Hispanics flee Arizona ahead of immigration law


By Alan Gomez, USA TODAY
Arizona's tough new immigration enforcement law is fueling an exodus of Hispanics from the state seven weeks before it goes into effect, according to officials and residents in the state.

Though no one has precise figures, reports from school officials, businesses and individuals indicate worried Hispanics — both legal and illegal — are leaving the state in anticipation of the law, which will go into effect July 29.

Schools in Hispanic areas report unusual drops in enrollment. The Balsz Elementary School District is 75% Hispanic, and within a month of the law's passage, the parents of 70 students pulled them out of school, said District Superintendent Jeffrey Smith. The district lost seven students over the same one-month period last year, and parents tell Smith the Arizona law is the reason for leaving.

"They're leaving to another state where they feel more welcome," he said.

The measure, signed into law April 23 by Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, requires a police officer to determine a person's immigration status if they are stopped, detained or arrested and there is "reasonable suspicion" they are in the country illegally.

About 100,000 illegal immigrants left Arizona after the state passed a law in 2007 that enhanced penalties on businesses that hired them, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Some early signs suggest another exodus.

Businesses serving the Hispanic community say business is down, signaling that illegal immigrants are holding on to cash in anticipation of a move from the state, said David Castillo, co-founder of the Latin Association of Arizona, a chamber of commerce for nearly 400 first-generation Hispanic business owners.

"(Brewer) signed the law, and everything fell apart," Castillo said. "It's devastating."

Jorge Vargas plans to move to New York City because his air-conditioning business relies mostly on Hispanics. "My business is completely dead," he said.

Juan Carlos Cruz, an illegal immigrant who has worked in plant nurseries for 20 years, huddled with dozens of relatives over the Memorial Day Weekend in the backyard of his brother's Phoenix-area home to plot out the family's next move to avoid what they say will be harassment by police. Virginia and California are the front-runners.

"If I were alone, I'd try to stay. But I have a family, and I have to find a place where we can live with more freedom," said Cruz, who hopes to move July 4 to blend in with holiday weekend traffic. "This is getting too hard."

Paul Senseman, a spokesman for Brewer, said it's difficult to gauge how many people are leaving because of the law, but he said he hears similar reports of people leaving the state.

"If that means that fewer people are breaking the law, that is absolutely an accomplishment," he said.

And it never occurred to you that Hispanics are leaving Arizona, a state many have lived in legally for generations as US citizens, because of the virulent racism being directed against them. How would you like to be stopped on the whim of cops and ordered to produce proof of citizenship? Would you want to stay somewhere that treats you like an invader even though you and your family lived there maybe since before it was an American state?

(Newser) – The top cop in Arizona's Pima County has no intention of enforcing the state's new "stupid, racist and disgusting" immigration law. "We're going to keep doing what we've been doing all along," said Sheriff Clarence Dupnik. "We're not going to stop and detain these people for the Border Patrol." He realizes his approach could land him in court, he tells Arizona's KGUN 9 News. But he says the racial profiling that would be required to enforce the new immigration law could also trigger lawsuits against him and his men.

"We're in a damned if we do, damned if we don't situation," he noted. "It's just a stupid law." State Sen. Russell Pearce, a sponsor of the controversial new law, called Dupnik's remarks "the stupidest statement someone who takes an oath to enforce the law has ever made."

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 27, 2010

Arizona's new crackdown on illegal immigration will increase crime in U.S. cities, not reduce it, by driving a wedge between police and immigrant communities, police chiefs from several of the state's and the nation's largest cities said Wednesday.

Arizona's law will intimidate crime victims and witnesses who are illegal immigrants and divert police from investigating more serious crimes, chiefs from Los Angeles, Houston and Philadelphia said before meeting with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to discuss the measure. Counterparts from Phoenix, Tucson, San Jose and Montgomery County, among others, joined them.

"This is not a law that increases public safety. This is a bill that makes it much harder for us to do our jobs," Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said. "Crime will go up if this becomes law in Arizona or in any other state."

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, four states have introduced their own versions of the Arizona law, which defines illegal immigration as criminal trespassing and requires police to request documents of anyone they stop and have a "reasonable suspicion" is in the country illegally.

Recent public opinion polls indicate that as many as 70 percent of Americans surveyed support such a police requirement. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund have filed lawsuits to stop the Arizona law, arguing that the Constitution preempts states from enforcing federal law and that the measure will lead to racial profiling. The U.S. Justice Department, which Holder heads, is also weighing whether to file suit.

While the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police opposes the new law, elected sheriffs including Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, head of the Arizona Sheriff's Association, back it.

