that in 1986, but in 2009, as governor of Arizona, I could choose not to be one of the “political forces” that endangered the lives of people like Rob Krentz. I was more determined than ever, after I saw the courage and dignity his family showed following his death, to finally do something. It was too late for Rob, and I was sick about that. But no more Arizona families would suffer like his, not if I could help it.
I got a firsthand glimpse of the “political correctness” the Krentz family referred to about ten days later. New Mexico governor Bill Richardson expressed an interest in touring the border after Rob died, so I took him on a tour of the area. As we flew across the beautiful but ravaged landscape, Governor Richardson seemed to join in my sorrow and indignation. All I could think was that these people—my fellow Arizonans—didn’t have to live like this. Rob Krentz did not have to die. When we finished the tour, speaking to the large media gaggle that met us on the landing field in Douglas, I echoed one more time the call that the Arizona ranchers and lawmakers from both parties had made so many times before. We needed help. “It’s incumbent upon the federal government to respond,” I said. “We cannot do it alone.”
While the cameras were on, Governor Richardson joined me in my call for help. I remember being grateful for his public words of support but wishing his actions as governor tracked more with the tough talk he was serving up. Under Governor Richardson, New Mexico in 2003 began a policy of not requiring proof of residency to get a New Mexico driver’s license. New Mexico has issued an estimated 80,000 licenses to foreign nationals under Richardson’s policy, but they have no way of knowing whether these licenses have gone to illegal aliens, because they don’t ask applicants about their immigration status.
I’ve always believed that this is an incredibly dangerous, wrongheaded policy. New Mexico had no idea to whom it was giving its driver’s licenses—and, with them, the ability to board planes or buy chemicals and fertilizer and any number of things that are useful to a terrorist. In Arizona, Richardson’s policy was making it more difficult for us to enforce our laws against illegal immigration, to ensure the integrity of our elections, and to put the rights and needs of legal, law-abiding residents above those of lawbreakers. I was, frankly, unconvinced to hear Governor Richardson talk about getting on the border-security bandwagon following Rob’s death since his policies had encouraged illegal immigration for years.
This is what the Krentz family meant by “deaf ears shrouded in political correctness”—politicians like Bill Richardson talking out of both sides of their mouth, pretending to protect their citizens while they actively encouraged illegal immigration through their policies. These so-called leaders don’t hear the calls from the people for border security because they don’t want to hear them. If they hear them, they will be expected to do something about them, and that’s the last thing they want to do.
In June, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story by an illegal alien named Jose Antonio Vargas. It recounted his life coming to the United States from the Philippines under a fake passport when he was twelve, being supplied a fake green card, and growing up to become a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. Vargas described being undocumented in the United States as “going about my day in fear.” I always found it interesting that the Times never gave such prominent treatment to Rob Krentz. He, too, lived in fear, but of a different kind. His fear wasn’t that his green card would be discovered as fake. His fear was for his family and his neighbors. His fear was of the violence and lawlessness that eventually took his life.
The mainstream media were interested in Rob’s story for a while, but mainly as an example of how the right-wingers out in Arizona exploited the issue to pass their right-wing laws. They never covered the story in any depth—they never put the same human face on Rob Krentz that they did for Jose Antonio Vargas, because to do so would have exposed not only the violence on the border created by thuggish illegal aliens but also the humanity and tolerance of people like the Krentzes who believe the border should be secured. In the liberal media’s view of the world, violent illegal aliens and tolerant supporters of the rule of law run counter to the story they want to tell, so they pretend they don’t exist.
Instead, immigration is often portrayed as a tale of good versus evil, a political and cultural battle that pits two different visions of America against each other. One is the vision of America in which it’s our moral obligation to absorb virtually unlimited numbers of poor, uneducated immigrants. Those who hold this view are the good guys—the ones who cherish and defend America’s welcoming and generous spirit. The other vision, in the media’s black-and-white interpretation, is the restrictionist view. In this vision, consciously or unconsciously racist Americans (there can be no other motive) seek an airtight border in order to preserve their western, white privilege. These, needless to say, are the bad guys. There’s no middle ground in this popular media narrative; there are no “good guys” who believe we still need to control our border, and no “bad guys” who aren’t racists and nativists.
Needless to say, this is a cartoon version of the problem we face on our border. It’s also just one reason why so many Americans view the press as at best unreliable and at worst nakedly partisan. The overwhelming majority of Americans want to do the right thing, both for our country and for law-abiding newcomers. That means, for most of us, securing our border first and then—and only then—figuring out how to fix our broken immigration system. As I like to say, you don’t call the architect when your house catches fire. You call the fire department. Later, you can get to the job of rebuilding.
Even those Americans for whom immigration seems a distant issue don’t fall so easily into the open-borders-versus-closed-borders dynamic, no matter how hard the media and Washington try to shoehorn them in. As polls have shown, most Americans favor getting control of illegal immigration but continue to support being open to legal immigration. They understand the distinction between illegal and legal immigration—between honoring the law and not—that eludes much of the media. And for those of us who live and breathe illegal immigration every day, the issue is far from a simple tale of good guys versus bad guys. It’s a practical, pressing issue of security and quality of life. For us, illegal immigration boils down to a few basic questions:
First, do our laws mean what they say they mean? Often lost in the heat of the immigration debate is this undeniable fact: Crossing the border into the United States without the proper documentation is against the law. Period. We can either honor this law or we can abolish it. But our political leaders in Washington seem to uphold the law only when it suits them. The problem is, selectively honoring the law serves to undermine all of our laws. What’s more, breaking the law to come to the United States too often leads to other law breaking. Employers break the law by hiring illegal aliens. And then the illegal aliens break the law by obtaining and using false identification—as do those who supply these documents. And that’s just for starters. Illegal immigration is feeding a growing violent subculture of drug and human smuggling in the Southwest—a culture that is spreading across the country as they are beginning to diversify into other criminal activity like extortion and racketeering—just like the mafia. In the vacuum left by unenforced immigration laws, a new kind of organized crime is coming to America.
