Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

SB 1070 deconstructed

I received an email from a friend, or perhaps a lost friend, over my most recent post. I urge you to read it in full because it represents a viewpoint widely held by suburban Anglos. Here it is:

Jon: check your facts. Russell  Pearce was the
sponsor of SB 1070. Most of the text for SB 1070 was written by Kris
Kobach, a law professor and important figurehead with the Federation of American
Immigration Reform.  Russell Pearce was not voted out of office by the
Mormons. He was voted out of office by the Hispanics who know he
sponsored SB 1070. SB 1070 was written after James Krentz, a rancher
in southern Arizona was killed on his own ranch by illegals.

All of the Arizonans I know are not against immigration. They
are against illegal immigration. Big difference. As you know I grew up in South America, specifically Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina. I did not come back to the States until I was a teenager and I can report first hand that immigration laws in all of the other countries I have been in are very tough compared to the U.S.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

City Hall

The first and perhaps only great mayor was Greek. He was Pericles of Athens, and he lived some 2500 years ago, and he said, "All things good on this Earth flow into the City, because of the City's greatness." Well, we were great once. Can we not be great again? — from the 1996 film City Hall.

Something strange is happening inside Phoenix City Hall, and I can't escape the nagging feeling that the ouster of police chief Jack Harris is part of it. Harris was removed as chief, but not as public safety director, after claims that the PPD inflated kidnapping numbers in order to get federal grants. Mayor Phil Gordon supported Harris, while Councilwoman Peggy Neely was a vocal Harris critic. That's the story so far, and the reporting has been disappointing. The back story has yet to fully emerge. (Here's a 3/11/11 update on council bickering; this is reaching Scottsdale levels of childishness).

To understand the modern Phoenix Police Department, you must go back to 1954, when Charlie Thomas was appointed chief. He was a rough equivalent of LA's William Parker, a modernizer and reformer who created a professional police force. PPD was never as corrupt or brutal as the LAPD that Parker inherited; it was a small force (149 officers for a city of 150,000) with a good-ole-boy culture in a mobbed-up town. It was still haunted by the 1944 murder of one its first African-American officers, "Star" Johnson, by detective "Frenchy" Navarre. Johnson and his partner were walking a beat in the Deuce when Frenchy, a notoriously brutal and racist cop, parked in a red zone off-duty and refused to move. He shot Johnson, who later died, and was acquitted by a Southern-culture Phoenix jury. Johnson's partner later came into Police Headquarters (on the first floor of the lovely, still-standing City-County Building) and gunned down Frenchy, who went down firing the two guns he wore. The bullet holes were in the walls for years. There was also the infamous World War II riot in "(racial slur) Town by soldiers, a rich historical event for some future scholar.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Will SB 1070 help or hurt?

On Sunday, the Information Center published a 573-word story, accompanied by many graphic and break-out doo-dads, asking: "Will SB 1070 help or hurt the economy." The lede: "Arizona's new immigration law will likely affect a sizable swath of the state's economy, but experts are uncertain whether it will bring overall economic gains or end up scarring the state with losses." I know one thing: These kind of shallow stories are among the many self-inflicted wounds killing journalism. Oh, I forgot, Gannett doesn't do journalism, it is an "information broker."

An old hand once told me, "Immigration isn't the most difficult dilemma facing America. It's worse." It is a result of Americans' insatiable addiction to cheap labor. But it is part of a far more complex set of phenomena involving a Third World nation bordering the First World superpower; globalization's destruction of Mexico's peasant economy; mass migrations on a scale never before seen on an overpopulated planet; corporate greed amid a worldwide glut of labor, and billions of poor living without hope but primed for instability and extremism. The topic deserves at least the kind of sophisticated work done early last decade by The Arizona Republic with the "Dying to Work" series.

The overwhelming evidence is that SB 1070 will be a net economic loser for a state already in a depression. The most comprehensive national work on the public costs of illegals vs. their output for the economy has been done by UCLA's Raul Hinojosa. The verdict: The aliens are a net positive. Nowhere is this more true than Arizona. The anti-immigrant bill is already dearly costing the crucial tourism industry from boycotts. Its explicit political extremism will deter capital formation and investments by quality corporations. To the extent that it causes an exodus of illegal immigrants, it will further erode the tax base, for those aliens pay a disproportionate share of their incomes to Arizona's regressive tax system. Most will stay, even deeper in the shadows and out of the mainstream, adding to the state's lost human capital and talent. Most important is this: No low-wage, easily exploitable migrant labor force, no Growth Machine.

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Posted inPhoenix

Phoenix recovery? Part II

The data and just driving around town make it clear that the Phoenix economy is not recovering. That the news snippets and economic forecasts desperately trying to spin things otherwise are almost exclusively focused on real estate is telling. Metro Phoenix so narrowed its economy that it was America's last big factory town, building houses. When this unsustainable game of risk crashed, the region was devastated. But like a dying rattler, it is still snapping its fangs, wildly hanging onto the hope that the Growth Machine can be started up again. It's always worked in the past! This is the forlorn cry of so many caught in past depressions and economic turning points. Buffalo… Youngstown…Detroit…

The old housing economy is not returning. The one based on large-scale output of tract houses built by national builders on a foundation of liar loans, high leverage and vast government subsidies for the suburban or exurban "American dream." Now that dream is a nightmare. The nation is much poorer after the Great Recession, yet the imbalances and high debt remain. Incomes and living standards for average people are in deep trouble. Millions of houses remain to be sold, with many more in the private "shadow inventory" as well as in the toxic "assets" taken off the hands of the banks by the Federal Reserve. Nowhere do these realities operate with more ruinous consequences than Phoenix. Any "new normal" will provide little relief for a regional economy whose business plans were based on an unsustainable profligacy of building and population increases. That little blip that might mean "the bottom" or "stabilization." So?

What's astonishing is the lack of realistic or imaginative thinking on the part of what passes for Arizona leaders faced with this harsh future. Or faced with the mounting evidence of how distorting, costly and damaging to the earnings of average people the real-estate monster had become. Metro Phoenix has never been so dependent on real estate, yet no one seriously wants to break the jones. To understand the future of discontinuity. Pinal County, a national ground zero of exurban crisis, sees only one way out: More sprawl. In fact, Pinal should be returning to agriculture as fast as it can; Arizona needs the exports to a growing Asia, as well as the capacity to feed itself in a high-cost energy future. But the self-destructive hits just keep coming:

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