These measures included laws, which denied services to undocumented residents, alerted police to assume ICE functions, penalized for employers who hired the aliens, and made English the official language. In Arizona, ordinary citizens were encouraged to report businesses, which hired suspicious foreign-looking persons. Hispanics were the major targets of this xenophobia because they were believed to be the major law violators. Statistics showed that there were approximately 12 million undocumented immigrants, most of them Latinos or Hispanics, in the U.S. The national bias against them showed up in studies, which considered only them in determining how much they were costing the country in services. But did they really drain the economy? A spokesman for the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission did not think so. A 2004 study on "foreign-born" citizens of Virginia alone concluded that Asians outnumbered Hispanics. The Commission found that these "foreign-born" citizens were not a huge...
[ View Full Essay]