by Jan Brewer
All of this violence and illegality has a cost, of course. The most important and immediate cost of our unsecured border is paid by people, both Americans and immigrants, in their lives, their health, and their safety.
For many of the immigrants attempting to cross our border, the cost is very high indeed. Last July, illegal alien deaths were so high that the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office had to use a refrigerated truck to store some of the bodies. In the first seven months of 2010, the Pima County authorities recovered 140 bodies—59 in July alone. Since 2001, the bodies of more than 2,100 men, women, and children have been found in the Arizona desert. Even as federal authorities report that border apprehensions are down, border deaths keep climbing. For me, that’s not an indication that our border is “as secure as it’s ever been.” Growing border deaths are an indication of precisely the opposite. Regardless of your position on immigration, these deaths on sovereign U.S. soil should sadden and shame us all.
For those of us who live near the border, the cost is the very real threat to the safety of our families and communities. Some pay more than others. Rob Krentz and Border Patrol agent Brian Terry are two tragic examples. But all of us feel the pain and insecurity that comes with seeing our wonderful, diverse state, with its warm, welcoming people and its unique natural beauty, overtaken by lawlessness. All of us lose a measure of our freedom because of this federal failure.
Illegal immigration costs us in more tangible ways as well. One of the frequently overlooked burdens of illegal immigration is the tremendous environmental damage done by the hundreds of thousands of people who traipse across the border each year.
The piles of trash left behind in the desert by illegal immigration have to be seen to be believed. Each illegal alien who crosses is said to leave about six to eight pounds of trash along the way. That adds up to more than 2,000 tons of trash each year. In 2006 alone, over a million pounds of trash was picked up along the Arizona border. Some of it is heart-breaking stuff: wedding pictures, photos of children, baby blankets. But most of it is just an eyesore. Illegal aliens and their smugglers leave behind veritable mountains of water bottles, backpacks, food wrappers, used diapers, and human excrement. Even cars and trucks are abandoned by smugglers and left on the border. The trash is everywhere, but it’s typically concentrated in what are called “lay-up” spots—places where illegal aliens rest and wait for the next smuggler to guide them farther north. Federal and state agencies, ranchers, and volunteers conduct massive cleanups, but the trash just keeps on coming.
The irony is that much of the land along the U.S. side of the Arizona border is supposedly protected by the federal government for environmental and historic reasons. Federal laws like the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act restrict access to the land. To enter these protected lands, the Border Patrol has to wait and get special permission from federal bureaucrats. Sometimes four months pass before permission is granted! That means the Border Patrol can’t police these areas effectively, so more illegal aliens get through, leaving more trash. In the twisted world of illegal immigration, environmentally protected lands suffer more damage than unprotected ones. It got so bad that Rob Krentz’s widow, Sue, asked the government not to classify wilderness areas as protected in order to protect them from illegal immigration.
Millions of dollars have been spent in Arizona cleaning up the trash left by illegal immigration. But that amount is nothing compared with the burden on Arizona taxpayers created by illegal aliens once they settle in our state. Our education, health care, and incarceration systems are strained past the limit. We’ve done what we could through ballot measures and a 2009 law I signed requiring proof of eligibility for state services. But many of the most costly parts of the American welfare state are mandated by the federal government. Moreover, simple Christian compassion requires that human beings in need get medical care, that children be housed, fed, and educated. Arizonans have generously met this humane obligation, but Arizona can’t continue to sustain it, because of our uncontrolled borders. And increasingly, as illegal aliens pass through Arizona and fan out across the country, our burden is becoming America’s burden.
The cost of incarcerating the criminals who cross our border is by itself astronomical. Law enforcement officials across the state have done a magnificent job in a very trying circumstance. But in the process they’ve caught a lot of bad guys, and these bad guys have to go somewhere. The result is that the Arizona Department of Corrections incarcerates some 6,000 criminal aliens, nearly 17 percent of our inmate population. Of the felony defendants in Maricopa County, 21.8 percent are illegal aliens. The cost to the Arizona taxpayers is approximately $150 million every year. The federal government is responsible for picking up much of this tab, but it has utterly refused to do so. I have—unsuccessfully so far—constantly begged the Obama administration to deliver to Arizona taxpayers the more than $880 million it owes us. And I haven’t been alone. My colleague in Texas, Rick Perry, recently sent the federal government a bill for $349 million for the state and local cost of incarcerating illegal aliens in Texas. In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Governor Perry noted that the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP), created to reimburse states for the cost of locking up criminal aliens, “doesn’t begin to compensate the entirety of Texas’s financial burden.” When Napolitano was governor, she would annually hold press conferences demanding payment with a giant cardboard prop—an oversize invoice for President George W. Bush. Now she’s busy defending the current administration’s refusal to honor its commitments. As usual, Arizona taxpayers are left footing the bill.
Add to the cost of incarcerating criminal aliens the court costs involved in prosecuting cases. According to recent reports, illegal reentry—attempting to reenter the United States illegally after already having been caught at least once—was the most frequent federal crime charged in the first six months of 2010, and the same held true for Arizona. The good news is that the number of these charges being brought in Arizona is increasing; the bad news is that it costs money. According to the University of Arizona study, from 1999 through 2006, the twenty-four counties along the U.S.-Mexico border spent a total of $1.23 billion on processing illegal aliens through the criminal justice system. The Arizona border counties spend over $26 million of taxpayer money every year providing law enforcement and criminal justice services, such as public defenders for illegal aliens.