Second, who gets to decide who becomes an American? Should it be the criminals who profit from smuggling drugs and humans across our border? Should it be the immigrants who cut the line to come here illegally? Or should the citizens who make the laws and pay the taxes decide who their fellow citizens will be? Americans have different views on whether there should be more immigration or less to our country. I happen to believe that we should keep our borders open to legal immigrants. But few are neutral on the question of who decides who is admitted to our country. Illegal immigration takes this decision from the citizens and puts it in the hands of others; it takes it from the law-abiding and puts it in the hands of lawbreakers. No country in the history of the world has ever willingly done that and survived.
Finally, we come to the question that really hits home for me and my fellow Arizonans: Who will pay the costs of uncontrolled illegal immigration? The hundreds of thousands of mostly poor, mostly uneducated illegal aliens who enter this country every year impose real costs on our communities. The sick need health care. The hungry need to eat. The young need to be educated. While many Americans mistakenly believe that illegal aliens are ineligible for public services, many do receive benefits, mostly through their U.S.-born children. And then there is the cost of the crime and violence that increasingly accompanies illegal immigration.
Who’s going to pay for all this? The communities and states that just happen to be along the border? Or the federal government whose job it is to protect the border and enforce the law? (That is, if we decide that our laws should be enforced to begin with!)
These are the real, unavoidable questions that Americans who live along the southwestern border have to deal with every day. The degree to which our leaders in Washington fail to consider these questions is beyond distressing. They seem to prefer to treat immigration as a purely political exercise. They look at it in terms of the votes they will gain or lose, not the individuals whose lives and property are destroyed. They look at it as a way to buy favor with this or that special interest group, not as a fundamental question of our national security and sovereignty. They look at it in terms of their self-interest in political advancement, not in terms of our national interest in the rule of law.
The failure of Washington to take illegal immigration seriously does a disservice to Arizonans and the people of the border states, of course. Unlike those who pontificate about the issue from Washington, New York, and other far-off centers of power and influence, we live with this problem every day. And like the Arizona ranchers who blame “political forces” on both sides of the border for fueling it and making it worse, we border-state Americans are angry about it.
But illegal immigration is not just “our problem” anymore—it is also yours. Increasingly, border states like Arizona are, for illegal aliens, simply transit points to cities and towns across the United States. The organized crime and drug and human smuggling rings that control the flow of humans across the border don’t limit their North American operations to the Southwest. As we will see, they are global operations, bringing illegal crossers from all over the world into Mexico and then funneling them through Arizona to destinations in virtually every state in the union. And as go the criminals who run these organizations, so goes the violence, exploitation, and lawlessness that accompanies them. Americans in every state must wonder how a federal government that has grown so big and increasingly asserts its authority to interfere in every aspect of our lives can be so impotent in the face of a clear threat to our security and safety.
The irony is that the crisis of illegal immigration in Arizona is due in large part to our success at stopping it in other states along the southwestern border. That’s right, folks: We can secure our border if we just summon the will to do so. We’ve done it before. We can do it again.
In the early 1990s, 75 percent of all illegal crossings along the 1,951-mile Mexican border occurred in San Diego or El Paso. Arizona was barely in the running. It was then that the U.S. government made the conscious decision to redirect illegal aliens east from San Diego and west from Texas by shoring up the border in these two locations. The idea was to push illegal crossers into more remote areas where they would have to make long, arduous crossings and would presumably be easier to apprehend. But it was an imperfect solution, and it came at a price for our state. As the Los Angeles Times acknowledged in 1993, “Arizona would bear the brunt of redirected migratory patterns, experts say.”
In other words: California and Texas get more secure borders. Arizona doesn’t. Washington decides; the rest of us just have to live with it.
It’s already getting hard to remember what a problem it once was, but San Diego used to be a major transit point for illegal crossers. There was kind of a carnival atmosphere at the border. Vendors sold food, and impromptu soccer games broke out as thousands of would-be immigrants gathered near San Ysidro to make their break. They would wait until dark and then make a treacherous but brazen run across the eight-lane Interstate 5 freeway. It got so bad that the state of California put up signs showing the silhouette of a man, woman, and child to warn motorists to watch out for people crossing the highway.
By 1994 the people of San Diego were tired of illegal aliens darting in front of them in traffic and running through their backyards. Californians decided they had had enough. So their political leadership, aided by the Clinton administration, launched the project known as Operation Gatekeeper. A fourteen-mile fence with eight-foot-high steel panels was built in the San Diego area. Then another fence was constructed. Hundreds of new border agents were added to the area. Stadium lighting, infrared night scopes, and motion sensors were installed. The result was dramatic. Apprehensions of illegal aliens dropped from 524,231 in 1995 to 126,908 in 2005 in the sixty-six-mile San Diego sector. Federal and local officials also reported that rapes, killings, and other violent crimes sharply declined.
The effects of shoring up the border in El Paso were equally dramatic. Once again, when the political will is summoned to secure the border, it can be done. The El Paso sector, running from the Arizona–New Mexico state line all the way through the two westernmost counties in Texas, used to be a busy spot for illegal crossings. In the twenty miles of border between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, an estimated 8,000 illegal aliens crossed each day. But about the same time California’s border security was beefed up, the feds boosted security around El Paso. Operation Hold the Line gave up on the failed strategy of trying to catch illegal aliens after they’d entered the United States and instead focused on preventing them from entering in the first place. It reassigned agents to the border from other duties and doubled the number of Border Patrol agents. Apprehensions went from about 1,000 per day to 150 per day. Crime declined, as did human-rights-violation charges against the Border Patrol. The operation enjoyed broad support, including from the Mexican American community.
