Is Russell Pearce Planning to Reprise Pinochet in Arizona?

If it isn't already, Arizona may soon become the front line in the immigrant wars.

In January, the Employer Sanction law will take effect. Spearheaded by far-Rightwinger Russell Pearce, the law will shut down businesses that knowingly hire illegal aliens. First offenders will face a 10-day suspension. Second offenders could lose their business licenses altogether.

Pearce is planning to follow this measure with laws that will force applicants for business licenses or business license renewals, as well as applicants for trade and professional licenses, to show their papers or go out of business.

All this may sound hunky-dory to a country jumped up against "illegals," but it sounds like disaster to me and to the Chamber of Commerce, which fears serious economic repercussions across the state and is hoping to halt the measure.

Already the Arizona Republic is reporting an exodus of about 100 Hispanics per day out of the state, along with a developing economic firestorm in their wake. At that rate, we'll be down 9,000 people before the law even kicks in.

This is bad, but worse, economics doesn't begin to take account of the damage being done to the whole social fabric, and especially to the psyches and bodies of our Hispanic community as Sheriff Joe and his Rightwing zealots go a-hunting "illegals." This state is Native American, Hispanic and then Ango. It's in the blood, the dirt, the rock, the sky. To harm one is to harm all, and there's already a climate of fear and despair among hard-working Hispanic men and women and among hard-working Hispanic middle-class families. This is my community, my hood.

Our leaders are taking us to a place we've struggled for 50 years to get away from. It's a hateful, loathesome place, of vigilantees, violence, segregated services, and deliberate bigotry. The reason that anti-illegal sentiment can't be separated from racism is simple: There's no way to tell by looking who's a citizen and who isn't, and even if there were, only a liar or a fool would argue that there's never been any anti-Mexicanism in the USA. In our historical and cultural context, you can't separate the racism from the xenophobia any more than you can cut water. Even if your personal intent isn't to be racist, the effect of the measures you're espousing decidedly is racist.

This state stands to reap an ugly whirlwind, thanks in no small part to a hard-Right legislature abetted by a centrist governor who's "centrism" is forced ever rightward to keep its "center" in a country spiraling into fascism.

To anybody who knows anything about fascism and about the unitary Presidents' usurpation of unprecedented unilateral powers, this isn't idle rhetoric.

Where, one wonders, are our monks, our clergypersons -- a reference, of course, to Burma, which, as a miltarist-corporatist despotism, is just further advanced in its descent into Hell than we are. Well, they're not in the streets, that's for sure.

In real estate, an already depressed market is being hit with houses being sold by undocumented persons or by families that include undocumented workers whose incomes are needed to cover the mortgage. This will increase as the exodus deepens.

In business, well, I can only say "Duh." First, the state of cotton, copper, cattle, canyons, construction, and citrus depends on Hispanics for labor. ALL of Arizona's main industries, including tourism (represented by "canyons" in that Six C formula will be whacked with a labor shortage of who knows what dimensions. And on top of that, all of them as well as every other business that depends on a large purchasing public for its success will be hard by a diminishing client base -- including the restaurant and entertainment businesses.

Not least, across this border state are thousands and thousands of tiny businesses --taquerias, furniture, clothing, and shoe stores, cantinas, carnicerias, and importers, that cater to our very large Spanish-speaking population. Among them are many thousands owned by undocumented people. Those that are owned by undocumented workers will close or be sold to persons who hold the right papers, but the question is whether there will be any kind of market for businesses that cater to a demoralized, angrym, and diminishing demographic.

Those that do manage to remain in business will face a smaller client base, and nobody knows how much smaller. Nor does anybody know the effect all this will have on our economy.

But we do know that one dollar isn't just one dollar in real economic terms. The respected velocity of money theory indicates that every dollar circulates through many hands in any given local market. The dollar I pay you for trimming my hedges, you give to the grocer for avocados, which goes to the produce driver, who uses it to pay for gas, and so on. With most of these transactions, that dollar also draws along a few cents in taxes to fuel local government and services.

Thus, for every dollar that is withdrawn as our Hispanics depart, a negative little sucking sound will be heard across the land. The result cannot be good for anybody. I'm sure there's a biblical moral in here somewhere -- about doing unto others, maybe, or being our brothers' keepers, or getting the logs out of our own eyes. There's gotta be.

But neither the hit on the economy in what's already a shaky phase, nor the increasingly confrontational racist and xenophobic cloud rising over Arizona, doesn't bother Pearce. He and his economic-and-population purists are on record opining that a little shock may be a good thing. It may waken us to all kinds of problems in our daily lives, and anyway, the strategy is worth it just to drive the Mexicans out of town on a rail.

This kind of fundamentalism or purism, as you will --nativist and economic -- is of a piece with hard rightward swing in the country as a whole.

It also happens to ring a big bell for anybody who's read or is reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. To wit: It makes me wonder whether Pearce and his Republican cronies have in mind creating in Arizona the legislative equivalent of what Bush created in the Gulf South following Katrina. The ensuing shock and disruption will be just perfect for engineering a great wealth transfer from the working classes to, ta da, the real "ownership class" that is being unmasked as privatization and outright land theft creep across New Orleans and the Gulf South.

Where, one wonders, are our monks, our clergypersons -- a reference, of course, to Burma, which, as a state of offical miltarist-corporatist despotism, is merely further along in its descent into Hell than we are.

Well, they're not demonstrating in the streets, that's for sure.

Heh-heh-hello, Pinochet.