Citizen Staff Writer

Tucson is returning to its roots – to a time when Hispanic children outnumbered white children in local schools.

Many recognize this sea change as an opportunity to take stake of where we are and a clarion call to begin planning for a community increasingly different than the one many of us have known.

Tucson has been part of the United States for only 152 years, since Mexico sold this part of the continent in the December 1853 Gadsden Purchase.

Whites have been the majority for much of the past 1-1/2 centuries, but that is about to change, beginning with the young.

In Tucson today, 47 percent of those under age 15 are Hispanic – compared with 42 percent who are white. Hispanics make up 32 percent of the total population and are the fastest-growing segment among the young. So it won’t be long before Hispanics are the largest segment of the entire population.

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‘Different races, not different people’

What does that mean? Eleven-year-old Gary Sousa, who recently was interviewed by the Tucson Citizen, put it in the proper perspective: “It’s different races, not different people,” he said.

Also important is the observation of Ray Chavez, multicultural curriculum specialist for the Tucson Unified School District: “Those kids who are 15 now will be old enough to vote in a couple of years, and a couple of years after that, hopefully, they will be buying homes, and we hope some of them will begin to run for office.”

But who will these people be? Who will be running this state in a generation?

Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy addressed this trend in 2001 with its report, “Five Shoes Waiting to Drop on Arizona’s Future.”

One of those “shoes” was the “Latino Education Dilemma.” The study noted the problem and the promise of Arizona’s growing Hispanic school-age population.

The problem: In the fifth grade, Hispanic students fall far behind their white peers in AIMS test scores in all subjects. By the 10th grade, Hispanics are further behind.

The promise: As many states suffer labor shortages because of modest growth, Arizona is growing. With a good education, Hispanics are upwardly mobile. Hispanics born in Arizona make up much of their parents’ economic and educational deficits in a single generation.

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Education is crucial

Clearly, a solid education for all young people is key to Arizona’s future. But when it comes to Hispanics, the state has failed. For proof, one need look no further than the 15-year legal battle over funding English language learning programs – a battle that remains unresolved.

The Morrison Institute study had several innovative suggestions including development impact fees for literacy programs, guaranteed college financial aid and a federal education initiative for border states.

There also are all-day kindergarten, higher pay for teachers and other steps that would improve Arizona’s educational system for all.

Our rapidly growing Hispanic community should be considered neither a burden nor a challenge. But this is a metamorphosis that must not catch us unprepared.

More online

To read “Five Shoes Waiting to Drop on Arizona’s Future,” go to this article online at www.tucsoncitizen.com/opinion.

Citizen Staff Writer

When Arizonans OK’d Proposition 200, there were widespread warnings that it would result in chaos and confusion.

Several recent events have borne out that prediction.

The proposition, approved in 2004, bans delivery of some state services to people who are in this country illegally.

It also made Arizona the first state to require that people show proof of citizenship before registering to vote. And it requires voters to show specific forms of identification to cast a ballot.

But a ruling from federal officials, contravening statements from state authorities and a bill in the Legislature all threaten to make the cherished right of voting an unnecessarily difficult undertaking.

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission recently ruled that voters do not have to show proof of citizenship when registering using a federal voter registration form.

Arizona Secretary of State Jan Brewer asked for the ruling from the federal commission. But after it was delivered, she labeled the decision “incorrect,” “outlandish” and “completely inconsistent, unlawful and without merit.”

And then Brewer did something even more outlandish. She told county election officials to ignore the federal ruling.

Brewer was an outspoken supporter of Proposition 200, so her order certainly smells of politics.

But more important, it puts county elections officials in a bind. Should voters who register with a federal form be turned away or accepted if they don’t have proof of citizenship?

What if some counties follow Brewer’s mandate and other counties follow the federal directive? Could those who register with a federal form be allowed to vote for candidates running for federal offices, but not for state candidates?

This gets even more confusing. Because Proposition 200 was so poorly constructed, it doesn’t address those who vote by mail. That’s a huge loophole, amounting to nearly half of all votes cast in some elections.

Legislators waded into that fray this week when they debated a bill that would have required those who mail in a ballot to also include a copy of an acceptable form of identification.

Thankfully, the bill was voted down. But until the session ends, no bill is really dead.