Babeu said cooperation from illegal immigrants, particularly those coming from Mexico, is already low because they are in the United States illegally and because of law enforcement corruption in their native countries.

"The people of Arizona believe the overall majority of Americans are not only supportive of this law, but that our measure of generosity has been crossed, a line has been crossed," Babeu said.

But reports by the Congressional Budget Office and the Social Security Administration confirm that undocumented immigrants in fact pay many different types of taxes, including sales tax, property tax, Social Security tax and income tax.

Francine Lipman, a professor of tax law at Chapman University, says the disinformation about the tax contributions of undocumented immigrants can be attributed to both "confusion about the system generally and . . . that we have a history of scapegoating people when times are tough, and maybe also when times are good."

Lipman's research in her 2006 report, "The Undocumented Immigrant Tax: Enriching America from Sea to Shining Sea," investigated the position of the low-income, undocumented person in the American tax system.

"Most of our tax system is seamless," Lipman went on to say, explaining that therefore, "folks don't think about the taxes they pay just for consuming."

Along with sales tax, which Lipman says immigrants pay whenever they spend money - and because they have low-income jobs, a high proportion of their salary goes to sales tax because they spend it on taxed products such as food and property - undocumented immigrants also file tax returns.

Lipman first discovered this when holding a tax clinic for low-income taxpayers. "My students were helping," said Lipman, "and all of the sudden they said Professor Lipman, this gentleman has all these Social Security numbers - and this other number. And that's how I discovered it."

This "other number," which Rita and other immigrants who do not have a valid Social Security number use to file taxes, is the nine-digit individual taxpayer identification number, or ITIN.

Analysis of the latest Census data indicates that Arizona’s illegal immigrant population is costing the state’s taxpayers about $1.3 billion per year for education, medical care and incarceration. Even if the estimated tax contributions of illegal immigrant workers are subtracted, net outlays still amount to about $1.3 billion per year. The annual fiscal burden borne by Arizonans amounts to more than $700 per household headed by a native-born resident.

This analysis looks specifically at the costs of education, health care and incarceration because they represent the largest cost areas and because a 1994 study conducted by the Urban Institute, which also examined these same costs, provides a useful baseline for comparison ten years later. Other studies have been conducted in the interim, showing trends that support the conclusions of this report.

As this report will note, other significant costs associated with illegal immigration exist and should be taken into account by federal and state officials. But even without accounting for all of the multitude of areas in which costs are being incurred by Arizona taxpayers, the programs analyzed in this study indicate that the burden is substantial and that the costs are rapidly increasing.

The $1.3 billion in costs incurred by Arizona taxpayers is comprised of outlays in the following areas:

• Education. Based on estimates of the illegal immigrant population in Arizona and documented costs of K-12 schooling, Arizonans spend approximately $820 million annually on education for illegal immigrant children and for their U.S.-born siblings.
• Health Care. Uncompensated medical outlays for health care provided to the state’s illegal alien population is now estimated at about $400 million a year.
• Incarceration. The cost of incarcerating illegal aliens in Arizona prisons and jails amounts to about $80 million a year (not including the monetary costs of the crimes that led to their incarceration).

The unauthorized immigrant population pays some state and local taxes that go toward offsetting these costs, but they do not come near to matching the expenses. The total of such payments might generously be estimated at $257 million per year.

The fiscal costs of illegal immigration do not end with these three major cost items. The total costs of illegal immigration to the state’s taxpayers would be considerably higher if other costs such as special English instruction, school nutrition programs, or welfare benefits for American workers displaced by illegal alien workers were added into the equation.

The anagram for your right-wing group is F.I.R., not F.A.I.R. It still doesn't address how the racist law passed doesn't violate federal laws against racial profiling.

In reality, there is no rising crime rate in Arizona (AP, 5/10/10; CNN, 4/29/10). The same is true of Phoenix—despite the oft-repeated (and thinly sourced) description of the city as a kidnapping haven. The city of Phoenix reported that crime in 2009 was at its lowest rate in 15 years, and violent crime had dropped 18 percent from 2008. Mayor Phil Gordon told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (4/20/09) that "crime is actually down, in every category."

What's more, there is no evidence linking immigrants (documented or undocumented) to increases in crime, in Arizona or anywhere else. In fact, much of the research indicates the opposite—that immigrants commit crime at a lower rate than the population at large (Immigration Policy Center, 4/28/10).

El Paso is regularly ranked as one of the safest cities in the United States (L.A. Times, 5/13/10). In fact, border towns with heavy levels of immigration are among the safest cities in the U.S. (AP, 6/3/10).

