Immigration for the day

Alan Dean Foster has an op-ed column in The New York Times about javelinas (not):

“The problem,” Luis told me, “is all these illegals. They come here expecting to find paradise, and it isn’t. You have to work hard for everything. But at least there is work.” He shook his head. He is shorter than me by five inches, but I would trade an inch or so of height for his full head of black hair. Vanity knows no borders.
Luis emigrated from southern Mexico sixteen years ago. He now runs a car maintenance business where I bring my old Aurora every few months. To say that he, and many immigrants like him, are strongly in favor of Arizona’s new immigration law— which went into effect at the end of last month without its most controversial aspects, like immigration status checks during police stops— is like saying one or two New Yorkers dislike the Red Sox.
The part of the law not blocked by a federal judge has been in force for over a week now, though no one I know has seen any signs of it in action. Still, there have been reports of arrests, and a lot of angry calls to both the federal courthouse and Governor Jan Brewer’s office. Most people in the country have heard about that kind of thing on the news. What they don’t seem to know much about is how regular Arizonans feel about the law.
If you think angry white guys who sleep with M16s, and whose six-packs are in their pickups as opposed to on their torsos, are the ones angriest at illegal immigration in Arizona, then you haven’t talked to the legal immigrants here. Did everything the hard way, they say, and earned the right to be called an American. Many of them resent those who crossed the border illegally, but they also sympathize. You can’t be human and not feel for someone who only wants to make a little money to send back home.
Take my friend, who works at the local Indian casino (most every county in Arizona has one). She left her family back in Chiapas because her husband couldn’t find work, and braved rapists and thieves and the Border Patrol so she could come here to do manual labor six days a week. While she works in the casino’s neon bowels, the plump and pale-skinned drop thousands of dollars into slot machines to alleviate the boredom of slow afternoons. Sure, she’s illegal. She’s also a saint.
Would that the human ramifications of the state’s immigration law were as simple and straightforward to parse as its bureaucratic language.
If, as is expected, the law moves up to the Supreme Court in the fall, the controversy will become even more difficult to avoid. And yet most Arizonans— both Anglo and Hispanic— will keep on moseying through their lives, much as their fellow Americans do. It’s not about immigration all the time here, any more than it is in the rest of the United States.
That noted, there are differences between there and here. Life is a little wilder in Arizona. To the best of my knowledge, no one wakes up in Manhattan wondering if a protected wolf has killed his newborn calves. Perambulating Bostonians are unlikely to be on the lookout for cactus rustlers (the theft of plants is a huge problem in our preserves and parks). If any good folks in St. Louis encounter a roadrunner, it’ll be on television. You can’t mine much peridot in Peoria, or copper in Calistoga, or gold in Grand Rapids.
My friends Brock and Glenna have a vegetable garden. In Arizona, that means battling with javelinas, which love their zucchini. Javelinas may be pigs, but they weigh over seventy pounds and have razor-sharp tusks; a pack of them can crush a mountain lion like a trucker does a beer can; keep that in mind the next time you grumble about having to shoo the neighborhood kids away from your tomatoes.
So, yes, Arizona is different. Most of all, the border with Mexico makes us different from those states bordering looks-just-like-us Canada, or silent wide oceans, or simply other states. We’re as American as our relatives in Maine and Minnesota, and we hew to the same values. But some things are a bit more complicated here.
Mexicans called this place home before it was ceded to the United States, and Native Americans have lived here for 10,000 years. Arizona, probably more than anywhere else in the country, belongs to these three cultures, and that says more about the state than any debate over immigration law could.
The truth is, nobody in Arizona likes the law. Nobody really wants it. All anyone here wants is for the federal government to enforce the existing rules governing our borders. Had it done so, no one would have bothered with the law.
It’s August, and the temperature in the deserts runs 115 (in the daytime) over 80 (at night). But Arizonans are used to it. Despite what the rest of the country seems to think, those numbers are also a pretty good approximation of an average resident’s blood pressure.

Alan Dean Foster is the author of the forthcoming novel The Human Blend.