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The Arizona story: where is chapter 3?

Let’s say you are reading a really interesting book. You come to the end of chapter 2. But when you turn the page, the book skips to chapter 4. A chapter is…

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Let’s say you are reading a really interesting book. You come to the end of chapter 2. But when you turn the page, the book skips to chapter 4. A chapter is missing.  

Before starting chapter 4, you want to know, what happened in between.

Chapter 4 says the Arizona “illegal-immigrant crackdown.” giving state and local authorities incredible discretion in choosing “suspects” of illegal entry into the U.S., was necessary. By extension, most Hispanics in the state become a suspicious class of people. From other books, we already know the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1950s ruled that such a conclusion to be out of bounds.

So, what are the Arizona lawmakers really up to? And what does chapter 3 say about what’s going on?

For instance, we know that fear of crime and the murder of a rancher on the border, possibly committed by some illegal border crosser (as yet no suspect), fed the impetus for highly intrusive measures in Arizona asking certain types of people for proof of citizenship. State legislators got fired up on the notion. A statewide dragnet was applied as a response to a crime spree.

But chapter 2 would show that’s not true. Instead, crime is down. According to the FBI, crime rates in the major Arizona-Mexico border areas have remained essentially unchanged for the past decade.

One officer explained to The Arizona Republic that the ramp-up of law enforcement since 2000, gives the border region one of the highest per capitas of law enforcement personnel in the U.S. Another officer said that the political call for National Guard troops on the border feeds the idea that crime is rampant. There is, as there has been for 100 years, a problem with smugglers of illicit and illegal goods and recently of people.

In the state overall, the violent-crime rate dropped by nearly 15 percent from 2005 to 2008.

Even Senator John McCain went a bit hysterical, saying border insecurity has led to violence, “the worst I have ever seen.”

Had you found a chapter 3, you would have seen how John McCain morphed into Sarah Palin.

In chapter 3, you would have learned that a 2008 University of Arizona study shows immigrant workers contributed $2.4 billion (about $860 million from naturalized citizens, plus $1.5 billion from non-citizens) to the state’s economy. The best estimates show costs of $1.4 billion (for education, health care and law enforcement), or a net $940 million positive immigrant impact in Arizona.

The latest estimates of economic output in 2004 show immigrant workers produced $44 billion ($15 billion for naturalized citizens and $29 billion for non-citizens).  It included $20 billion in labor and other income and 400,000 full-time jobs.

The chapter would also show, among other things, how the state spent a decade recruiting English-as-a-second-language teachers in Latin America during teacher shortages in the 1990s. Then, a 2000 ballot measure stipulated instruction only in English. That leads today to teachers getting purged. Those with "heavy" or "ungrammatical" accents (rules as vague as those for suspected “illegal immigrants”) are no longer allowed to teach English classes. The chapter would show how some working-class and the middle-class people became “undesirables.”

Chapter 3 ends by pointing out that Chris Simcox, co-founder of the anti-illegal immigrant Minute Man movement, forerunner of the Tea Party movement, had earlier challenged John McCain for the incumbent’s U.S. Senate seat, but dropped out to support former U.S. Rep. J.D. Hayworth, also a staunch opponent of converting the undocumented into legal residents.

So the question becomes, why, in light of Arizona’s severe recession and housing foreclosures, would political elements want to wreck the state economy further by running off productive and revenue-producing groups?

Instead of a broken border, is it possible Arizona is a broken state? And is that why chapter 3 was lifted from the story?

NEXT WEEK: THE REASON THE FULL STORY WASN’T TOLD

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