Mark Olmsted wants the workers of Arizona to help solve Arizona’s harsh new law by going on strike. I’d move, if it were my family. If Arizona wants to institute ethnic cleansing, and “white-out” their state, let em.
The Arizonans who support this measure — and they appear to be a majority — need to understand the economic consequences of their ignorance. Undocumented workers who use false social security numbers have wages withheld that they never get back — a net gain to state and federal coffers. They pay sales tax. They buy food and clothes and cars and pay rent, creating thousands of jobs. They keep labor costs down, doing twice the work at half the pay that most native Americans get. The send millions back home, much of which is re-spent in border cities and during visits, buying American goods and services, not to mention keeping real human beings out of poverty.
These workers need to give Arizona what it wants. They need to go on strike, even go home for well-deserved vacations or visit other states. Arizona needs to see what happens when you remove crucial organs from the economic body. The rest of us need to boycott Arizona completely — conventions, visits, even driving through. These people need to understand that hate has a very steep price. The law should be repealed — but by the same voters who demanded its passage in the first place.
This doesn’t mean the status quo is tenable. Of course we need comprehensive immigration reform. But as long as voters keep responding to propaganda that illegal aliens are sitting around collecting welfare (see the California gubernatorial campaign) the politics of moving forward are untenable for either party. Politicians won’t act if voters punish them for it. The voters must find out the hard way that their jingoistic nativism misreads the economic impact of migrants completely. Only then will they reward politicians for enacting sane immigration policy.
[Click to continue reading Mark Olmsted: What to Do — Or Not — About Arizona]
Or Arizona could just secede from the US – that’s what they really want to do. Apparently, Arizona doesn’t need any federal dollars to maintain their highways and so forth.