The sale of garden gloves is about to explode in Arizona.
Why? Because Arizona is about to get what its misguided immigration policies earn for it, a dearth of workers. SB 1070 is about to go into effect, and one of the results is that undocumented workers are leaving. Businesses are closing, not because they were owned by the undocumented, but because they made money off of them. Apartments are emptying. Shopping centers are closing.
Many people, businesses, and even government agencies depend on undocumented labor. I was once riding in a car with an undocumented friend in northern Mississippi, and we passed the INS regional office (now called ICE ICE BABY). My friend said, “See that building? I helped build it. Half the workers on the site didn’t have papers.”
The exodus of workers will cause other dominos to fall. Tax revenues will go down. The budget will be harder to balance. Cuts will be made. Teachers and firemen will lose their jobs.
The first law of ecology is also the first law of policy. You can’t do just one thing. One of the kickers is that what the law was intended to fix, crime, isn’t even broken. Crime has been going down in Arizona for the last six years. SB 1070 wasn’t designed to fix an immigration problem; it was designed to win xenophobic political points.
Here’s my little extrapolation of how it’s going to play out from here. I call this, Robert’s Rule of the Pendulum. Arizona will be so strapped for tax revenue and workers who do jobs no one else either wants to do, or can do as well, that they will follow California’s lead and legalize recreational use of marijuana. Revenues will go up, and new workers will flow from the rest of the US. They will have created a truly “business-friendly” climate.
And then those nice Republicans who voted for SB 1070 can finally pull off their worn garden gloves that they bought to tend their own garden, toke a little, and then put them back on to plant a different kind of harvest.
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