California and Texas are real-life refutations of the lie that securing our border is an impossible dream. The major downside of their success, however, is that it created a funnel effect, squeezing the flow of illegal aliens from the west and the east until it formed a gushing stream right through—you guessed it—Arizona. Now, California and Texas haven’t solved their illegal immigration problems, not by a long stretch. But even their limited success has meant that hundreds of thousands of illegals who still want to cross the border every year now have to go through my state. Arizona has become the path of least resistance—the chokepoint through which illegal aliens enter the United States every year and then fan out across the country.
Of all the states in the union, Arizona is the site of the most illegal crossings. More illegal aliens are detained in Arizona—and more drugs are confiscated in Arizona—than in any other state. Although the numbers have declined overall since the onset of the recession, the federal government currently estimates that about half of all illegal border crossings—of all borders in America—are through the Grand Canyon State. This is a considerable change from 1992, when fewer than 8 percent were recorded in Arizona. In 2009, Customs and Border Protection apprehended almost as many illegal aliens in Arizona as in California and Texas combined. That year, the Border Patrol caught more than 550,000 illegal aliens, and over 240,000 of these apprehensions occurred in the Tucson sector. Since 2009, well over 400,000 people have crossed illegally into the United States in the Tucson sector—the equivalent, according to Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne, of an invasion of twenty divisions.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the Border Patrol estimates that it apprehends only one in four illegal border crossers. That means the actual number crossing into Arizona every year is at least a million. That’s about twice the population of the city of Tucson. And for every illegal immigrant who’s a criminal and who gets arrested crossing the border—a gang member, a drug dealer, even a child molester—three are missed and find their way into neighborhoods in other states all across America.
So it’s not for nothing that parts of Arizona have been called lawless free-for-alls when it comes to illegal immigration. And the reason is not that law enforcement and Border Patrol agents are failing to do their job. These men and women are being threatened, shot at, sometimes paying the ultimate price, and still doing a heroic service for their communities and their country.
No, the reason for the crisis of illegal immigration is that our leaders in Washington are failing to do their job. Despite their protests that the border is “as secure as it’s ever been,” the experts tell a different story.
The federal government’s own independent research group, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), admits that of the nearly 2,000 miles of border between the United States and Mexico, less than 44 percent is under the “operational control” of the Border Patrol. As if that isn’t bad enough, consider that the feds define “operational control” as not necessarily the ability to locate and apprehend illegal aliens at the border itself, but up to 100 miles from the border. In fact, only 15 percent of the border is under full control in the sense that crossers are caught then and there.
Fifteen percent. If 15 percent in control means the border is “as secure as it’s ever been,” we’re in bigger trouble than even I realized.
Arizona has dealt with the challenge of illegal immigration for a long time. Mexico is our neighbor, after all. And like all neighbors, we have had good times and bad. But for the most part, for those of us who have lived, worked, and raised families in the Southwest, our Mexican neighbors are people like us. Most of them want what we want: to provide for their families and live in safety and security.
But a few years ago, Arizonans began to notice a change in the character of many of the people crossing the border. Although most illegal aliens were still just looking for an opportunity to provide for their families, another, more sinister type was now haunting the border. As usual, it was the people who live along the border itself, like Rob Krentz, who noticed it first.
The cattlemen told us that more and more of the illegal aliens they saw on their land were no longer wearing their traditional clothes. Now they were wearing black—they even painted their water jugs black—to be less detectable at night. And instead of carrying Circle K plastic bags with their shoes and other personal items like they used to, more and more were carrying automatic weapons. Homes were being broken into. Women at home alone during the day reported menacing men staring at their houses and refusing to leave. Rob Krentz himself made the observation to a group of ranchers around that time that if something didn’t change, it was inevitable that someone would be killed.
Up in the interior of the state, we realized that things had changed for the worse when violence spiked in places like Phoenix. In 2003 alone, we had a 45 percent rise in homicides that the police traced to fighting among gangs smuggling drugs and illegal aliens and a 400 percent rise in kidnappings, home invasions, and extortion linked to illegals.
A home invasion is every bit as terrifying as the name suggests. Rival drug gang members have been known to dress in uniforms similar to those of the Phoenix police and carry military-style rifles to target homes of other smugglers where they believe large amounts of cash, drugs, or weapons are stored. During the attacks, residential neighborhoods have been sprayed with hundreds of rounds of automatic-weapon fire. Earlier this year, eight armed men broke into a west Phoenix home at three A.M. looking for drugs while a mother and father and their six-year-old daughter were asleep. They beat and stabbed the father, and one of the intruders died in a shoot-out with police. Since then, stories of home invasions and the ensuing armed clashes with police have become routine in the Phoenix area.
And of course, we started to find more bodies along the roadside and in the desert, the innocent and not-so-innocent victims of the growing violence entering our state from the southern border.
I vividly remember the crisp November morning in 2003 when we got one of the first of many wake-up calls about this new and very frightening level of violence. I was at my office in the Capitol when reports started coming in that Department of Public Safety officers had come upon bodies scattered along the median of Interstate 10 southeast of Phoenix. They were the grisly remains of a forty-mile, high-speed shoot-out between illegal-alien-smuggling gangs.
I did a mental inventory of everyone I knew who might have been traveling along I-10 that morning. As the details came in, each was more unbelievable then the next. The shootings had occurred at eight thirty in the morning. In broad daylight. During rush-hour traffic on a well-traveled interstate highway. Four people were believed to be dead.
