When it comes to illegal immigration, Flagstaff hears Hollywood calling
MARK CROMER points out the hypocrisy
An acquaintance of mine, let’s call her ‘Lisa’ who lives in a nice spread in the University Heights neighborhood of Flagstaff (about as swanky as that small mountain town gets) is what I would consider to be a quintessential liberal of the Hollywood-cum-Malibu breed: young, Cosmo pretty, educated, world-traveled, vibrant and flush with dead presidents buried in her bank account.
She also employs an illegal immigrant.
Settling in for a drink with her not too long ago on the balcony at the legendary Zane Grey saloon, I listened intently as Lisa explained that as a single mom she needed the extra help taking care of her year-old son, so she hired ‘Rosario’ as a nanny/maid to lend a full-time hand around the house.
While the flood of economic refugees from Mexico has long roiled California’s political waters and set the stage for numerous showdowns in Texas, Arizona is now taking the brunt of the illegal migrant flow, with as many as a million refugees now living in the state.
With hospitals closing their trauma centers and social services collapsing over the strain, the wild west of Arizona is now facing a showdown on the issue.
Arizonians are scheduled to cast their ballots on the ‘Protect Arizona Now’ initiative in November, which will require proof of citizenship to vote and to access a range of social services. Bearing shades of California’s Prop. 187, the PAN initiative comes as a last-ditch effort to staunch the human tidal wave of Mexicans pouring into the state—the government reports that 2,300 illegal immigrants were captured daily in the Tucson District alone for the past five months, 95-percent of which were Mexican.
The high octane debate has finally highlighted corporations who hire illegal immigrants to drive down wages and grind as much profit from an exploited workforce, but private citizens like Lisa who hire the undocumented at home continue to skate along undisturbed, enjoying the same dynamic of exploitation that the corporate greed freaks indulge, just on a smaller scale.
Not that they’d ever admit it. No, people like Lisa will offer downright egalitarian motives for passing over fellow Americans in favor of hiring illegal immigrants.
As the wind whipped wisps of her brunette mane across her beautiful face, Lisa blathered on about the wonders of having her son raised bilingually and “totally exposed to other cultures.”
It sounded nice I suppose, but we both knew what her decision to hire an illegal immigrant was really all about—money and power.
The irony of listening to a fashionably bohemian, six-figured corporate headhunter who protests the global disease of corporate excess blithely explain away her decision to personally employ an illegal immigrant was…well, entertaining, to be charitable about it.
When I asked her why she didn’t hire an American—perhaps even an unemployed American struggling to find a job—she shrugged and simply said she couldn’t find any citizens suitable for the job.
I had a feeling that she didn’t exactly search far and wide.
The fact is Lisa hired Rosario for reasons that have nothing to do with broadening her son’s cultural horizons or even finding good house help. If it really was about her son, then what kind of background check did Rosario go through? Did Lisa vet Rosario’s employment history or conduct a criminal history check and mental health backgrounder to ensure the safety of her child?
Of course she didn’t.
What it seems Lisa does know about Rosario—and its all she knows—is that she lives in an apartment off Lake Mary Road that is jammed with other illegal immigrants, an assortment of family members, her lover and his family from Mexico, and other children he has had with another migrant. Fourteen people jammed into in a two-bedroom apartment.
Far from being an altruistic endeavor to help Rosario, I suspect that Lisa enjoys the fact that she is not bound by minimum wage requirements, overtime rules, unemployment and disability insurance and Social Security taxes—to name a few legal responsibilities of an employer.
And what recourse does Rosario have with Lisa, should any disagreement over a work-related issue arise? In a word: none.
So what’s the difference between Lisa and thousands of other Arizonians just like her who hire illegal immigrants and the corporate giants in retail, restaurants, hotels, auto body shops, agri-business and dozens of other industries who also pass over American citizens in order to squeeze every drop of profit possible out of migrants?
There is no difference, except maybe that people like Lisa insist on playing make-believe when they discuss their rationale for breaking the law, spitting in the face of Americans looking for work and exploiting economic refugees from Mexico.
So they dress it up with every excuse from insults like Americans “don’t want these jobs” to absurdities such as increasing “cultural awareness” in their home.
Perhaps the most telling moment in my dialog with Lisa was when I asked her if she was going to help Rosario become legal and work her way toward citizenship?
“No,” she replied. “She doesn’t want to become an American, she has no interest in being a citizen or learning English. She just wants to stay up here and work.”
How convenient.
While many people would understandably like to see the estimated nine million illegal immigrants living in this nation deported home, I would equally like to see plantation owners like Lisa marched off to a Zen center—the kind surrounded by fences and razor wire—for a year or two of hard meditation.
This article was first published in Flagstaff Live!