The net effect of all this is undeniable: It is becoming harder to register to vote and, once registered, harder to cast a ballot.

Proposition 200 was an unnecessary intrusion on Arizonans’ right to vote. The ensuing interpretations of and “improvements” to the proposition have only made this bad situation worse.

Park downtown

Don’t let parking be the factor that keeps you away from the restaurants, theaters and other attractions of downtown.

Many Tucsonans believe that downtown parking is hard to find, involves a long walk and is expensive. Wrong, wrong and wrong.

There are many parking spots in surface lots, garages and at meters on the streets. In most cases, you’ll park closer to your destination than you would at a major mall. And you may pay a few dollars, but it’s nothing like the cost of downtown parking in most major cities.

There also is the convenient TICET, or Tucson Inner City Express Transit, which shuttles people around on small buses.

Take a trip downtown. It’s accessible.

The Arizona Republic

As a prelude to the 2008 presidential campaign, Sen. John McCain is indicating that, when it comes to economic issues, he may be a work in progress.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore, McCain acknowledged that while he felt on solid ground on military and foreign policy matters, he still had a lot to learn about economics.

McCain’s behavior has also changed recently. He opposed President Bush’s first-term tax cuts. Nevertheless, he recently supported extending the cut in investment income tax rates. He also has hinted that he could support a compromise on the estate tax being crafted by fellow Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, which provides a hefty exemption and subjects inheritances above that to the low 15 percent investment income rate.

This willingness to reconsider his position on economic issues is welcome. During the 2000 presidential campaign and Bush’s first term, McCain showed an antipathy toward growth-oriented fiscal policy that is troubling in a Republican senator, much less a presidential standard bearer.

The bet here, however, is that McCain will find a tough go of it.

McCain is an instinctive politician who tends to see the world as a morality play. In his morality play construct, success requires the exhibition of virtue, usually sacrifice to a cause greater than oneself. That’s the unifying theme to McCain the politician.

Sound economic thinking, however, conflicts with McCain’s moral instincts about economic issues.

Take the issue of the budget deficit, for example. A case can be made that budget deficits are in part a growth issue, that they raise private sector interest rates and thus impede private sector growth. And at some level that’s undoubtedly true.

The evidence of the past 25 years, however, suggests that the effect is small and easily overwhelmed by other factors. Interest rates declined as budget deficits were building in the 1980s, stayed pretty steady as surpluses appeared in the late 1990s, and then actually declined as deficits reappeared in this decade.

There is, however, a moral argument about the budget deficit as well, that it consists of this generation living beyond its means and handing the bill to the next generation. Never mind that roughly half the deficit is to build capital projects that will benefit the next generation. In this view, the relatively affluent, who can afford it, should be willing to sacrifice through higher taxes to right the wrong.

Now, there is a moral argument in favor of growth-oriented tax cuts as well, namely that people should be able to keep the fruits of their industry and that high tax rates are a diminution of freedom.

There is also, however, an empirical case. Policies that grow an economy tend to better improve the lot of the poor and the middle class than policies that seek to redistribute wealth through high taxes on the affluent to finance government services.

Investment capital is the fuel that grows an economy. In the United States, participation in the capital markets has been greatly broadened over the last couple of decades. More than half of American families now own stocks or bonds.

Nevertheless, there is an investment class in the United States, consisting of the relatively affluent with some measure of discretionary income or wealth. What these people do with their money is economically very important. Having it taken by government isn’t the option that maximizes economic opportunities for the broader citizenry.

This notion of success through mutual gain conflicts with McCain’s instincts about the superior virtues of sacrifice. But it has been the most important and enduring insight about political economy since Adam Smith.

It also conflicts with McCain’s instincts about the role of government in the economy, which are very Rooseveltian, Teddy that is.

McCain has a famously high regard for Roosevelt, who championed a graduated income tax. Roosevelt’s cadences are often heard in McCain pronouncements on a broad range of topics.

A Rooseveltian heavy hand, however, isn’t what a modern economy needs to grow. It needs resources left at work in the private sector and a steady and sensible regulatory environment.

In other words, it needs governmental restraint. Restraint, thus far, hasn’t been one of the virtues that have captured McCain’s attention.