Not all of the people crossing illegally into Arizona come here for the purpose of committing additional crimes, of course. They are admirable, hardworking souls who want nothing more than a better life for their families. But they are also overwhelmingly poor and uneducated. Studies show that welfare use is correlated with education level. Both native-born and immigrant Americans with college degrees earn about the same amount. And immigrants with college degrees contribute more in taxes than they consume in public services.
The problem is, in Arizona, around half of the illegal aliens entering the state have less than a high school education. The result is that nearly a third of all Arizonans living in poverty are in immigrant households. And of these households, two thirds are headed by at least one illegal alien. Their use of public assistance has nothing to do with their willingness to work—and work hard. Most immigrant households have at least one member who is working. But too often, it’s not enough.
These generally hardworking, law-abiding immigrants nonetheless place a crushing burden on Arizona taxpayers. The costs to Arizona taxpayers of illegal immigration fall into three broad categories: health care, education, and law enforcement.
Federal law requires that hospitals provide treatment in emergency rooms to anyone, regardless of immigration status or ability to pay the bill. Many people, particularly the uninsured, use hospitals for non-emergencies. And because approximately 60 percent of illegal immigrants are uninsured, as illegal immigration has soared in Arizona, so has th
e cost of providing emergency room care. Between 2001 and 2005, emergency room visits for outpatient care spiked by 46 percent in Arizona while they increased by only 8 percent nationally. Emergency room personnel don’t ask about the legal status of their patients, so nailing down the numbers is hard. But a 2002 report mandated by Arizona senator Jon Kyl found that hospitals and ambulances in the border counties of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas spent more than $200 million in one year on emergency medical treatment of illegal aliens. In Arizona, the cost was $31 million. Thanks to Internet sites that tell illegal aliens how to claim care at American hospitals—complete with maps showing where to find them—the cost of uncompensated care in Arizona hospitals for non-citizen immigrants in 2004 was more than $135 million. Our total Medicaid costs to this group were over $475 million. The federal government—meaning, the American taxpayers—covers much of these costs. But in total, in fiscal year 2011, the costs of providing illegal aliens with federally mandated emergency medical care, Medicaid, cash assistance, youth and family services, and other health and welfare benefits were almost $200 million.
Educating illegal aliens and their U.S.-born children is another area of high cost to Arizona taxpayers. According to the Pew Center, as many as 170,000 Arizona students, out of a total student population just over 1 million, have parents who are illegal aliens. And it’s not only the cost of educating illegal aliens we’ve had to pay in our schools: until former Arizona schools chief Tom Horne put a stop to it in 2010, for years Mexican children were actually being picked up every day and bused across the border to attend Arizona public schools in Ajo, forty miles north of the border!
Most of these children are struggling to learn English, which adds to the cost. In 2009 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Arizona in a long and costly legal battle over funding English Language Learners (ELL) in our public schools. Still, the cost of our approximately 170,000 ELL students in 2008 was about a $70 million drain on the taxpayers, and the ELL cost in 2009 was more than $110 million. In total, the cost to the state of educating undocumented children was $1.2 billion in FY 2011.
Adding the cost of imprisoning criminal aliens brings the total expense to Arizona taxpayers of illegal immigration in FY 2011 to about $1.6 billion. Even if we deduct the estimated $670 million illegal aliens will have paid in taxes this fiscal year, we still have a net cost to the Arizona taxpayers of almost $1 billion. Out of an $8.5 billion state budget—and in the middle of the biggest recession since the Great Depression—that’s not chump change.
And as for those Americans living far away from the border who think they’re immune to these problems: Think again. According to the Justice Department, the cartels have spread their violent reach to at least 230 American cities. They are, in the words of the U.S. government, “the greatest organized crime threat to the United States.” The same cartels that kidnap, rape, and murder in Phoenix maintain drop houses in Georgia; conduct assaults in Alabama; engage in shoot-outs in the Pacific Northwest; and distribute marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin from Anchorage to Miami.
And just as the criminal element imposes costs on these communities, so does the level of illegal immigration itself. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, illegal aliens are more widely dispersed across the country than ever before. There were more than half a million illegal aliens in Illinois in 2010. There were 625,000 in the state of New York, 550,000 in New Jersey, 325,000 in North Carolina, and 425,000 in Georgia.
These populations impose tremendous costs on local taxpayers. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, welfare use by illegal aliens is highest in California, at 77 percent. But the state with the second-highest rate of welfare expenditures for illegal aliens is New York, far from the Mexican border, at 76 percent. The border state of Texas is next, with 70 percent of its illegal immigration population on welfare, but Illinois is close behind, at 68 percent. Minnesota, Georgia, and Nevada follow in highest welfare use by the undocumented, at 65 percent. Thanks to the high numbers of illegal aliens in our state and the federal mandates, Arizona comes next. If we hadn’t limited state services, we would be much higher on the list.
