How SB 4 might play out in Texas
Arizona offers lessons on the gains, costs of tough anti-immigration law
PHOENIX — Friends and neighbors fled this city’s mostly Hispanic southern and western enclaves in droves after the state Legislature approved a set of sweeping anti-immigrant laws in 2010. But Oscar Aguirre wasn’t one of them.
This has been his home for more than 20 years, ever since he and his wife crossed the border illegally. He has two daughters who were born and raised here. A mechanic, he has grown a thriving business.
So, like many with deep roots in this city that is 40 percent Hispanic, the couple chose instead to make their lives smaller. They stopped calling the police or even accessing public health care, for which their kids qualified. Every time they get in the car they still view it as a game of Russian roulette.
“If I see the police, I take another route,” said Aguirre, 43, as he checked a friend’s engine in a mobile home park this week. “The truth is, if the police stop you, it’s over. To Mexico, you go.”
Within two years of the legislation, which was almost immediately embroiled in years of litigation, Arizona lost $490 million in tourism revenue as trade groups across the nation canceled scheduled conventions in protest. Agricultural and construction companies struggled
to fill jobs.
The Supreme Court ultimately blocked many of the law’s provisions but greenlighted its most controversial portion, allowing police to inquire about immigration status, which is similar to a provision in a Texas “sanctuary cities” bill signed a week ago by Gov. Greg Abbott.
The controversial Texas law permits officers, even those on college campuses, to question anyone they stop about their status and threatens police chiefs with jail time if they don’t cooperate. After Arizona’s bill in 2010, it is considered the harshest anti-immigrant legislation passed by any state since 2012.
Top metropolitan law enforcement leaders in Texas, including Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo and Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, have said the bill would hammer community relations if Hispanics fear that reporting crime could lead to immigration checks. Since President Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration, such police calls have already plummeted. Last week the American Civil Liberties Union issued a travel alert for the state, warning that Senate Bill 4 would cause racial profiling and a violation of constitutional rights. 200,000 left
Seven years in, Arizona’s experience hints at what Texas, with the nation’s largest Hispanic population after California, might expect. Supporters of Arizona’s legislation say it has worked, helping to reduce the number of immigrants illegally in the state by 40 percent between 2007 and 2012, according to the Pew Research Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C. More than 200,000 left. Since then, the population has stayed about the same.
“Enforcement does work and even the threat of enforcement makes a difference,” said the bill’s Republican sponsor, former state Sen. Russell Pearce, who became Arizona’s first legislator to be removed from office in a 2011 recall election shortly after the passage of what’s known as SB 1070. “As long as you got the bird feeder out, the birds are going to come and eat. You gotta take the bird feeder down.”
Many of Trump’s supporters see it the same way at a time when the issue has arguably never been more rancorous. But business leaders in Arizona warn that such a reduction came at a cost.
“No one stops to think that, when you eject people from an economy, you’re not going to feel it,” said Todd Landfried, executive director of Arizona Employers for Immigration Reform. “It’s a dramatic impact. People aren’t buying food, clothes, gas. They’re not going to baseball games or buying soccer uniforms, they’re not going out and socializing. Business owners have to cut back and lay people off. It’s a snowball effect.”
Some economists have found that the exodus reduced Arizona’s gross domestic product by roughly 2 percent a year. Proponents of the law say that loss was bolstered by savings in education, medical care and the costs of incarceration. A 2004 study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington, D.C., group seeking to reduce immigration, argued those services cost the state more than $1 billion annually.
But Landfried called that a red herring, noting that all of Arizona’s residents, no matter their legal status, contribute to property taxes paying for education, whether they own homes or rent. Immigrants illegally in the state don’t qualify for any public benefits, although their American children do.
The overall impact to the state’s convention and tourism industry alone was $752 million in completed and potential cancellations and booking declines, Landfried testified to the U.S. Senate judiciary committee in 2012. That involved more than 4,200 lost jobs.
Industry leaders said they lost money when they couldn’t complete jobs because they didn’t have enough workers.
“Immigrant labor left the state. It was a ghost town,” said Sheridan Bailey, president of Ironco Enterprises, a steel fabrication company in Arizona. “We had about 40 steel fabricators when (SB) 1070 came around, and now we have about eight.”
Bailey helped found the employer immigration group more than a decade ago, years before Arizona’s legislation, because he couldn’t find the labor that he needed.
Today he said that problem is exacerbated. Though his business is currently in a lull, he’s paying overtime to complete contracts. To prepare for several projects later this year, he’s thinking about outsourcing to Tijuana, Mexico.
“It’s very difficult to get steel fitters and welders,” Bailey said. “There’s just not enough to go around.” Perception problem
Some executives say that even the perception of the law as anti-Hispanic casts a shadow that they are still struggling to overcome. The city of Oakland, Calif., declined Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton’s invitation to a Governing Magazine summit this month, reportedly citing an ongoing travel ban due to the 2010 legislation. Stanton’s office, meanwhile, has been working to improve relations with the state’s largest trading partner of Mexico, recently opening a second office there.
