Desolation: Coming soon to a shopping center near you!
Assemblyman Greg Ball has built his career on demonizing immigrants. Since launching his campaign for State Senate, he has ratcheted up his demagoguery, proposing to implement Arizona’s anti-immigrant law in New York. Perhaps he should take a moment and consider the disastrous effects this legislation is already having on Arizona before we follow them over the cliff:
Every time a customer buys some of the large fabric tote bags from the Dollar Store at 43rd Avenue and Thomas Road, Najmuddin Katchi sees another piece of his business vanish.
The purchase of the briefcase-sized shoulder bags means that another one of Katchi’s customers, mostly Latino immigrants, is packing to leave the state before what is touted as the nation’s toughest law against illegal immigrants takes effect July 29.
Katchi’s store isn’t the only business suffering. The vast shopping center that holds his small shop is almost empty. The Food City supermarket closed this spring. Then the furniture shop. Then the pizzeria…
For the last 20 years, Arizona has been one of the fastest-growing states in the nation. It depends on an expanding population to power its economy, which relies heavily on the construction of new houses.
At the corner of 43rd and Thomas, it’s hard to determine how much of the neighborhood’s woes stem from Arizona’s immigration laws and how much from the state’s economy, battered by a once red-hot housing marked that cooled.
Katchi’s revenue was already sagging before April 23, when Gov. Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law. Since then, sales have plummeted. [...]
When immigrants leave, Gans said, “stores experience dramatic drops in sales. Apartment owners who rent to immigrants have high vacancy rates and risk losing their buildings. Legal workers or renters or consumers don’t generally step in quickly enough to prevent these businesses from experiencing real additional hardship.”
At 43rd and Thomas, such short-term economic perils are no abstraction.
Rather than integrate new workers into the economy and help them revitalize troubled areas as others have done, Greg Ball wants to enact a law that will target immigrants, legal and illegal, and minorities, of all kinds, for harassment and unfair treatment.
Ball can talk about getting the government off our back and empowering the private sector all he wants, but it is hard to see how a policy of driving away the local workforce and customer base for many Hudson Valley businesses is a sound strategy for growing our economy.