What happened was this: After crossing the border with a group of illegals, a human-smuggling gang had its “cargo” hijacked by a rival gang about eighty-five miles from the border, just north of Tucson. The two groups of smugglers, with the robbers and their human cargo in the lead, took off heading northwest on I-10 toward Phoenix. The original smugglers caught up with the rip-off gang just north of Casa Grande, about thirty miles from Phoenix. They pulled up alongside them and opened fire—still speeding up the freeway—with automatic weapons. The back-and-forth gunfight continued along the freeway for more than thirty miles, until they ran into the morning rush-hour traffic heading into Phoenix. The vehicles were so shot up that police found one man crouched by the side of the highway, holding the toe that had been blown off his foot in the gunfire.
Looking back, it’s clear that the I-10 freeway shooting was just a taste of things to come. Smuggling humans across the border had become big business. So much money was at stake—and so little risk of capture or lengthy incarceration was involved—that rival groups had taken to stealing each other’s “cargo.” But not only were the lives of illegal aliens being lost, but the lives of Arizonans themselves were being threatened. Even now, I look back and shudder at the thought of someone I love being caught in the crossfire that morning.
The rapid growth of human smuggling in the Southwest desert is first of all a tale of human greed. At critical points, the criminals that operate along the border saw potential for yet more money to be made off of human misery, and at each point the levels of violence and suffering increased. Along the way, it became a story about something else as well: a story of total indifference to the sanctity of life.
But perhaps the worst part of the story is our government’s utter failure to protect us from this evil. A government’s most fundamental job is to protect its citizens from those who prey upon the vulnerable and put profit above human life. The outrage of human smuggling in America isn’t just that these kinds of criminals exist. It’s that our federal government has chosen to ignore them for so long.
Once upon a time, Mexicans, Central Americans, or others seeking to cross the border into the United States illegally might pay a “mom-and-pop” guide a few hundred dollars to help them across. But the security crackdowns following the attacks of September 11, 2001, made crossing America’s borders, for a time, more dangerous and difficult. Where illegal aliens used to slip across relatively easily with the help of small-time guides—commonly known by their Spanish name, coyotes—after 9/11 the crossing got more perilous. Illegal aliens could still cross, but now they needed more help. Greater danger meant greater demand for coyotes, and that, of course, meant higher prices. These higher prices in turn attracted a more organized, sophisticated, and brutal criminal element.
By that memorable morning of the I-10 shoot-out, mom-and-pop smuggling operations had largely been replaced by cold-blooded, high-stakes, organized criminal gangs. And instead of moving individuals or small groups of illegals, these gangs are responsible for smuggling thousands of illegal aliens into Arizona each day.
Human smuggling is a multibillion-dollar business in Arizona and the Southwest. Today, organized smuggling operations can command anywhere from $2,000 to $3,000 per person—and much more if the illegal immigrant is from China, Central Europe, or any country other than Mexico. They deal in bulk, herding groups of twenty, fifty, or a hundred people at a time. As it stands, the risk these smugglers take is nothing compared with the money they can make. They can average $2,000 a head smuggling a hundred people across the border up to three times a week. You do the math.
As if this weren’t bad enough, something else has happened to the cross-border traffic in human beings that has made it even more dangerous: The Mexican drug cartels have gotten involved. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that it was only a matter of time before this happened. If you can move humans across the border, you can also move drugs; it doesn’t take a genius to see the enormous profits that can be made by combining the two. So, increasingly, the drug cartels are turning aliens seeking to cross the border—even those who just want to come to the United States to work—into reluctant drug mules. Double the illegality—quadruple the money. The GAO has estimated that the Mexican cartels earned $8 billion to $23 billion from U.S. drug sales in 2005 alone. At the high end, reported the Arizona Republic, that puts the Mexican cartels at ninety-seventh on the Fortune 500 list, just below Coca-Cola.
Law enforcement officials tasked with detecting and dismantling these operations tell us that the cartels will typically take a group of illegal crossers, isolate the healthy males, and “make them pack,” as they say. For the most part, these immigrants are poor, desperate people. They are in no position to resist the demands of armed, bloodthirsty gangsters who offer them the infamous choice of plata o plomo—silver or lead. So each crosser is forced to carry, say, a backpack containing fifty to sixty pounds of marijuana. The cartels use duct tape to secure the backpack so completely that the immigrant can’t remove it—they’re literally taped into their drug loads. Then they are marched sixty or seventy miles across the border and through the desert up to one of the major interstate highways that parallel the border in Arizona, I-8 or I-10.
These crossings can take days, and they are very dangerous. In remote areas of Arizona, like the Tohono O’odham Indian reservation, you can walk through the desert for hours without seeing any people, roads, or buildings. There are rattlesnakes and scorpions. The sun is relentless, and water is nonexistent. Here, an injury—even a slight one—can mean the difference between life and death. Drug-cartel coyotes think nothing of leaving behind the sick or injured, and the Border Patrol routinely comes upon their decomposed remains.
When they reach the interstate, the smuggling bands are usually met by gang members with vehicles. Before they are piled into the trucks, vans, or SUVs, the illegal immigrants’ backpacks are literally cut off them. But the Mexican cartels are careful. They know better than to have their human and drug cargoes in the same place. So the drugs go off in one vehicle and the people in another.
It’s along the interstates and back roads of Arizona that our law enforcement officers most often encounter illegal aliens. The smugglers’ vehicles are typically in bad shape, and heavily laden, often with more than twenty people inside. They travel at high speeds, and rollovers are common. I remember when, a couple of years ago, an SUV carrying at least twenty-seven people rolled over around midnight on a remote stretch of highway in southeastern Arizona. The reports said that the illegal aliens were “stacked like wood” in the back of the truck. Eight people, including the driver, were killed. Five had to be airlifted to a Tucson hospital.