“This was a complete disaster for our state from an image perspective and from an economic perspective,” said Lisa Urias, the president of a large advertising agency and a member of the boards of the Greater Phoenix Leadership Council and the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “There is still lingering damage that is there, and we are still a state that feels very raw about this issue.”
Proponents, led by Pearce, the bill sponsor, say that the law reduced crime, helping Phoenix achieve the lowest crime rate in 30 years by 2012.
Criminologists say the state’s crime was already falling, on par with national trends, and that there is little correlation. Nationally a strong body of research shows that immigrants tend to be incarcerated at about half the rate of those born in the United States.
Supporters of the legislation, however, argue that anyone here illegally is committing a crime simply by being here in violation of the law in the first place and should be immediately removed.
Big city police chiefs believe that requiring state law enforcement ask about a federal civil infraction hampers their ability to locate witnesses for serious felonies such as homicide and rape. A 2013 University of Chicago study found that Hispanics, regardless of their immigration status, were half as likely to report crimes if they suspected police would ask about their citizenship.
The Phoenix Police De- partment declined an interview request about the law’s impact.
But Tucson Police Chief Chris Magnus, who took office nearly two years ago, said his department has struggled to battle the perception that police are doubling as immigration agents.
“There’s no possible way that crime can go down,” he said. “What you’re really talking about is a dynamic that discourages a large segment of the population from reporting crime and working with police to solve crimes or even serve as witnesses to crimes.” Walking a fine line
What Arizona’s legislation has done, Magnus said, is greatly complicate the jobs of officers who are required under the law to ask about immigration status but not permitted to racially profile or hold someone for longer than is constitutionally permissible — all amounting to a delicate balance in the dayto-day task of policing.
When the high court’s justices allowed the state to implement the provision in 2012, they raised the prospect that it could invite racial profiling. Law enforcement agencies here have since struggled with training their police officers on how and when to ask about immigration status.
“The nuances of this law is so confusing that it took us a very long time,” said Tucson’s Assistant Police Chief Ramon Batista, who previously oversaw the patrol division. “You have to be very, very careful in how you apply this.”
A recent ride-along with Tucson Police Officer Jose Flores hinted at the complexities. Working in the city’s predominately Hispanic south side about an hour from the border, Flores was called to check on a woman wandering in and out of a major road. She appeared to be on drugs or suffering a mental imbalance, didn’t have any identification, and couldn’t provide her name.
The officers called the mental health unit. But had the woman carried a form of identification and if it was not issued by the U.S. government, Flores said that he would have had to alert his supervisors, who could contact Border Patrol and see if they were interested in detaining her for further questioning.
Last year, Arizona’s attorney general agreed with advocacy groups on a narrow set of guidelines for how and when police should ask about immigration status. Tucson police chief of staff and former legal adviser, Michael Silva, said as a result, the department went from requiring officers to check status every time they issue someone with a criminal citation to a more nuanced version that takes into account a host of factors. The number of immigration checks went down from more than a thousand a month to less than a dozen, he said.
But the law allows each police department, indeed each officer, to interpret it as they see fit, said Carlos Garcia, executive director of the state immigrant advocacy group Puente Arizona.
“The overall problem is that because of a lack of structure or mechanism on how to implement it, you end up giving officers the personal discretion on whether they want to pursue deportation or not,” he said. “It’s basically a lottery for our community.” A ‘tipping point’
It’s unclear how this will play out in Texas, where no advisories have yet been issued on implementing the new law and where officers aren’t required to ask about immigration status but are permitted to do so, giving them great latitude. Acevedo, Houston’s police chief, has suggested it would be problematic.
“We cannot prohibit officers from doing what they want to do in regard to immigration enforcement, which means that a small percent of our officers who decide to become (immigration) agents and want to stop a jaywalker and they start asking for their papers, I as a chief can’t do anything to explain to that officer, ‘Hey, we’ve got calls for service backed up,’” he said at a news conference last month.
Immigrant advocates in Arizona say the state law was also greatly softened by deportation priorities set under the latter part of President Barack Obama’s administration, which focused on removing violent offenders and recent arrivals. Under Trump, who has said anyone here illegally is a focus for deportation, that could change dramatically.
The legislation has had a surprisingly bright impact, however, said Ian Danley, executive director of One Arizona, an advocacy coalition. It has helped them register a quarter of a million new Latino voters since 2010, and elect 24 Latinos to the state Legislature and three to the Phoenix City Council.
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, seen as the face of anti-immigrant tactics for his use of aggressive workplace raids and what some called over-thetop publicity antics, lost his election last November and is facing a federal trial for defying a judge’s order to stop immigration patrols.
Alejandra Gomez, executive director of the Arizona Center for Empowerment, an advocacy group, called the legislation a “tipping point,” suggesting the same might come for Texas.
Urias, of the advertising agency, said the state’s business groups have defeated dozens of anti-immigrant bills since 2010.
“In Arizona we have learned our lesson,” she said.