Claims muddle debate over Arizona immigration law

Behind the distortions, true impact uncertain

by Dan Nowicki - May. 16, 2010 12:38 AM
The Arizona Republic

Arizona sparked an emotional war of words with its tough illegal-immigration enforcement law, a national debate in which both sides make wild claims and distortions that fuel divisiveness.

Cutting through the political rhetoric is difficult. Even then, it's impossible to know exactly how the law will play out.


Experts who study the complicated economics of immigration are skeptical of claims that the controversial law's supporters make about the beneficial impact on crime, taxes, jobs, schools and government costs. Likewise, some national critics of the state statute have misrepresented parts of the legislation. Other opponents, particularly in the blogosphere, pile on over-the-top language that compares Arizona to Nazi Germany. In an extreme instance, the liberal Daily Kos blog has repeatedly referred to the statute as an "ethnic cleansing law."

Previous federal and state immigration-related laws also came with positive or dire economic forecasts that never panned out, said Philip Martin, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of California at Davis.

"People exaggerate on both the upside and the downside, depending on your point of view," he said.

In the age of Facebook, Twitter, viral YouTube videos, blogs and 24-hours-a-day cable-television news, information - and misinformation - spreads faster than ever. As the recent battle over health-care reform demonstrated, it's difficult to dispute a concept (such as, say, "death panels") once it takes root in the public's consciousness. Likewise, supporters of comprehensive immigration reform have had trouble countering the pervasive charge that they are promoting "amnesty" for undocumented workers already in the country.

Arizona's far-reaching law, which takes effect July 29, provides enough legitimate fodder for an all-out policy argument on the roles of states in immigration enforcement, which is recognized as a federal government responsibility. Arizona has made it a state crime to be in the United States illegally and requires local police to pursue the immigration status of people they reasonably suspect might be undocumented. Opponents blast the law as unconstitutional not only because they believe Arizona has overstepped its authority but also because they predict it will lead to civil-rights abuses.

Four lawsuits have been filed, and more are expected.

Despite the rhetoric, the law's ultimate impact on various social issues might surprise backers and foes alike.


Crime questions

Champions of the bill, such as state Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, have predicted crime will decrease as a result of the law, which at least partly is designed to drive out undocumented immigrants by making the state so uncomfortable that many will leave on their own.

However, Arizona law-enforcement agencies have mixed opinions on the law.

Although Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and others have defended it, Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris suggested it's at best superfluous in terms of helping local law enforcement combat serious crime and at worst a diversion of resources to enforcing federal immigration law.

"Proponents of this legislation have repeatedly said that the new law provides a tool for local law enforcement, but I don't really believe that that's true or accurate," Harris said at an April 30 news conference. "We have the tools that we need to enforce laws in this state to reduce property crime and to reduce violent crime, to go after criminals that are responsible for human smuggling, to go after criminals that are responsible for those home invasions, kidnappings, robberies, murders."

Judith Gans, who manages the Immigration Policy Program at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona, said predictions that crime will drop because of the law are "really overstated." While Mexican drug- and human- smugglers pose an ongoing threat, most illegal immigrants try to avoid causing problems once in the United States, she said.

"There are lots of studies that have confirmed that immigrants, and especially undocumented immigrants, are far less likely to commit crimes than the general population," Gans said.


Economic unknowns

On taxes and other economic issues surrounding illegal immigration, concrete data is hard to come by. That makes it difficult for some scholars to swallow supporters' claims that the law will help taxpayers.

Experts say it is extremely difficult to accurately gauge the ramifications of undocumented workers given the murkiness of the underground economy. There are an estimated 7 million undocumented workers in the country, a relatively small portion of a U.S. workforce of about 155 million.

"In general, it's very hard to trace any kinds of impacts from immigrant workers, plus or minus," Martin said.

Even illegal immigrants pay sales taxes. If they are working on the books with fake documentation, they pay some income taxes and make contributions to Social Security and Medicare, two government programs that they are unable to use.

A 2007 report by Gans, based on 2004 information, indicated that legal and illegal immigrants in Arizona contributed $2.36 billion in taxes, or $942 million more than the $1.41 billion in direct fiscal costs associated with them. "This claim that immigrants are somehow using services and not paying taxes is just not accurate," she said. "There's a lot of political hyperbole there."