The initial destination of human smugglers traveling along Arizona’s roads and interstates, more often than not, is the Phoenix metropolitan area. But even when they reach Arizona’s largest city, a couple hundred miles from the border, the mayhem isn’t over. In many ways, it’s just beginning.
Earlier this year, federal authorities raided a house in a quiet west Phoenix neighborhood of single-family homes. Inside the four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house they found 108 frightened, dehydrated illegal aliens.
Welcome to Arizona’s notorious drop houses.
A drop house is a house—very often rented—where smugglers hold their frightened charges until they have received enough payment from the immigrants or their families to let them go. Rarely does a week go by in Arizona that our newspapers and televisions don’t carry news of law enforcement finding another drop house. In an unfortunate confluence of bad trends, the foreclosure crisis has combined with the immigration crisis to give smugglers their pick of homes in Phoenix and its surrounding suburbs. In Phoenix alone, law enforcement has discovered more than 600 drop houses in recent years. Many, many more go undetected. Meaning that, at any given time, literally thousands of people are being held hostage in these houses.
Coyotes used to hold illegal aliens in drop houses until they had paid the prearranged price of their crossing. The immigrants would use the place to rest, lie low, and pay their bills, and then were sent on to their final destination. But the more vicious breed of criminals who now control the human smuggling business sensed an opportunity. Why should they be satisfied with a $2,000-to-$3,000 negotiated price when there’s more money to be had, provided you don’t have a conscience? So these criminals started to hold the migrants hostage, demanding additional cash payments from their relatives before they’d be released.
Today’s drop houses have been described as prisons and torture houses. Captain Fred Zumbo, who heads the Department of Public Safety’s illegal immigration task force, describes the men who run Phoenix’s drop houses as “a violent subculture of twenty-to-thirty-year-old Mexican men who have no regard for human life and dignity.” In addition to torturing the immigrants they smuggle, this subculture of criminals, Captain Zumbo told me, “puts citizens at risk.”
Drop houses can be found anywhere, even in middle-class and upscale neighborhoods. Because they’re so hard to detect, police often rely on tips from terrified relatives to find them. Sometimes they find drop houses by watching for a few telltale signs. Police watch the interstates for bulky, heavily laden vehicles that might be carrying large numbers of illegals. Very often, these vans and SUVs have temporary license plates, or tags from a stolen car. If the police get suspicious, they follow. Smugglers like to make their drops late at night, while the neighbors are asleep. If police see the weighted-down vehicle pull into the garage of a house, watch the garage door close, then see it open again a few minutes later as a suddenly lighter vehicle emerges, they know they’re on to something.
What goes on inside these houses is literally the stuff of a horror movie. Immigrants are beaten, they are raped, they are Tasered, and they are murdered. Smugglers pack them in, forty, fifty, sixty, and more to a house. Dozens of human beings are shoehorned into rooms in which the furniture has been removed and the windows boarded up. To prevent their escape, the immigrants are sometimes forced to remove their clothes. On one memorable night in 2008, Captain Zumbo’s task force responded to a Phoenix police report of fifty naked, bloody people running down the street. They were a group of illegal aliens that had overpowered their guard and busted out of a drop house by breaking through the back patio doors.
Captain Zumbo told me about one undocumented Mexican man who was running a very violent—but tragically typical—drop house. Like other smugglers, this guy was as clever as he was sadistic. The smugglers know that most people seeking to enter the United States have relatives here. And those relatives have money. So this guy would take those immigrants who he suspected had lucrative connections in the United States to a boarded-up “torture room” within the drop house. He would call their relatives on the phone and demand $3,000 in exchange for the immigrants’ lives. Then he would take a wooden dowel—a cylindrical piece of wood not unlike a baseball bat—and beat the men. The relatives would listen on the phone as the men were beaten and begged for their lives. What would anyone do in that situation? The relatives would pay to free their loved ones, and the torturer would get rich. And that’s what happens in anonymous drop houses in Phoenix and across the country every day. People suffer and criminals get rich. The ones that we’ve discovered are just the tip of the iceberg. The smugglers tell illegal aliens that their families in the United States and Mexico will be targeted if they tell the police. And for good reason, the immigrants believe them.
The evidence that Phoenix has become the drop-house-and-kidnapping capital of America can be found outside the police reports as well. After 9/11, wire transfer businesses were required to report data on senders and receivers to state attorneys general, so we took a look at what was reported for Arizona. The result was astounding. The data showed that Arizona is a magnet for money transfers, with a great deal of money coming in and very little going out. Delaware, for example, sent sixty times as much to Arizona as Arizona sent to Delaware. South Carolina wired thirty-eight times as much cash to Arizona as Arizonans sent there. In all, the wire transfers entering the state dwarf the transfers leaving it by a factor of thirty. What that tells us is obvious: A lot of people are paying a lot of money to bring illegal aliens safely into our country.
The most recent phase of the escalating violence has been its most violent yet. This is the stage in which the stakes become so high that the criminals turn on each other. It is the point at which the amounts of money being made are so great that, criminals being criminals, they start to prey on one another. Smugglers start to rob smugglers. Drug dealers steal from drug dealers. And freelance criminal gangs organize to rip off both. This is where Arizona is today, and where much of America may be tomorrow.
The driving force behind the criminal-on-criminal violence is simple: Human beings and drugs are both more valuable to criminals on the U.S. side of the border than they are on the Mexican side. After all, our side is where drugs can be sold, and where illegal aliens want to be. In the eyes of the criminal class, the value of both drugs and people is very little before they cross the border. But once across, their value soars, and the loads of illegal aliens, drugs, and the cash they bring become ripe targets for thieves.
The Spanish slang that surrounds the human-smuggling trade probably best describes the rise of intra-criminal violence on the border. If illegal aliens are pollos, or chickens, and human smugglers are polleros, or chicken ranchers, the thieves who rip off the smugglers are known as bajadores—chicken thieves.