Robert Robb, an Arizona Republic columnist, writes about public policy and politics in Arizona. E-mail: robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com

Citizen Staff Writer

Arizona spends less on its school system than almost every other state. So it is shameful that the Legislature is pushing bills that would siphon even more money from public schools.

Instead of dreaming up new ways to undermine public schools, lawmakers should be working to strengthen them.

Legislators are moving ahead with a series of bills that would put state money in private and parochial schools – although the measures likely are unconstitutional.

Under Article 2, Section 12 of the Arizona Constitution, “No public money or property shall be appropriated for or applied to any religious worship, exercise, or instruction, or to the support of any religious establishment.”

That seems unambiguous. But legislators have, nonetheless, given approval to a bill that would provide parents with a state-funded voucher to pay tuition and fees at any school – private or religious. The vouchers would be for $3,500 for each grade school pupil and $4,500 for each high school student.

Two other bills would limit vouchers to disadvantaged students, to those who are disabled, to those unable to pass third-grade reading tests, to English language learners or to students attending schools that are not meeting academic standards.

Another bill would take money from public schools in a different way. It would allow corporations to reduce their income taxes by an amount equal to what they donate to private and parochial school scholarships. The total amount of credits would be capped at $5 million a year.

Depending on how the money is counted and who is doing the counting, Arizona is either dead last or two or three spots from the bottom in per-pupil spending. That would only get worse under the Legislature’s hunt for new ways to take money out of the public treasury and give it to private schools.

State Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Gilbert, said he supports vouchers because they would allow low-income parents to send their children to private schools. “You should not be required to keep them in a failing school just because you are impoverished,” Biggs said.

But there is a far better solution. Instead of looking for ways to remove students from inadequate public schools, legislators should be improving those schools.

More money for education, including an increase in teachers’ salaries, would be a good start. And if legislators were truly concerned about the Arizona children, they would support Gov. Janet Napolitano’s drive to have state-paid, all-day kindergarten throughout Arizona.

Vouchers undermine public schools and are constitutionally questionable. Lawmakers should drop this quest.

Las Artes works

Arizona has one of the nation’s highest high school dropout rates. But there is a school here in which 85 percent to 90 percent of the students succeed, receiving their General Educational Development diplomas.

That amazing record has been achieved by Las Artes Art and Learning Center, where students create public art while crafting their futures.

In a large studio in South Tucson, Las Artes students learn art while also earning their high school equivalency degree.

Other schools would be well-advised to study the programs at Las Artes and emulate what is working there.

Citizen Staff Writer

Some of the latest state and national proposals purporting to advance border control smell more like political gamesmanship than genuine solutions.

And given the seriousness of the situation, this foolishness is unacceptable.

At the state level, the Legislature last week passed a bill that purported to appropriate $10 million to deploy National Guard troops along the border.

We have concerns about whether any military force should be operating along the U.S.-Mexico border. But the bill wasn’t written to tackle that contentious issue. Instead, its purpose was to put Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano in a political pickle.

The Republicans who wrote and passed the bill included a requirement that the governor “shall” call out the Guard anytime an emergency is declared.

The governor is the sole commander of the Guard and it would have been unacceptable and unconstitutional to require Napolitano – or any future governor – to activate the Guard whenever an emergency is declared.

If legislators really think the National Guard should be added to the border mix and that Arizonans should pay the bill, they could simply appropriate the money without the political poison pill.

Even so, we are concerned about Napolitano saying Guard troops should be deployed at all. A Guard spokesman said he feared introducing military troops would lead to a buildup in weaponry and possibly to gunbattles.

Napolitano points out that Guard troops have been assigned to the border region since 1988. They don’t pursue or arrest illegal immigrants, but do other jobs that allow the Border Patrol to more effectively carry out its responsibilities.

Still, it is a disquieting development.

At the federal level last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee ordered the Border Patrol to hire 12,000 new agents in the next two years.

That sounds like a get-tough move, but it is toothless. No money was proposed for training and hiring new agents.

Assume that it costs $50,000 to hire, train, equip and deploy one Border Patrol agent for a year – a very conservative estimate. Twelve-thousand agents would cost $600 million a year. Where is the money?