But Gans' report was criticized as an incomplete look at costs, and in early 2008, a study by George Borjas, a Harvard labor economist, concluded Arizonans lost a minimum $1.4 billion in 2005 due to reduced wages related to illegal workers.

Gans agreed that immigrants do lower wages, at least for those low-skilled and less-educated workers who compete with them for jobs where speaking English is not necessary.

Contrary to the popular assertion that immigrants are taking jobs from Americans, Gans said new immigrants mostly compete for work against other recent immigrants. The "relatively few" native-born workers who clean hotels, pick lettuce or do the roofing and construction jobs sought by immigrants often are high-school dropouts, she said.

"In the longer run, as the economy rebounds, if we've ended up creating labor shortages in sectors that really rely heavily on immigrant workers, it's not clear to me that we've done much for the fiscal health of the state," Gans said.


School impact

The Arizona law's impact on schools is another unknown. Although backers envision smaller classes for students and relief from immigrant-related education costs, others note that school districts are funded based on enrollment.

"We do know that after passage of (previous immigration-related laws), we did see evidence of a Mexican-American flight back . . . to Mexico," said John Wright, president of the Arizona Education Association, the state's largest teachers union. "We saw enrollment drops in many of the elementary-school districts in the metropolitan Phoenix area, and those were primarily students who were of Mexican or Hispanic descent. There are economic impacts. If there is a loss of students, there is a loss of funds, and we know that many districts are considering or implementing layoff policies now."


Papers, please

For their part, supporters of the law are trying to fight misinformation about it. They particularly are chagrined by continued references to a police state where "papers" are required at all times, racial profiling is institutionalized and the civil rights of U.S. citizens are at risk.

Arizona's law, which makes it a state crime for immigrants to be without certain documents, mirrors a federal requirement that has been around since the Alien Registration Act of 1940, said Kris Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law who helped write the Arizona law.

Moreover, Arizona's law does not require U.S. citizens to carry an Arizona driver's license or any other papers, he said.

"It's long been a requirement of federal law for aliens to have certain documents on their person while in the United States, just as it is a requirement of most countries on the planet for U.S. citizens who travel there to have their documents in their possession while in that country," Kobach said in a May 5 conference call with reporters from The Arizona Republic and other media outlets.


Profiling banned

The courts ultimately will determine whether the Arizona law facilitates racial profiling, but Kobach suggested that critics haven't given Gov. Jan Brewer and state lawmakers enough credit for expressly prohibiting the practice in the legislation. An amendment passed April 30 says law enforcement cannot consider race, color or national origin except to the extent permitted by the U.S. or Arizona constitutions. Law-enforcement officers can pursue immigration status of someone they reasonably suspect is undocumented only through a "stop, detention or arrest" on the basis of a violation of any other state, county or local law, with speeding a likely scenario.

"If there were, suppose hypothetically, a situation where some bad-apple officer were acting illegally and engaging in racial profiling, the conviction could certainly be overturned on the basis of the law itself because he would not be complying with (the statute)," Kobach said. "And there would potentially be a Fourth Amendment problem, as well."

The U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Although a racially profiled illegal immigrant might be reluctant to seek legal help, a Hispanic U.S. citizen or legal resident who feels he has been illegally targeted could find the protections helpful.


'Nazi' Arizona

Brewer's signing of the immigration law on April 23 unleashed a torrent of vocal criticism of Arizona, some of it overheated.

The Anti-Defamation League, for instance, took exception to the frequent commentary drawing parallels between Arizona and Adolf Hitler's Germany, which required persecuted Jews to carry identity cards.

"No matter how odious, bigoted, biased and unconstitutional Arizona's new law may be, let's be clear that there is no comparison between the situation facing immigrants, legal or illegal, in Arizona and what happened in the Holocaust," Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League's national director, said in a written statement. "Comparisons to the Nazis may be politically expedient and serve an agenda of demonizing those who supported the bill, but in the end they do great damage to the memory of 6 million Jews and the millions of others and soldiers who fought to defeat Nazism."

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