Bajadores are typically illegal aliens themselves. They’re opportunistic rather than organized, but they are heavily armed. Their motive is money, pure and simple. Like the thieves in the I-10 shoot-out, they kidnap loads of illegal immigrants from smugglers and hold them for ransom. According to police, immigrants typically fetch $1,500 to $2,500 a head. Not infrequently, these criminals kidnap their competition. Kidnapped smugglers pay off at $10,000 to $50,000 each. Thanks to criminals preying largely on criminals, Phoenix now has the dubious distinction of being the kidnapping capital of America, second in the world only to Mexico City. And recent audits indicate that Phoenix officials have actually underreported the number of kidnappings in Phoenix.
Sometimes these gangs simply zero in on a drop house, break in, kill the guards, and start taking over the payments made by the illegal immigrants. Other times they will discover a house where they think people, drugs, or cash are being held, arm themselves with military-style rifles, dress up like police officers or SWAT teams, and raid the house.
For these guys, anything they get is pure profit.
But more dangerous than even the loosely organized bajadores are the rival Mexican drug cartels whose brutal fights to control smuggling routes and market share are increasingly spilling over from Mexico into the United States.
By now most Americans are familiar with the out-of-control violence in Mexico related to the drug wars. The murder and mayhem there are truly beyond comprehension. But even this incomprehensible violence has a purpose. Forty thousand Mexican citizens have been killed since President Felipe Calderón began his campaign against the cartels in December 2006; but for the drug cartels, this has not been enough. They have moved beyond murder in their viciousness and brutality. Cartels routinely mutilate victims for no obvious reason. And they don’t “just” behead their victims anymore. They skin them and rip their hearts from their chests. In one case, the cartels actually cut the face off a victim and stitched it to a soccer ball. Law enforcement officials agree that this is done to send a message both to the Mexican people and to the other cartels. To the first: The government is powerless to help you. And to the second: Don’t cross us.
The lifeblood of these cartels, of course, is the smuggling routes across the U.S. border. These are literally their livelihoods, their superhighways to outrageous fortune. As a consequence, the cartels seek to control these routes using any means necessary. The mountaintops of the Southwest desert are infested with hundreds of so-called spotters—cartel members who monitor the smuggling routes for other cartels, bajadores, and the Border Patrol. Two to three hundred of these spotters are in the hills—deep inside U.S. territory—at any given time. They use radios to communicate with smugglers leading human trains of drug mules across the desert, letting them know if it is safe to pass or if thieves or rivals are on their route.
Despite the fact that they squat in primitive caves called “spider holes” for months at a time, the spotters are highly sophisticated. They have the usual high-powered weapons, including, in at least one case, shoulder-fired rocket launchers. They use (and leave behind) car batteries to power their encrypted satellite radios. Sometimes they even use solar panels. They have GPS and night-vision goggles to monitor the smuggling routes. If they see a U.S. official or a rival gang member, sometimes they just report it. Sometimes they shoot.
And, sad as it is to say, the cartels have established a degree of control over the border that the United States government has never come close to having. I remember reading a story in the Dallas Morning News about a drug cartel that was waging war on another smuggling ring for control of a route in the Tucson sector. The reporter had talked to one man who wanted to come to the States for a construction job but couldn’t. The border, the man told the newspaper, was “tapado por la mafia”—closed by the mafia. “There’s too much vigilance, too much,” he said. “And it’s not the border patrol.”
The “vigilance” of the drug cartels is making the Mexican mafia very rich, and the American Southwest increasingly dangerous. The cartels now control the U.S. markets for marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamine, and they are moving more and more of it across the border. The amount of marijuana seized by the Border Patrol in 2010 was more than 3 million pounds, with an estimated street value of over $2 billion. That’s billion with a b. During the past two years, the amount of marijuana seized by Sheriff Paul Babeu’s office in Pinal County—which is seventy miles from the border—more than doubled. The trend that is truly alarming is how the smuggling of hard-core drugs has skyrocketed—cocaine is up 90 percent, heroin is up 40 percent, and methamphetamine is up 20 percent.
And despite the Obama administration’s claims to the contrary, the cartels are bringing violence across the border along with their drugs. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed earlier this year in a gunfight linked to the cartels. The cartels are now openly threatening law enforcement. Jeffrey Kirkham, chief of police in the border town of Nogales, reports that his officers have been threatened. Informants in the cartels have told Chief Kirkham to ignore cross-border drug shipments or pay the price.
Along with drugs and violence, the cartels are bringing their unique criminal methods across the border as well. Just last year, their passion for beheadings became evident in the Phoenix area. Police entered an apartment in Chandler and found a head in one room and the body in another. And increasingly, the cartels are recruiting American citizens to join in their criminal activity. Earlier this year, on the Tohono O’odham reservation, federal agents and tribal police arrested forty-six people accused of working with the Mexican cartels that use their land to smuggle people and drugs. The cartels are even recruiting Arizona high school kids—American citizens—to do their dirty work. They pay them $200 or so to use their parents’ cars to transport drugs across the border. Eventually these kids typically drop out of school because the money is so good. They effectively become members of the cartel. And if they want out, the cartels won’t let them go—once they’re in, they’re in for life, however long that lasts.
In addition to the drug cartels, Arizona is plagued by garden-variety criminals sneaking in from Mexico. Each week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection publishes a report of the arrests made in the area near Tucson. Recent reports detail arrests of illegal aliens who are gang members. Some have previous criminal convictions for crimes against children, including child molestation. It’s easy for federal officials with political motives to sit in Washington, D.C., and tell us we’re exaggerating the criminal threat coming across the border and insinuate that we’re racists and xenophobes. But we see it every day. We live it every day. And we have had enough.