For the taxpayers of these states and a growing number of others, the question of how to deal with the burden imposed by illegal immigration is not the media myth of good guys versus bad guys. It’s no wonder, then, that so many of these states are considering or have already passed laws that mirror Arizona’s tough immigration laws. Like us, they are facing a huge challenge. Like us, they’ve received from Washington the public-policy equivalent of the back of the hand. And like us, they are finally being forced to take matters into their own hands.
For many Americans, Rob Krentz’s tragic death was their first real glimpse of the immigration crisis on our border. But it is a crisis that has been long in the making.
Despite what you may have heard, it’s not a crisis of race or culture. It’s a crisis of violence, desperation, and human greed. It’s a humanitarian crisis. An environmental crisis. An economic crisis. A political crisis. It’s a crisis that the people who live and work along America’s southwestern border know all too well. We didn’t cause it. We didn’t ask for it. But we’ve lived with it for years. And soon, unless our government acts, the entire country will be living with it, too.
Fueled by drugs and lawlessness, and abetted by federal indifference—or worse—Arizona’s crisis is coming to the rest of America. In fact, it’s already here.
Chapter Two
Janbo
Arizona’s image in the mainstream media has taken a pounding since I signed SB 1070. Opponents of the law have been determined to explain away its majority support (in Arizona and the rest of the country) as the product of racism. It’s a cheap, easy, unsubstantiated accusation that is designed not to further debate but to shut it down. Instead of debating the merits of the law—or even reading it, in the case of Attorney General Eric Holder—the media and many Washington politicians prefer hysterical name calling.
For me, one of the many low points in this sordid national drama came when ABC took its hidden-camera show What Would You Do? to Tucson earlier this year. The show, in case you’ve never seen it, is a quasi news program that seems determined to cast the American people in the worst possible light. They use actors to stage scenes designed to bring out the meanness in people—a phony waitress refusing to serve actors playing gay patrons at a restaurant, or a dwarf at a convenience store being ridiculed by other actors playing insensitive shoppers. All the hateful, bigoted stuff is done by actors, mind you. The responses from real Americans are taped by hidden cameras.
As you can see, I’m not crazy about What Would You Do? It values the sensational and the confrontational over the truth and creates fake “news” designed to attract ratings. But the show’s producers really outdid themselves when they came to Tucson. Under the pretext of examining the implications of SB 1070, they staged a phony scene in a restaurant with the wonderfully Arizonan name of BK Carne Asada & Hot Dogs. In the setup, actors playing Hispanic patrons were harassed by an actor playing a racist security guard. The guard demanded to see the customers’ IDs as they stood in line for tacos and the restaurant’s famous Sonoran-style hot dogs, saying he just wanted to make sure they were “legal.” It was a grotesque distortion of the actual provisions of Arizona’s immigration law—a lie of such magnitude that the Arizona Speaker of the House, Kirk Adams, later demanded that ABC apologize for airing the show. I, too, was outraged. SB 1070 gives no one the right to ask people standing in a restaurant for their identification, much less an off-duty security guard.
What the producers didn’t count on was the reaction by the real-life Arizonans in the restaurant. Time and again, as the cameras rolled, unsuspecting Arizonans came to the aid of the people they thought were innocent, harassed Hispanics. They were outraged by the (fake) bigotry they witnessed. At one point it looked as if they were about to come to blows with the security gu
ard, and a reporter was forced to step out of the shadows and admit it was all a setup. Everyone in the restaurant was good-natured about it when they found out the truth. I’ll just say this: They took the deception better than I would have.
That obnoxious show stays with me, both for how grossly it distorted the law we passed and, more important, for the tolerance and caring it showed by Arizonans themselves. Liberal activists and their media accomplices can call Arizonans racist all they want, but when they brought in hidden cameras to record how we actually treat one another, Arizonans showed them otherwise.
This is the Arizona I know—the Arizona I’ve always known. After all, most Arizonans are (like me) from somewhere else. We’ve always been a state that welcomes outsiders. All we’ve asked is that people obey the law, respect their neighbors, and respect our state.
Now, it’s true that the Arizona I know has an independent streak. We’ve always proudly and defiantly gone our own way. We haven’t always danced to the tune set in Washington, New York, or Hollywood. No, we don’t observe daylight saving time. And, yes, we honor the Second Amendment and allow law-abiding citizens to carry guns. But most of all, we respect and take care of one another as neighbors and fellow citizens. And that goes as much for the Hispanics whose families have been here since before statehood as the Anglos who moved here during the 1990s boom.
Arizona is defiantly different. I think that’s why I’ve always felt at home here. My parents, Wilford and Edna Drinkwine, raised a defiantly different girl.
I was born in California but spent my first ten years living on base at the country’s largest Navy munitions depot in Hawthorne, Nevada. My father worked as a civilian there, first as one of the men packing explosives into bomb casings for the war in Germany and Japan and later as a supervisor. For years we were happy—my big brother, Paul, my mom, my dad, and me. We were a close, loving family and were part of a military community that was very much united in the belief that we were part of something noble in fighting fascism in Europe and imperial Japan.