Ground zero in the illegal immigration nightmare

For the second time in two weeks, the New York Times has produced major stories on Phoenix and illegal immigration (read the stories here and here). It’s about time the nation took notice of Phoenix’s second largest industry (after house building): people smuggling. Many of the immigrants that staff the chicken plants of North Carolina and the meat-packing plants of the upper plains states came through Phoenix.

This industry has caused a low-intensity war to be fought on the streets of Phoenix and its suburbs for several years, recently leading to the gunning down of a police officer. Of the millions who have gone through the city, many have settled. A third of the city is officially Hispanic, but the real numbers are probably far larger and many are illegal. Meanwhile, the Anglo population, whether from the Midwest or from Arizona, has increasingly rebelled against the influx. Arizona has passed some of the most draconian laws against illegals, and the state is full of anti-Hispanic sentiment, much of expressed in the most thuggish manner (check out any blog or story comment on the Arizona Republic if you doubt me).

But the situation is complex and contradictory. It’s not rocket science. It’s much, much more complicated.

A little history is important. Unlike Tucson, Phoenix was historically a Southern city, from its cotton crop to its segregated schools. The city was predominantly Anglo, with a significant black population and an old segment of Mexican-Americans. This was true culturally well into the early 1960s. As a major agricultural center, Phoenix usually encountered Mexicans that moved through for the harvest as part of the Bracero program. And the biggest influx of illegals didn’t happen until the 1980s.

To say the least, it has been extremely destabilizing. The Maryvale district, the classic post-World War II automobile suburb, was turned from middle-class Anglo to poor to lower-middle-class Hispanic. Now most of the west side of this 500-square-mile city is Hispanic. Not only that, a huge part of the population is first-generation, low-skilled, non-English speaking. A secret: even much of the old Mexican-American population is uneasy and resentful of the newcomers. The tension with the diminishing black population is significant.

One of the biggest waves of immigrants in American history hit a city least prepared for it. Phoenix was built on the cheap, in an era when cities were made to be thrown away. The result: starter houses easily accommodated poor migrants, but the neighborhoods have become linear slums, lacking the historic houses or real neighborhoods that encourage reinvestment or renewal. Schools, always underfunded, were swamped by students that didn’t even know English. Hospitals similarly were overwhelmed. The costs of illegal immigration have been profound.

And yet, the cheap Phoenix economy is heavily dependent on the immigrants, who have taken over not only landscaping but the former Anglo bastion of construction. In addition to house building, the region’s tourism economy is staffed largely by Hispanics, many of them also illegal. That cheap house you bought when you moved from Minnesota, those inexpensive restaurant meals — they come from the same illegals you love to hate.

San Diego offers an instructive contrast. While Phoenix is 200 miles from the border, the city of San Diego is right on the border. Yet San Diego has nothing like the warfare afflicting Phoenix. Only part of this is the more aggressive border enforcement there. San Diego also built a quality economy, moving from dependence on tourism to telecom, biotech and other high-tech, global industries. It has illegal workers, to be sure, but it is not an economy where illegals are the backbone.

In addition, NAFTA and globalization caused a massive migration from Mexico to the United States. Mexico’s traditional jobs were destroyed. Up north, employers, emboldened by years of federal policies that tilted against unions and workers’ rights, felt free to throw out their American workforces and hire illegals. And many of them came through Phoenix. Smuggler gangs fight among themselves on the streets of the city, where yesterday’s dream ranch house is now a run-down slum where 50 illegals are held at gunpoint until relatives pay off the coyotes.

The state government has been singularly purblind in dealing with the issue. Suburban pols, catering to racism and fears, rammed through anti-immigrant policies. And while some anecdotal evidence suggests some are leaving, the mass deportation imagined by the most rabid anti-immigrant forces won’t happen. The Arizona economy would collapse. Meanwhile, programs to provide immigrants will pathways in to the mainstream haven’t materialized. There are no factory jobs of a century ago providing the ladder up for an influx of low-skilled, non-English-speaking immigrants. So Phoenix is gathering a massive underclass, with all the attendant crime and social costs. These people in the shadows aren’t going anywhere. They are a tragic waste of human capital in a world where diverse, global cities will prosper — but only if they are forward-thinking in knowledge, creative and technology economies.

The most anti-immigrant attitudes are found in Phoenix’s suburbs: growing rapidly and becoming more powerful than what is becoming an aging center city on the tipping point of decline. Theses suburbanites want Des Moines in the desert and see no reason to address the issue beyond the punitive. In the city and state, the growing Hispanic population has been politically lethargic. Phoenix only recently elected its first Hispanic council member in years. As a result, a retrograde, fearful politics dictates bad policy.

Indeed, the anti-immigrant attitude may have a couple of unintended consequences. If migrant labor flees, the recession there may be much longer and deeper than anything experienced since the 1890s. And the most able and promising migrants will leave, taking their skills and futures to more welcoming states.

Of course federal inaction is to blame. Border policy was long a monument to hypocrisy. Mexico’s rotten government could use the U.S. as a safety value for its young, expanding population. American businesses got cheap labor. Larger forces, such as worldwide migration between rich and poor countries, and the consequences of NAFTA, have washed across Arizona and Phoenix.

But Phoenix has in many ways made its bed. Now it’s living the nightmare.