Speaking of which . . . so . . . Arizona, eh?
What pisses me off about this is that at the bottom this is really a management problem, and this country has massive ongoing management problems all over the place. Frankly, I blame business schools. I think they're teaching profit-making or something instead of business. The business of America is supposed to be business, not money.
The immigration issue in Arizona is really three issues, the way I see it:
1) Border control. The bottom line is that the border is not under control. I don't mean locked down; I just mean under control. The how and why of this failure is a whole other set of issues at the state and federal levels, but obviously Mexico is not solving this one for us. Blaming the immigrants is just a game.
2) Civil control. Because the immigrants are poor, insular, afraid of authority, etc, they're prone to crime and other issues that are obviously bad in the first place but which also tend to spread. You have to be able to police the immigrant society once it's here (and getting rid of it entirely is simply an irresponsible pipe dream) to maintain peace and order. If you have a huge underclass that regards the police as an enemy, you've already failed. Of course, border states aren't the only place that has that problem, but it tends to be worse there.
3) Asset management. Immigrants are assets. People are assets. They can be trained and taxed; they can do useful things; they are consumers. Humans are very flexible assets, too. If you refuse to make good use of the immigrants, they wind up eating up welfare dollars and immersed in crime instead of being productive, taxable residents. That's retarded. And these assets tend to degrade after they get here if you refuse to improve them with training, medical care, etc. That's even stupider.
The notion, too, that there are only so many jobs to go around is only true if there's no growth. The influx of immigrants IS growth, and if Arizona otherwise has a falling population and failing economy, then Arizona's government is failing in exciting ways that have nothing to do with their failure to manage the immigration issue.
I'm not saying this is an easy problem to solve, but the traditional methods of prejudice (racist or not), exclusion, and oppression are complete failures. It would be nice to see some effort in a more sensible direction that would be better for the country. New York used to absorb ridiculously disproportionate numbers of immigrants speaking dozens of languages and from widely different backgrounds, and it wasn't perfect but it was more than merely possible.