On May 21, O'Reilly claimed that Arizona is "overrun with crime and everything else and people getting slaughtered on their ranches. I mean, it's insane."

But since then, O'Reilly's stopped making these false accusations. Maybe he saw the FAIR petition demanding that he stop. Or maybe he read the story in another Murdoch-owned news outlet, the Wall Street Journal (5/25/10), about how the newly released FBI crime statistics for 2009 show that the violent crime rate "plunged 16.6 percent in Phoenix, despite a perception of rising crime that has fueled an immigration backlash."

[Phoenix, AZ.] Don't be fooled. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law, signed last week, requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are US citizens.

I don't buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the Saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning.

What's new here is not the politicians' fear of a xenophobic "Teabag" uprising.

What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote -- and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.

In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters ... directed by one Jan Brewer.

Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer's command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.

That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you're not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: after all, they give their names and addresses.

So I asked Brewer's office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution?

No, not one.

Which raises the question: were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, non-citizens Brewer tagged them, or just not-quite-white voters given the José Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?

The answer was provided by a federal prosecutor who was sent on a crazy hunt all over the Western mesas looking for these illegal voters. "We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost 2 years, I didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case."

This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more. When he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his firing was personally ordered by the President of the United States, George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove.

Iglesias' jurisdiction was next door, in New Mexico, but he told me that Rove and the Republican chieftains were working nationwide to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria with public busts of illegal voters, even though there were none.

"They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments," Iglesias told me. The former prosecutor, himself a Republican, paid the price when he stood up to this vicious attack on citizenship.

But Secretary of State Brewer followed the Rove plan to a T. The weapon she used to slice the Arizona voter rolls was a 2004 law, known as "Prop 200," which required proof of citizenship to register. It is important to see the Republicans' latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, as just one more step in the party's desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box.

[By the way, no one elected Brewer. Weirdly, Barack Obama placed her in office last year when, for reasons known only to the Devil and Rahm Emanuel, the President appointed Arizona's Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano to his cabinet, which automatically moved Republican Brewer into the Governor's office.]

State Senator Russell Pearce, the Republican sponsor of the latest ID law, gave away his real intent, blocking the vote, when he said, "There is a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in this country."

How many? Pearce's PR flak told me, five million. All Democrats, too. Again, I asked Pearce's office to give me their the names and addresses from their phony registration forms. I'd happily make a citizens arrest of each one, on camera. Pearce didn't have five million names. He didn't have five. He didn't have one.

The horde of five million voters who swam the Rio Grande just to vote for Obama was calculated on a Republican website extrapolating from the number of Mexicans in a border town who refused jury service because they were not citizens. Not one, in fact, had registered to vote: they had registered to drive. They had obtained licenses as required by the law.

The illegal voters, "wetback" welfare moms, and alien job thieves are just GOP website wet-dreams, but their mythic PR power helps the party's electoral hacks chop away at voter rolls and civil rights with little more than a whimper from the Democrats.

Indeed, one reason, I discovered, that some Democrats are silent is that they are in on the game themselves. In New Mexico, Democratic Party bosses tossed away ballots of Pueblo Indians to cut native influence in party primaries.

But what’s wrong with requiring folks to prove they’re American if the want to vote and live in America? The answer: because the vast majority of perfectly legal voters and residents who lack ID sufficient for Ms. Brewer and Mr. Pearce are citizens of color, citizens of poverty.

According to a study by prof. Matt Barreto, of Washington State University, minority citizens are half as likely as whites to have the government ID. The numbers are dreadfully worse when income is factored in.

Just outside Phoenix, without Brewer's or Pearce's help, I did locate one of these evil un-American voters, that is, someone who could not prove her citizenship: 100-year-old Shirley Preiss. Her US birth certificate was nowhere to be found as it never existed.

In Phoenix, I stopped in at the Maricopa County prison where Sheriff Joe Arpaio houses the captives of his campaign to stop illegal immigration. Arpaio, who under the new Arizona law, will be empowered to choose his targets for citizenship testing, is already facing federal indictment for his racially-charged and legally suspect methods.

I admit, I was a little nervous, passing through the iron doors with a big sign, "NOTICE: ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE PROHIBITED FROM VISITING ANYONE IN THIS JAIL." I mean, Grandma Palast snuck into the USA via Windsor, Canada. We Palasts are illegal as they come, but Arpaio's sophisticated deportee-sniffer didn't stop this white boy from entering his sanctum.

But that's the point, isn't it? Not to stop non-citizens from entering Arizona -- after all, who else would care for the country club lawn? -- but to harass folks of the wrong color: Democratic blue.