BREAKING NEWS
July 4, 2007
Immigrants May Flee to Other States
As crackdowns spread, job options may dwindle
Sergio Arellanes was back on the job Tuesday, pouring cement for a new home in Ahwatukee in the scorching heat.
But he and other undocumented immigrants spent the day contemplating their fate in Arizona after the governor signed a bill that could put companies out of businesses for hiring them.
News of the law, believed to be the toughest of its kind in the country, sent a shock wave through the immigrant community. It spread far and fast as illegal immigrants braced for the possibility that they may soon lose their jobs if skittish employers begin culling workers wholesale rather than facing the possibility of losing their business licenses, the penalty for a second offense under the measure.
Instead of waiting for that to happen, Arellanes said, he is considering moving to look for work where the climate toward undocumented immigrants is less hostile. Others said they planned to wait and see how the law pans out, then decide whether to stay.
"I'm thinking of going to another state, maybe Nevada or Colorado. I don't know," said Arellanes, 22, who is from Chihuahua, Mexico, and has been living illegally in Arizona for three years.
Arellanes may not find the welcome mat he is expecting. Other states are expected to follow Arizona's lead in passing employer-sanctions laws or other bills to clamp down on illegal immigration out of frustration with Congress' failure to solve the problem.
Colorado already passed a bill that requires employers to verify the legal status of workers. As a result, labor shortages in some industries that rely on immigrant workers were worsened this year, prompting officials in Colorado to contract with prison inmates to pick crops in some areas.
Arizona Republic |
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Exclusionary Forces Send Shock Wave Up From Border
By: Pete Kendall, July 5, 2007 |
It was only last summer that Business Week’s cover story on “Embracing Illegals” stated that companies “are getting hooked on the buying power of 11 million undocumented immigrants.” “Let’s be real: the U.S. is not about to arrest and herd millions of men, women and children into boxcars for transport back across the Rio Grande,” said an editorial in the same issue. “That’s a nativist’s fantasy that will never come to pass.” But we caution such editorialists that in a major bear market, nativist and other fantasies of exclusion typically become stark reality. And the brunt of this bear market is still to come.
The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast, February 2006 |
 It looks like the bullish trend of inclusion is faltering rapidly. We've gone from grassroots resistance to illegal immigration to a few towns passing ordinances to laws in major states like Arizona in just a couple of years. This is certainly no isolated incident, as Colorado has passed a similar law and other states are set to follow suit. Social mood must be the driver since the economy only began slowing recently. Unemployment is still so low that labor competition shouldn't be much of an issue now and it certainly was not at the time these initiatives were proposed. Convetional political and economic theory can't account for it, but socionomics can.
--Deron Kawamoto
It’s also interesting to see how the negative emotion of exclusionism is getting the best of people even though it causes obvious and immediate hardship. Consider, for instance, that there are 500,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona, and they do a lot of the work no one else wants to do. A construction manager illustrates by taking the reporter of the story at left “into a large trench” where a crew is “laying the footings for the basement of a custom home. ‘It's 120 degrees down here, easy,’ [he says], ‘And there's no breeze. This is hard work. Who is going to do it if we leave?’” That economic influence also could extend to the state's already fragile real estate market.”
Also keep in mind, that many long-time illegal residents own their own homes. As the Business Week article referenced above reported back in 2005, illegals were actually be pitched as a great opportunity for housing at that time. If they now “decide to sell and move on, their houses will add to the record 52,000 existing homes for sale Valley-wide.” A downturn in social mood starts with the impulse for separation from those that are perceived to be different, and it quickly develops into a sticky wicket in all kinds of areas. |
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