The Border Patrol also says it can’t handle 12,000 new agents in two years. In previous years, there have been problems when the Border Patrol was pushed to ramp up hiring too quickly.

One agent was a convicted burglar, another had been convicted of helping an illegal immigrant enter the country and a third was charged with murdering his cocaine supplier before joining the Patrol.

In tackling border problems, it’s time to stop the posturing and be constructive.

Man on a mission

The story of José P. Herrera, a Tucsonan with a seemingly quixotic dream, was told last week in the Tucson Citizen.

Herrera is building an 8,000-square-foot home on the near South Side, one concrete block at a time.

Work started 11 years ago and is progressing slowly because Herrera can’t get a loan for the home. Finance companies say a house that big won’t hold its value in that part of town.

But the building goes on, little by little. Audacious? Of course. But so what? It’s Herrera’s audacious plan, his money and his labor. We hope he – and we – see this mansion completed.

The Arizona Republic

Republican legislators are trying to put together a tax cut package for this session. That’s not an easy job for a Legislature to accomplish without executive branch leadership.

Spending pressures are incessant and the Legislature is more prone to succumb than the executive branch, at least when it is held by a fiscal conservative. Different lawmakers are fond of different spending programs. Unfortunately, the math of legislative deal-making in such circumstances is nearly always addition, not subtraction.

Lawmakers are also trying to sort out the relative merits of income tax and property tax cuts. Unfortunately, the legislative deal-making math of addition that applies to spending rarely does so for tax cuts. Instead, one tax cut tends to crowd out the other.

During the 1990s, the state tax cuts enacted wouldn’t have been nearly as robust and productive without the singular focus and leadership of Gov. Fife Symington. Gov. Janet Napolitano, however, doesn’t support broad-base tax relief, preferring tax credits and preferences for politically favored activities. So, this time, the Legislature is pretty much on its own.

Here’s how the Legislature can get a state tax cut right. For a variety of reasons, primacy should be given to income tax relief.

The first, and most important, is economic. Economist Richard Vedder has carefully examined four decades of data, studying the relationship between state tax structures and economic growth. He has found that income taxes adversely affect economic growth more than any other tax.

He found that over the 40-year period, the 10 states with the smallest income tax burden had personal income growth nearly 2.5 times greater than the 10 states with the largest income tax burden.

The second reason to give income tax cuts primacy is equity. Last session, the Legislature enacted two big tax cuts that primarily benefited big business – allowing manufacturers to base their state income tax burden more on sales rather than employees or property, and rolling back business assessment ratios for property tax purposes.

This session, small business should get some attention. Small businesses tend to have organizational forms in which net income flows to the owners and is taxed as personal income. Personal income tax cuts are the most effective form of tax relief for small businesses.

They aren’t bad for individuals either. To trivialize their importance, the left tends to measure them, for some reason, in terms of steak dinners and six-packs of beer. The income tax cut being considered by the Legislature is not worthwhile, they sneer, because it represents only a single steak dinner.

Now, for many people, steak dinners and six-packs of beer are nothing to sneer at. However, the left ignores the cumulative value of a process of incremental income tax reductions over time.

For a family with taxable income of $25,000, the Symington-era income tax cuts have returned easily over $2,000 since their enactment. For a family with taxable income of $40,000, over $4,000.

There will be no brief against a property tax cut here. According to Vedder’s work, property taxes are a close second to income taxes in adversely affecting economic growth. Business property taxes are certainly where Arizona’s burden stands out as disproportionate compared to other states. And rising residential values have homeowners up in arms, which understandably gets the attention of politicians.

However, even if the state eliminates the county equalization rate, as is being discussed, that only reduces the average statewide total property tax rate by about 4 percent. The real property tax action lies with local governments.

The important thing is for legislative Republicans to make tax cuts a priority and not delay them until the spending wars are settled.

There are always proposals to spend more money, many of them virtuous. A lot of big-ticket spending items are banging around the Legislature.

Tax cuts, however, shouldn’t be relegated to the leftovers after the spenders leave the table. More money left at work in the private sector makes for a more productive private sector economy and expanding opportunities for workers and their families.

Republicans are supposed to understand, and act, on that insight.

