Arizona lawmakers are expected to vote this week on a tough immigration measure that mirrors Texas’ controversial SB4, but this time, they want to send it to voters.
HCR 2060 has been dubbed the Secure the Border Act. It would give state and local law enforcement the power to enforce immigration laws, plus there are measures in here to bar people from using fraudulent documentation to get public benefits or circumvent the E-Verify system to work in our state.
Gov. Katie Hobbs has called the measure a job killer – even though she remains frustrated by what she calls the federal government’s failure to secure the border. Many leaders in our state’s business community agree.
The Show was joined by Danny Seiden, president of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, to speak more about HCR 2060.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: So I know your organization has some problems with this proposal and the fact that it's being sent to voters. So I want to go through some of those now beginning with, I guess, how do you think this could affect the state's economy. Like, why do you have concerns from a business point of view?
DANNY SEIDEN: Sure. Well, first and foremost, again, I do think the process matters and as you pointed out in the lead up to The Show, this is going to the voters. So it's a referral. And that's so different than typical lawmaking because it's going to tie the Legislature's hands for the next, you know, 10 plus 100 years because of Voter Protection Act. So this is not the right way to take on a complex issue. And our concerns specifically with the economy. I want to be very clear. Every member of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce uses E-Verify, they're not trying to hire people over here unlawfully or illegally. We, we support more legal immigration as a solution to labor. So again, anybody who's saying that this is gonna, you know, wipe out the labor workforce, I don't know what they're talking about. That's incorrect.
What it does do is it does bring into question the, you know, how can we ever solve, you know, getting more legal immigration in here first. And, and this doesn't really address that and it allows for some of these other organizations in town to kind of take us back 10-plus years to the days of [SB] 1070, make it seem like this is a huge measure meant to scare away all immigration, whether legal or not. And that's, again, not the case. I do believe they're trying to address a real concern. This is the number one issue in every poll that we see right now. And so we're sympathetic to that, but at the same time, we don't want, we don't want to, to go to the, to the voters and to force them to vote on something that's going to really tie our hands on how we, how we process our workers. If, if it's E-Verify right now, is it going to be E-Verify 10 years from now? We, we don't know that. So again, not the right way to do something like this. So there is some concern around that, but it's not that the economy will collapse because we're going to lose all of our legal labor. We don't use illegal labor.
GILGER: Now, let me ask you more about 1070 in a moment. But first, you also called this an unfunded mandate. What's the concern there?
SEIDEN: Oh, absolutely. Again, so within this bill, there is requirements for the state to hold people who cross over illegally. Again, it makes a state crime very similar to Texas' SB 4. But if you're a Department of Corrections, how, how, how are you going to fund that? We already, we already don't get properly reimbursed. I can tell you this from my time working in the governor's office. The counties, the border counties, the county sheriffs who have the house in their jails, they don't get reimbursed right now for the work they do on illegal immigration. So if we're going to make it, you know, mandatory that they have to hold them for a certain amount of time, which this bill does in its current form.
Now, it's always changing, right. We don't know what the amendments are going to look like on Wednesday and want to see what that looks like. But for right now that does put all the pressure back on the state and already, you know, pretty tightly strapped budget to cover the cost of housing these inmates.
GILGER: Let me ask you about the legacy of SB 1070 that you brought up there. I mean, it was, it was a big deal, you know, more than a decade ago, we saw boycotts, we saw con conventions canceled, you know, like there was a big economic impact. Do you think that would happen again if this passes or if, if voters do pass it in November? Because, or do you think maybe the political environment is different today?
SEIDEN: I, I think it's 100% different, you know, 1070 was at a time when we haven't seen a record amount of border crossings. 1070 was at a time when fentanyl wasn't one of the top killers of young men in the state of Arizona, which it is right now. In fact, Rachel Mitchell, our county attorney, has talked about you, you can point to close to 50% of the country's fentanyl coming in through our border. That's embarrassing. That is something to be concerned about. And it, it is a part public safety issue, and it's a valid public safety issue. That's again why the border is number one and number two and number three on almost every poll you see right now is the top issue.
People are concerned. They, they see it, they, they feel it. So what happened with 1070 would not, I do not believe what happened now, despite what I think some activists would like you, would want us to say, that we're gonna boycott. We do not boycott our own state. You know, Texas passed SB 4 and I missed the point where anyone talk about boycotting their state. I missed the point where anyone in the business community says our economy is gonna collapse. That is a frustrating thing for us because the Legislature is trying to address the problem. Do we like the way they're doing it? No, but that doesn't mean we boycott our own state. That doesn't mean we want conventions to get canceled.
So I don't believe that will happen here. I think there's always a chance that it will happen to some degree. But again, we don't know what the final product is yet and that's why we're kind of watching it closely. I give Ken Bennett, I give Ken Bennett a lot of credit for trying to address this DACA issue. You know, DACA is something that the voters of Arizona have spoken on. That's about 24,000 people in our state, maybe a little bit more, who are here. They followed the law as best as they can. They came here when they were kids, you know, Arizona voters obviously support them because we went through this with tuition in the past. So if the Supreme Court would ever strike down DACA, that could be handled separately, it doesn't have to be in this bill that sends the wrong message to people who are here going to work every participating in the system, the right and legal way.
GILGER: Let me ask you lastly, Danny, in the last minute or so here. When it comes to immigration being a border state has been sort of a, a plus and minus kind of situation, right? Like we do a lot of business across the border, right? Like, but at the same time, political tensions when they get high on the border, we can also create business repercussions as we're talking about now. I mean, how do you view our state's role as a border state from a business point of view?
SEIDEN: Oh, it, it's, it's huge. You know, we're less than a year removed from where we saw Lukeville, one of our legal ports of entry, be closed down because they couldn't handle the illegal shift. So the, the White House decided we're going to close down the legal port of entry. That hurt tourism to Mexico and that hurt people coming from Mexico. Anyone in Arizona who has a place in Rocky Point couldn't get there. But for an extra three hours through some less than desirable ports of entry. So that really matters.
Now, when they close the legal ports of entry at Eagle Pass in Texas, that impacts the beer industry. The, Mexico is Arizona's largest trading partner times four. It is a very valuable relationship. And this round again, another difference between 1070. It's not about people coming here from Mexico looking for work. It's about people violating, you know, and abusing the asylum process. All things that Sen. [Kyrsten] Sinema tried to address in her bill and, you know, that's the appropriate venue, the federal government, for this. We, we again, you know, we need to have open ports of entry with Mexico. We need to have that trade going on. They are a valuable partner on this and that, they are not who's causing this problem for us, too. Again, it's our broken federal system and that's what has to be addressed.
And I appreciate the Legislature trying to do that. The referral system is a tough way to do it, but they are responding to their constituents. So we're going to monitor it and, again, make sure we can get the best product out possible and hopefully that would be, you know, a legislative solution as opposed to a referral one day.
KJZZ’s The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ’s programming is the audio record.
