Arizona immigration battle turns bitter (...with panicking Hispanic families fleeing)

[alp227]

The intersection of 43rd Avenue and Thomas Road on the west side of Phoenix is lined with the same monotonous range of petrol stations, fast-food outlets, pharmacies and clothes stores that you'll find in any modern city in America's heartlands. It is distinguished only by the exceptionally mundane.

Look closer, though, and a disturbing pattern emerges. Here is a real estate office that is shuttered and empty, here a panaderia – a bread shop – that has closed, and next door to that, a children's clothes store also shut. Across the road a cellphone outlet is boarded up and a large grocery store has vanished. A Mexican restaurant still has its sign proudly boasting "Tacos Since 1975", but there are no tacos being made here any more. A rival restaurant nearby, Marly's Mexican Food, has a sign saying "Drive Thru Open", yet the building has been stripped bare. A handwritten note in the front entrance says "Se cierra el negocio porque nos mudamos de estado" – the restaurant is closed because we've moved out of the state.

It's as if the whole area is turning into a tourist ghost town, for which the west is renowned. But this is not supposed to be a ghost town. This is bustling Phoenix, capital of Arizona and one of America's fastest growing and most dynamic metropolises.

Why this is going on is the question put to Sergio Diaz, the owner of an English language school next to Marly's restaurant, where a room full of young students are practising English verbs. "We've been in business since 2000," Diaz says. "At the end of this month we are going to close."

"My students are about 90% undocumented," he says, referring to the largely Mexican illegal immigrants who attend his school. "Three months ago we'd have up to 200 students every day; now there are only 15. They are all leaving, or preparing to leave."

Diaz says his clients are fleeing a controversial new immigration law that comes into effect throughout Arizona on 29 July. SB 1070 amounts to the harshest crackdown against undocumented immigrants that has been made in any part of the US for a generation. It has put Arizona in the centre of a nationwide foment about immigration that is pitting individual states against the Obama administration, whites against Hispanics.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/18/hispanics-flee-arizona-immigration-law

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. Intended consequences suck

Too bad the stupid elected officials in AZ did this to the people. I know if I lived there I'd be working to remove from office every one of them who voted for this bill.

[tsuki]

3. Wait until the Regressives have to start paying wages for services. Here,

they bitch, bitch, bitch about all the illegals, but when they want something done, do they hire a licensed, bonded and insured trades person. No, they hire illegals and bitch, bitch, bitch about the money American trades people charge.

Intended consequences do suck.

[Joanne98]

2. That's what they wanted to happen.

[MadMaddie]

11. I think you are right

however; I believe the Republicans are always short sited on their ideas. With the revenue drying up because of these businesses closing they won't have much of a tax base to draw from. The money that the Hispanics spent also will not go into the economy.

We will hear them whining about this in no time..

[DesertFlower]

4. i haven't been down in the area for years.

i probably wouldn't recognize it.

[southernyankeebelle]

6. I will never step foot in AZ or any state that OK's racism. I stay home and not give my money .

[DesertFlower]

7. i don't blame you. if i didn't

live here, i wouldn't come here either.

[SargeUNN]

5. Again I refer you to YouTube and search for 9500 Liberty

You will be able to predict the next stages as well. Nothing like knowing history.

[DesertFlower]

8. just found this article.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/07/18/20100718jan-brewer-montini.html#ixzz0u3xrYdbQ

[cutlassmama]

9. Are they going back to Mexico or to other states?

[The Backlash Cometh]

10. Maybe all the racist entrepeneurs will leave our states and go to Arizona

to take over their jobs?

[MadMaddie]

12. Ha..ha...

I am sure they will be willing to take below minimum wage and cash only. I am also sure they will take working in sub-human dangerous working conditions.......:sarcasm:

[Alcibiades]

13. I don't think most racists are entrepeneurial

I have no data to back this up, but for a long time, the most racist parts of the country were the least heavily industrialized, the least racist, the most. This was not an accident: in the south, people with money all want to be landlords, renting to tenants, be they apartment dwellers or farmers. The goal is to simply to set up a passive revenue stream and enjoy the fruits of other people's work. In the north, rich folks would at least grow a real business that made real stuff, understanding that reinvesting profits would be a better path to more wealth. It's the plantation model of capitalism versus the industrial model. One of the benefits of having so many folks from the north move here has been increasing entrepreneurship.

That's just my observation as a southerner who has lived up north and moved back again. I do think, though, that you won't see what they have done in Arizona in the Deep South: the folks who run things here like illegal immigration, because it's like having their slaves back, only without the infamy.