MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“No Immigrants, No New York,” Ellis Henican Column, amNewYork, April 29, 2010
Dios mio, it would be awful! Living in New York without illegal immigrants!
Who’d deliver the Chinese food? Who’d raise the children on the Upper East Side? With teamsters busing the restaurant tables, we’ll all be paying $49.50 for our next plate of spaghetti carbonara — even before the tip gets added in.
That’s the dirty little secret of all this antiimmigrant uproar. Once the ugly speeches are finished and the call-in talk hosts have packed it in for the night, nobody seriously wants to chase off Maria, Sophia and Jose.
If they suddenly stopped coming — or federal agents actually rounded them up — we’d have to offer special internships to lure them back immediately. All is forgiven! Nannies and landscapers wanted! Comeback, por favor!
This latest wave started in Arizona, where the governor and the Legislature have now changed the official slogan from the “Grand Canyon State” to the “Show Me Your Papers State.”
Against the advice of her attorney general, Gov. Jan Brewer has signed the toughest immigration law in America, making it a crime not to carry citizenship papers. Under the law, police will begin stopping people upon the “reasonable suspicion” they’re in the country illegally, which apparently is Arizonan for “look Mexican.”
Once upon an Arizona night, Sen. John McCain was known as an immigration reformer. Now he’s in a tight home-state re-election battle against a former talk-radio host — and suddenly he’s sounding like Tom Tancredo before his nap.
Now Bronx Rep. Jose Serrano is demanding that the MLB move the 2011 All-Star Game out of Chase Field in Phoenix, and rallies are being held coast to coast. Even the major law-enforcement groups are saying this kind of crackdown may not be such a great idea.
Here, this is all a little hard to understand. We live in a city that was built by immigrants and is now entirely catered by them. Day and night, we come face to face with people freshly here from around the world — some with papers, some without — and we know it.
Instinctively, we understand: Dining out already is pricey enough.
E-mail ellis@henican.com. Follow him at twitter.com/henican.
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