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More than a decade since Arizona legislators began enacting laws targeted at immigrants without legal status, the
immigration situation has sharply worsened. It was in 1996, when proof of legal residency or citizenship began to be
required to apply for a driver’s license. Since that genesis of cracking down on undocumented immigration, the largely
ineffective measures implemented to thwart the influx of people without a permit or visa, have fast-tracked us into a
socioeconomic and demographic apocalypse, today in 2007.
Many other laws have been enacted since then. However, no legislation has proven effective to stop people from entering
Arizona seeking work and to earn money to send to their families in their home countries. Laws and enforcement aimed to
detect and deport people living in the United States without legal papers have just done that, but there has been little or no
effect to stop the influx of people.
Enforcement —both at the local and federal level— routinely detect and deport people at a fast rate, but not faster than the
economic phenomenon called illegal immigration. Year after year, lawmakers actively have responded to what a large
percentage of Arizona citizens see as a pervasive invasion. People who they say are not living up to the American Dream
but are instead creating a nightmare supposedly responsible for most social ills in Arizona and many other states.
Economic disparity in Latin American countries has significantly increased, thus causing a continuous northbound flow of
people from impoverished regions toward the U.S. Reality is, as long as poverty and hunger are rampant in these
countries, empty stomachs will continue to direct men and women searching for better economic conditions into rich,
more prosperous countries.
People sneaking into the United States without a work permit or a visa do so not because they did not apply for one at a U.
S. embassy back in their countries. They do it because they did not meet the requirements to obtain a visa: home
ownership; money in the bank; and a stable job. In other words, no visas for the neediest human beings who want to
migrate precisely because they are poor and hopeless.
Nevertheless, in spite of aggressive legislation to fight against people who still come without the proper documentation,
America —and Arizona— is feeding the fire that is burning in counties like Maricopa, Pima and Santa Cruz, to name a few.
Approaching the year 2008, regardless of drastic laws and measures, the influx of people remains strong.
For many years, however, large corporations, small businesses and private citizens have knowingly employed —and
many times exploited— immigrants who lack documents to work. Businesses such as department stores, car
dealerships, and realty companies have also allowed these “illegals” to purchase everything, from clothes to cars to
homes, without inquiring about their legal status. The prosperity of many of these businesses has been in part from these
men and women who are “legal” to buy but “illegal” to work.
Business owners have hired these people; they have allowed them to be their customers. Too much and for too long.
Otherwise, how do we explain the fact that more than 12 million —and counting— are in the country living in homes that
realtors sold to them, driving cars car salesmen sold to them, and wearing clothes they purchased from department
stores? Consumerism from undocumented people is never questioned; their labor rights always denied.
Now, America —and Arizona— has a very serious crisis that has erupted on the sidewalk of East Thomas Road. There, for
the last seven weeks, an economic boycott against a business —M.D. Pruitt’s— that hired off-duty sheriff deputies to
arrest day laborers has taken place and force. But the current situation is the result of a society that has employed —
clandestinely— and accepted as consumers the thousands of men and women who are now deplored.
These immigrants have been used and abused both as workers and customers, and they’re as fed up with this hypocrisy
as the society that wants them all deported. Thus we arrive to an Arizona that yes, should be fed up with the double
standard of workers without a permit being able to find low paying jobs, and consumers who without legal status are
welcomed —with “SE HABLA ESPAÑOL” signs and bilingual personnel— as long as they spend money in American
businesses.
Latin American governments are to blame also for their inability to create sources of employment for people who shouldn’t
have to leave their country in the first place. Economies from these countries do little to stop their poor to leave their cities
to come to a country that welcomes them to work and consume without documents, but not to have labor rights. They also
enforce immigration laws and deport people as well, thus creating a lack of moral authority and effective advocacy when
they want to defend their countrymen abroad.
The U.S. federal government has tragically failed to pass realistic and comprehensive laws that could have avoided
conflicts like Pruitt’s at a local level. No wonder why states like Arizona and cities like Phoenix are struggling with larger-
than-their-local resources can do to fight a socio-economic Goliath, a battle they can’t win, no matter what laws are
enacted, and to try stopping the demographic tsunami from Latin America. People continue to cross the border daily in
search of work into a country where employers have and will continue—either because they benefit from or have to—
hiring them. Without a doubt, Federal authorities will have and need to eventually enact a program to allow these people to
do the work they already do with documents.
So here we are today, on the sidewalk of East Thomas Road between the stretch of 34th and 35th Streets, the epicenter of
a heated immigration socioeconomic quake in Phoenix, Arizona. A tremble that is shaking organizers, citizens and
politicians who have been literally forced to act under the ugly scenarios seen around the country, at the national level in
reports like this one published by The New York Times, and in videos at the local level by Barriozona.
We are angrily trying to solve a problem so emotional and complicated for us to possibly make a significant, determinant
and fair impact on the root, the source, the core of this international and local issue. We are as a nation as engaged and
divided as demonstrators from both sides of the narrow sidewalks of East Thomas Road. We are as desperate for a
solution as the men and women who fled their countries in search of an American Dream that some wonder if it still exists.
Copyright © 2007 Hispanic Institute of Social Issues
Grassroots Journalism
www.barriozona.com
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Both as customers and clandestine workers, people in this country without legal status have been used
and abused for too long by businesses who benefit from them.
By Eduardo Barraza
BARRIOZONA
December 10, 2007
America's Demand for Cheap Labor and
Consumerism Created Stalemate