All of this violence and illegality has a cost, of course. The most important and immediate cost of our unsecured border is paid by people, both Americans and immigrants, in their lives, their health, and their safety.
For many of the immigrants attempting to cross our border, the cost is very high indeed. Last July, illegal alien deaths were so high that the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office had to use a refrigerated truck to store some of the bodies. In the first seven months of 2010, the Pima County authorities recovered 140 bodies—59 in July alone. Since 2001, the bodies of more than 2,100 men, women, and children have been found in the Arizona desert. Even as federal authorities report that border apprehensions are down, border deaths keep climbing. For me, that’s not an indication that our border is “as secure as it’s ever been.” Growing border deaths are an indication of precisely the opposite. Regardless of your position on immigration, these deaths on sovereign U.S. soil should sadden and shame us all.
For those of us who live near the border, the cost is the very real threat to the safety of our families and communities. Some pay more than others. Rob Krentz and Border Patrol agent Brian Terry are two tragic examples. But all of us feel the pain and insecurity that comes with seeing our wonderful, diverse state, with its warm, welcoming people and its unique natural beauty, overtaken by lawlessness. All of us lose a measure of our freedom because of this federal failure.
Illegal immigration costs us in more tangible ways as well. One of the frequently overlooked burdens of illegal immigration is the tremendous environmental damage done by the hundreds of thousands of people who traipse across the border each year.
The piles of trash left behind in the desert by illegal immigration have to be seen to be believed. Each illegal alien who crosses is said to leave about six to eight pounds of trash along the way. That adds up to more than 2,000 tons of trash each year. In 2006 alone, over a million pounds of trash was picked up along the Arizona border. Some of it is heart-breaking stuff: wedding pictures, photos of children, baby blankets. But most of it is just an eyesore. Illegal aliens and their smugglers leave behind veritable mountains of water bottles, backpacks, food wrappers, used diapers, and human excrement. Even cars and trucks are abandoned by smugglers and left on the border. The trash is everywhere, but it’s typically concentrated in what are called “lay-up” spots—places where illegal aliens rest and wait for the next smuggler to guide them farther north. Federal and state agencies, ranchers, and volunteers conduct massive cleanups, but the trash just keeps on coming.
The irony is that much of the land along the U.S. side of the Arizona border is supposedly protected by the federal government for environmental and historic reasons. Federal laws like the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act restrict access to the land. To enter these protected lands, the Border Patrol has to wait and get special permission from federal bureaucrats. Sometimes four months pass before permission is granted! That means the Border Patrol can’t police these areas effectively, so more illegal aliens get through, leaving more trash. In the twisted world of illegal immigration, environmentally protected lands suffer more damage than unprotected ones. It got so bad that Rob Krentz’s widow, Sue, asked the government not to classify wilderness areas as protected in order to protect them from illegal immigration.
Millions of dollars have been spent in Arizona cleaning up the trash left by illegal immigration. But that amount is nothing compared with the burden on Arizona taxpayers created by illegal aliens once they settle in our state. Our education, health care, and incarceration systems are strained past the limit. We’ve done what we could through ballot measures and a 2009 law I signed requiring proof of eligibility for state services. But many of the most costly parts of the American welfare state are mandated by the federal government. Moreover, simple Christian compassion requires that human beings in need get medical care, that children be housed, fed, and educated. Arizonans have generously met this humane obligation, but Arizona can’t continue to sustain it, because of our uncontrolled borders. And increasingly, as illegal aliens pass through Arizona and fan out across the country, our burden is becoming America’s burden.
The cost of incarcerating the criminals who cross our border is by itself astronomical. Law enforcement officials across the state have done a magnificent job in a very trying circumstance. But in the process they’ve caught a lot of bad guys, and these bad guys have to go somewhere. The result is that the Arizona Department of Corrections incarcerates some 6,000 criminal aliens, nearly 17 percent of our inmate population. Of the felony defendants in Maricopa County, 21.8 percent are illegal aliens. The cost to the Arizona taxpayers is approximately $150 million every year. The federal government is responsible for picking up much of this tab, but it has utterly refused to do so. I have—unsuccessfully so far—constantly begged the Obama administration to deliver to Arizona taxpayers the more than $880 million it owes us. And I haven’t been alone. My colleague in Texas, Rick Perry, recently sent the federal government a bill for $349 million for the state and local cost of incarcerating illegal aliens in Texas. In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Governor Perry noted that the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP), created to reimburse states for the cost of locking up criminal aliens, “doesn’t begin to compensate the entirety of Texas’s financial burden.” When Napolitano was governor, she would annually hold press conferences demanding payment with a giant cardboard prop—an oversize invoice for President George W. Bush. Now she’s busy defending the current administration’s refusal to honor its commitments. As usual, Arizona taxpayers are left footing the bill.
Add to the cost of incarcerating criminal aliens the court costs involved in prosecuting cases. According to recent reports, illegal reentry—attempting to reenter the United States illegally after already having been caught at least once—was the most frequent federal crime charged in the first six months of 2010, and the same held true for Arizona. The good news is that the number of these charges being brought in Arizona is increasing; the bad news is that it costs money. According to the University of Arizona study, from 1999 through 2006, the twenty-four counties along the U.S.-Mexico border spent a total of $1.23 billion on processing illegal aliens through the criminal justice system. The Arizona border counties spend over $26 million of taxpayer money every year providing law enforcement and criminal justice services, such as public defenders for illegal aliens.
Not all of the people crossing illegally into Arizona come here for the purpose of committing additional crimes, of course. They are admirable, hardworking souls who want nothing more than a better life for their families. But they are also overwhelmingly poor and uneducated. Studies show that welfare use is correlated with education level. Both native-born and immigrant Americans with college degrees earn about the same amount. And immigrants with college degrees contribute more in taxes than they consume in public services.
