The Real Arizona Boycott

ILLUSTRATED: Arizona has unfortunately branded itself as a place unfriendly to brown skinned people. The state does not deserve this shame its politicians have brought upon it.

Workers with highly technical skills and an enterprising drive will be the impact players in the new job market. Many such workers are immigrants, legal and not, and the largest concentrations of immigrants are generally the places with the fastest wealth creation.

These immigrants look like Scandinavian au pairs who overstayed a visa and starting a nursery. They look like a Jamaican seaman who ditched their ship in Miami and started an ethnic catering service. They look like a European grad student illegally doing paid consulting work, or an Asian computer programmer who got fired from a job on an H1-B visa and is selling mobile apps.

In Arizona, law enforcement officers are to request papers from anyone they suspect are undocumented. In the unlikely event that this law lasts long enough to be enforced, it comes down hardest on the race of people who make up the vast majority of illegal immigrants: Latinos.

Some are highly skilled, others not so much. But the message being received by immigrants everywhere is that Arizona is a place where whites are threatened by striving brown people. And every contemporary analysis concludes what the Medicis of Renaissance-Era Florence knew: diversity percolates innovation, and innovation creates wealth.

It will take years for Arizona to shake this reputation. They will lose a lot of brown people and green money.