Watch The Republic’s coverage of Arizona in 2024
From the Phoenix Open to Election Day, from ‘Gilbert Goon’ violence to ASU’s Big 12 championship, The Republic covered it all in Arizona in 2024.
The Republic
President-elect Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans, coupled with Proposition 314, Arizona’s new immigration and border enforcement law, are shaping up to pose a double threat to undocumented immigrants in the state.
Arizona’s border with Mexico remains a major gateway for illegal immigration. Under the Biden administration, record numbers of migrants arrived at the southern border with Mexico, raising concerns among Americans that helped Trump win a return to the White House on promises to close the border to illegal immigration and carry out the largest mass deportations in U.S. history.
More than 62% of Arizona voters also approved Proposition 314, legislation put on the ballot by Republican lawmakers in an attempt to stem unauthorized migration, stop fentanyl from entering Arizona, and identify and deport undocumented immigrants, through the controversial use of state resources and enforcement measures.
But, perhaps surprisingly, federal data shows that the state’s undocumented population, once the largest in the U.S. of any state by share, has actually shrunk dramatically over the past decade and a half, though it may be growing again, experts say.
The data shows that Arizona’s undocumented population declined by nearly half since the peak of 560,000 in 2008 to 290,000 in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s most recent estimates. Meanwhile, the state’s overall population has grown from about 6.3 million in 2008 to more than 7.3 million in 2022.
As a result, undocumented immigrants now make up a far smaller share of the state’s overall population, 4% in 2022 compared with 9% at the peak in 2008, according to an analysis by The Arizona Republic. In other words, about one in 25 Arizona residents was undocumented in 2022 compared with about one in 11 in 2008.
Arizona’s migrant crisis less visible than it was
The state’s immigration landscape also has changed in other ways since the 2000s. During that period Arizona was known for passing some of the strictest laws in the nation to make the state as unwelcoming as possible to undocumented immigrants through a policy known as attrition through enforcement that the second Trump administration may follow.
The vast majority of undocumented immigrants who crossed the border in Arizona used to be mostly men from Mexico in search of jobs who tried to avoid being caught by the Border Patrol.
Now, nearly half of the undocumented immigrants who arrive at the border are groups of families who turn themselves over to U.S. border officials once they cross and then ask for asylum to stay in the U.S.
In fiscal year 2024, about 262,000 of the undocumented immigrants encountered at the Arizona border with Mexico arrived as families compared with the 271,000 who arrived as single adults, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
Also different: The newcomers are not just from Mexico but from countries all over Latin America as well as the Caribbean, Africa and Asia and parts of Europe.
And unlike the past, when the demand for jobs in industries such as construction, hospitality, and restaurants enticed large numbers of undocumented immigrants to settle in Arizona, most migrants who cross Arizona’s border with Mexico don’t tend to stay in the state.
Those who are released by federal authorities in Arizona after requesting asylum usually are dropped off at shelters in Yuma, Tucson and Phoenix. From there most typically board planes or buses and head to other states.
The brazen shootouts, kidnappings, extortions and murders tied to human smuggling that plagued Arizona in the 2000s also have dissipated.
During that period, Phoenix was considered the main hub for human smuggling in the United States. Undocumented immigrants smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border were typically brought in vehicles to Phoenix, warehoused in “drop houses” and then transported to other cities.
Back then, federal immigration agents and local police frequently discovered human smugglers hiding large groups of undocumented people in deplorable conditions in hundreds of drop houses scattered throughout the Phoenix area. The discovery of drop houses, however, is now a rare occurrence.
Also no longer in the news are the violent smuggling gangs, “bajadores,” who used to kidnap groups of migrants from other smuggling groups along Arizona’s southern border with Mexico. The bajadores let other smuggling groups do the hard and risky work of smuggling migrants across the border and then stole their loads so that they could extort lucrative ransoms from relatives of each migrant in the U.S.
It used to be common for smuggling vehicles overloaded with migrants like cordwood to crash on roadways between the border and Phoenix, leaving bodies of injured and dead migrants sprawled on the pavement. While crashes like that still happen, they are more rare.
Day laborers still congregate outside Home Depots and other locations around the Valley, flagging down vehicles in search of a day’s worth of work. But instead of hundreds, only a dozen or two day laborers can be found, if any.
“The immigration crisis was very visible” back then, said state Sen. John Kavanagh, a Republican from Fountain Hills, a main proponent in Arizona of the attrition through enforcement policy and a key sponsor of Senate Bill 1070, the sweeping 2010 Arizona immigration enforcement law that became a blueprint for Proposition 314.
Still, Kavanagh said, the migrant crisis is now “far worse because of the open border.”
Though “less visible in Arizona,” big cities in other states considered more welcoming to immigrants are now the ones “getting the brunt of the problem,” Kavanagh said.
“The big difference now is that we have a president who is ready to do aggressive anti-illegal immigration enforcement. And when you combine that with our state law, which mandates that all levels of government cooperate in immigration enforcement, I think it’s a real game changer,” Kavanagh said.
Why are migrants who cross the border in Arizona not staying in the state?
Ariel Ruiz Soto, a policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, said encounters of undocumented immigrants in Arizona have skyrocketed. The number of encounters at ports of entry by Customs and Border Protection officials and between ports by the Border Patrol climbed from 82,000 in fiscal year 2000 to a high of 576,000 in fiscal year 2023. In fiscal year 2024, encounters fell to 564,000. Notably, each encounter does not represent a unique individual because some migrants are caught multiple times.
Despite the record numbers of encounters at Arizona’s southern border, undocumented people are mostly passing through, not staying, Ruiz said.