The problem is, in Arizona, around half of the illegal aliens entering the state have less than a high school education. The result is that nearly a third of all Arizonans living in poverty are in immigrant households. And of these households, two thirds are headed by at least one illegal alien. Their use of public assistance has nothing to do with their willingness to work—and work hard. Most immigrant households have at least one member who is working. But too often, it’s not enough.
These generally hardworking, law-abiding immigrants nonetheless place a crushing burden on Arizona taxpayers. The costs to Arizona taxpayers of illegal immigration fall into three broad categories: health care, education, and law enforcement.
Federal law requires that hospitals provide treatment in emergency rooms to anyone, regardless of immigration status or ability to pay the bill. Many people, particularly the uninsured, use hospitals for non-emergencies. And because approximately 60 percent of illegal immigrants are uninsured, as illegal immigration has soared in Arizona, so has the cost of providing emergency room care. Between 2001 and 2005, emergency room visits for outpatient care spiked by 46 percent in Arizona while they increased by only 8 percent nationally. Emergency room personnel don’t ask about the legal status of their patients, so nailing down the numbers is hard. But a 2002 report mandated by Arizona senator Jon Kyl found that hospitals and ambulances in the border counties of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas spent more than $200 million in one year on emergency medical treatment of illegal aliens. In Arizona, the cost was $31 million. Thanks to Internet sites that tell illegal aliens how to claim care at American hospitals—complete with maps showing where to find them—the cost of uncompensated care in Arizona hospitals for non-citizen immigrants in 2004 was more than $135 million. Our total Medicaid costs to this group were over $475 million. The federal government—meaning, the American taxpayers—covers much of these costs. But in total, in fiscal year 2011, the costs of providing illegal aliens with federally mandated emergency medical care, Medicaid, cash assistance, youth and family services, and other health and welfare benefits were almost $200 million.
Educating illegal aliens and their U.S.-born children is another area of high cost to Arizona taxpayers. According to the Pew Center, as many as 170,000 Arizona students, out of a total student population just over 1 million, have parents who are illegal aliens. And it’s not only the cost of educating illegal aliens we’ve had to pay in our schools: until former Arizona schools chief Tom Horne put a stop to it in 2010, for years Mexican children were actually being picked up every day and bused across the border to attend Arizona public schools in Ajo, forty miles north of the border!
Most of these children are struggling to learn English, which adds to the cost. In 2009 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Arizona in a long and costly legal battle over funding English Language Learners (ELL) in our public schools. Still, the cost of our approximately 170,000 ELL students in 2008 was about a $70 million drain on the taxpayers, and the ELL cost in 2009 was more than $110 million. In total, the cost to the state of educating undocumented children was $1.2 billion in FY 2011.
Adding the cost of imprisoning criminal aliens brings the total expense to Arizona taxpayers of illegal immigration in FY 2011 to about $1.6 billion. Even if we deduct the estimated $670 million illegal aliens will have paid in taxes this fiscal year, we still have a net cost to the Arizona taxpayers of almost $1 billion. Out of an $8.5 billion state budget—and in the middle of the biggest recession since the Great Depression—that’s not chump change.
And as for those Americans living far away from the border who think they’re immune to these problems: Think again. According to the Justice Department, the cartels have spread their violent reach to at least 230 American cities. They are, in the words of the U.S. government, “the greatest organized crime threat to the United States.” The same cartels that kidnap, rape, and murder in Phoenix maintain drop houses in Georgia; conduct assaults in Alabama; engage in shoot-outs in the Pacific Northwest; and distribute marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin from Anchorage to Miami.
And just as the criminal element imposes costs on these communities, so does the level of illegal immigration itself. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, illegal aliens are more widely dispersed across the country than ever before. There were more than half a million illegal aliens in Illinois in 2010. There were 625,000 in the state of New York, 550,000 in New Jersey, 325,000 in North Carolina, and 425,000 in Georgia.
These populations impose tremendous costs on local taxpayers. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, welfare use by illegal aliens is highest in California, at 77 percent. But the state with the second-highest rate of welfare expenditures for illegal aliens is New York, far from the Mexican border, at 76 percent. The border state of Texas is next, with 70 percent of its illegal immigration population on welfare, but Illinois is close behind, at 68 percent. Minnesota, Georgia, and Nevada follow in highest welfare use by the undocumented, at 65 percent. Thanks to the high numbers of illegal aliens in our state and the federal mandates, Arizona comes next. If we hadn’t limited state services, we would be much higher on the list.
For the taxpayers of these states and a growing number of others, the question of how to deal with the burden imposed by illegal immigration is not the media myth of good guys versus bad guys. It’s no wonder, then, that so many of these states are considering or have already passed laws that mirror Arizona’s tough immigration laws. Like us, they are facing a huge challenge. Like us, they’ve received from Washington the public-policy equivalent of the back of the hand. And like us, they are finally being forced to take matters into their own hands.
For many Americans, Rob Krentz’s tragic death was their first real glimpse of the immigration crisis on our border. But it is a crisis that has been long in the making.
Despite what you may have heard, it’s not a crisis of race or culture. It’s a crisis of violence, desperation, and human greed. It’s a humanitarian crisis. An environmental crisis. An economic crisis. A political crisis. It’s a crisis that the people who live and work along America’s southwestern border know all too well. We didn’t cause it. We didn’t ask for it. But we’ve lived with it for years. And soon, unless our government acts, the entire country will be living with it, too.
Fueled by drugs and lawlessness, and abetted by federal indifference—or worse—Arizona’s crisis is coming to the rest of America. In fact, it’s already here.