Prop. 200 OK says ‘stay out,’ but state economy says ‘we need you’

Despite opposition by groups all along the political spectrum — from liberal human-rights activists to conservative business leaders — Proposition 200, a measure intended to staunch the flood of illegal immigration from Mexico and points south, passed handily Tuesday.

The new law will require proof of citizenship to vote, and to obtain public services Arizona’s government has set up for citizens. The objective of such strictures is ostensibly to protect the integrity of Arizona’s electoral process and to limit taxpayer-funded benefits to the citizens who pay for them.

But Arizona voters’ approval of this initiative is also intended to send a number of messages. The first of these is to politicians at the federal level, whose responsibility it actually is to maintain the inviolability of the border.

That message is: Get on the stick. The tide of illegal immigration, which has come about because of the attention you’ve paid other sectors of the border — read California — is heavily taxing institutions such as our hospitals, whose emergency rooms must by law serve essentially as medical clinics for indigent persons.

Another is to politicians at the state level such as Gov. Janet Napolitano, who last year vetoed a bill to require proof of citizenship for prospective voters. That one is: Don’t expect to inflate a demographic you see as your constituency at our expense.

And a major one is to foreigners considering an illegal move here: Stay home. This is no land of milk and honey.

The problem with that last one is that it’s only half of a double message — the other half being: We want you! Work cheap by our standards, and we’ll pay you handsomely by yours. Oh, and by the way — you can send some of your pay home, but spend most of it here, for rent, groceries, clothes, transportation and other necessities.

This is the problematic side of this measure. The overwhelming majority of illegals aren’t lining up at welfare offices or trying to commit vote fraud. They’re standing out on street corners, hoping to pick up a day’s hard work — even if it’s 110 out. (Didn’t that used to be called a work ethic?)

And they tend to come from situations of such extreme privation that the prospect of getting barred from an emergency room is unlikely even to enter their heads, much less serve as a deterrent.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: A major part of any solution must be the establishment at the federal level of a guest-worker program that allows a reasonable number of Mexicans into the U.S. to get the work they need and that our economy needs done. This would go far toward the "regularization" of a North American labor market that has greatly changed in recent years.