One of the reasons is because the majority of Arizona’s immigrant population is from Mexico. Meanwhile, the migrants coming now are from many countries, not just Mexico, Ruiz said.
Migrants tend to flock to cities where they can tap into already established networks of families and friends from the same country who can help connect them with housing and jobs, Ruiz said.
“The diversity of nationalities is super important,” Ruiz said.
Migrants aren’t going to stay in Arizona if they don’t have communities that are able to receive and support them, Ruiz said.
Migrants who now arrive at Arizona’s border from many countries, not just Mexico
Mexico is still the main country of origin for the majority of undocumented immigrants who arrive at the southern border.
But data shows that nearly half of border encounters in Arizona in fiscal year 2024 were undocumented immigrants from countries other than Mexico, notably, Guatemala, Ecuador, Colombia, Cuba, Peru, India, Venezuela, Haiti, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.
“People who are coming from Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, China, Turkey and many other countries. Because of a lack of support from networks in Arizona, they are going to Miami, they are going to Houston, they are going to New York, they are going to Chicago,” Ruiz said. Seattle, Los Angeles and San Diego are also destinations, he said.
Arizona still seen as unwelcoming to migrants
Kavanagh, the state senator, said there are other reasons migrants crossing the border in Arizona are not staying here.
“Number one, it was quite obvious that the big cities were welcoming them and giving them all sorts of benefits like hotel accommodations,” Kavanagh said. In addition some states, including Arizona, Texas and Florida, have been busing migrants to cities in other states, notably, Denver, Chicago, and New York City, to make a political statement.
And second, “I think Arizona still has something of a reputation as being an unfriendly place for illegal immigrants,” Kavanagh said.
At the same time, Kavanagh thinks businesses adjusted after undocumented immigrants left the state by finding ways to need fewer workers.
Salvador Reza is a longtime migrant advocate. He led protests against SB 1070 and other measures aimed at driving undocumented immigrants out of Arizona, which he believes were rooted in racism and ended up exacerbating the effects of the Great Recession and housing market collapse.
Reza agrees that Arizona’s lingering anti-immigrant reputation is one of the reasons the state’s undocumented population has decreased and newly arrived migrants don’t stay here.
“Would you come to a racist state when you can go to another place that will treat you better?” Reza said.
Reza believes Trump’s mass deportation plans along with Proposition 314 will throw Arizona back to the days when undocumented immigrants and their families lived in fear, which could again hurt the state’s economy.
“Fourteen years ago I thought we had we have made it very clear that racism doesn’t work and racism is not good for communities or for the economy, especially for the economy,” Reza said. “And we were able to stop it for 14 years.
“Then now because of Donald Trump” hostility towards immigrants has “come back with a vengeance. … It was pretty bad in Arizona. It’s going to get worse,” Reza said.
Reza used to run the Macehualli Work Center, a now-closed spot for day laborers to gather safely in north Phoenix. He said most of the day laborers he has interviewed recently have told him they will not go out on a job for less than $20 or $25, far above the state’s $14.35 minimum wage.
“What does that tell you? It tells you there is not enough workers because the prices have gone up,” Reza said.
Reza said the higher wages day laborers are demanding is an indication of an already tight labor market that will only get tighter if mass deportations happen.
“And the thing is it’s not just going to be Arizona, it’s going to be the whole country,” Reza said.
Increased border enforcement made migrants stay in U.S. and gave rise to criminal gangs
Armando Garcia, a former Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent, noted that many migrants who cross the border now are asylum seekers who have received permits to work in the U.S. while their asylum cases are pending.
That may help explain why estimates of the state’s undocumented population have not grown despite the recent surge in border crossings.
“My first question is has (the undocumented population) shrunk or are they just getting permission to stay once they cross” Garcia said.
Garcia was a Border Patrol agent in Arizona in the late 1980s. He then joined the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, which later became Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Garcia retired in 2012 as the assistant special agent in charge of the ICE Homeland Security Investigations unit in Phoenix.
Garcia remembers when most of the undocumented immigrants crossing the border where men from Mexico who would go back to Mexico during the Christmas holidays and then return to their jobs in the U.S.
“It was cyclical where they’d come and work, but they were able to go home. It wasn’t that big a deal to come back and sneak across as many times as you needed to until you made it,” Garcia said.
But after the U.S. began strengthening border security in the 1990s, Garcia said, the makeup of the undocumented immigrants who crossed the border changed. Instead of mostly men, more women and children began to cross to reunite with men who began staying in the U.S. rather than risk crossing the border again, Garcia said.
“Especially here in Arizona with (the immigration raids by former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio),” Garcia said. “People knew that they would not be able to go back home for years because that’s how difficult it became and what I heard back then was that they started bringing their families because of enforcement.”
When Garcia started investigating groups responsible for smuggling undocumented immigrants in the U.S., he said, most of them were “mom and pop” operations that had been smuggling people for generations.
That changed when border security and immigration enforcement increased and federal agents began arresting and imprisoning smugglers in the U.S., Garcia said.
The mom-and-pop operations, Garcia said, were then replaced by more sophisticated and violent criminal organizations.
“Every time we prosecuted a group, they learned from us and they changed their tactics,” Garcia said.
That resulted in a rise in kidnappings in the 2000s by smuggling groups stealing migrants from other groups, Garcia said
Garcia isn’t sure why human-smuggling-related violence has decreased in Arizona even though the number of undocumented immigrants arriving at the border hit record highs during the Biden administration.
He speculated that as human smuggling has turned into such big business, cartels now control the trade, and “no one is going to take on the cartels.”
Reach the reporter at [email protected].
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Publish date : 2024-12-19 00:03:00
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