Robert Robb, an Arizona Republic columnist, writes about public policy and politics in Arizona. E-mail: robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com

Citizen Staff Writer

Tuition increases for students attending the three state universities have been pretty painful for the past several years.

So it’s a relief to know that the Arizona Board of Regents is taking a cautious approach to the next round of increases.

The regents, who govern the university system, agreed Thursday to delay a decision on tuition increases for a month in hopes that the state Legislature will come up with more money for higher education.

It’s a calculated risk based on the fact that the state has more money available this year and thus, more might be appropriated for the universities.

“It would be wise for us to put this off” in hopes the political process plays out in favor of more funding, Regent Dennis DeConcini said at Thursday’s meeting.

Regent Robert Bulla said the state has more money and he hopes “the Legislature will do the right thing for the students, the community and the state of Arizona.”

That’s a high hope, but a good one, and it is shared by University of Arizona President-designate Robert Shelton. Shelton said last week he wants to show legislators how more state funding for the universities can help improve Arizona overall.

The regents and Shelton are on the same, correct path. Let’s hope that the universities and their students can persuade the Legislature to get on that path, too.

UA in-state tuition has risen 75 percent since the 2002-03 academic year, including a $1,000 increase that year for state resident undergraduate students and smaller increases in the subsequent three years.

Painful as they were, the increases were needed to keep the universities afloat because of reduced state funding.

Some of the stinginess was driven by the state’s dire financial situation, some by legislators who don’t see the university system for what it is – the most important key to the state’s economic future.

UA President Peter Likins has asked for a relatively modest 4.6 percent in-state tuition increase for 2006-07.

Action by the Legislature in the coming weeks to increase university system funding could mean an even smaller increase than what Likins is seeking.

It also could mean greater opportunity for more deserving Arizonans to get college educations and thus contribute to the state’s economic future.

UA and Saturn

One need look no further than the University of Arizona’s geosciences program to find proof of the need for improved funding of higher education.

That’s where Jason Perry, a senior, is helping analyze information coming back from the Cassini spacecraft now circling the planet Saturn and its moons.

Perry and others have discovered in their analysis that Saturn moon Enceladus may have water geysers erupting from it.

If further study bears that out, it will be the first evidence of liquid water in the solar system outside of Earth.

A composite infrared spectrometer aboard Cassini detected a warm area and the distinct possibility of the water geysers, Perry said. He co-authored a research paper on the topic in the current issue of Science, which was published Friday.

Congratulations to Perry and his UA scientist mentors, among them Alfred McEwen, of the Cassini imaging team.

This could well prove to be an important discovery, brought to you by an investment in higher education.

Let’s have more.

Syndicate

Juan Hernandez once had a job that many Mexican-Americans would love to have. From December 2001 to September 2003, the native Texan and professor of U.S.-Mexico studies served as the equivalent of Mexico’s ambassador to Mexican immigrants living in the United States. As the director of President Vicente Fox’s Office for Mexicans Abroad, he served as a go-between and reintroduced Mexico to its runaway children in the north while doing the same for the runaways.

Hernandez had an office at Los Piños (the Mexican White House), but he’d fly home to the United States once a week to meet with immigrant communities from Alaska to Arizona. He’d listen to their concerns and reassure them that Mexico, the country of their birth, had not forgotten them.

I saw him in action when I was working in Dallas, where he taught at the University of Texas at Dallas. Hernandez was in town to address a business luncheon. It was one of those functions where Mexican waiters pick up the dishes and they’re mostly invisible. In cities such as Denver and Phoenix the idea of being waited on by the same people we say we want to get rid of is so common you miss the irony.

Hernandez didn’t. From the podium, he called out to one of the waiters in flawless Spanish and told him that he was there representing the Fox administration and that his countrymen in Mexico had not forgotten him. The man, visibly touched by the gesture, smiled and nodded.

I loved it. Not because I was witnessing some secret communique in a plot to retake the Southwest but because, given that Mexican immigrants sent home about $16 billion last year, Mexico owes them reassurances – and respect.

Before he took that job, Hernandez made an introduction of a different sort. Simply put, he introduced one rancher to another.

While teaching in Dallas, Hernandez happened to meet both Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Fox, then the governor of the Mexican state of Guanajuato. He thought the two men would hit it off, and indeed they did.

When the governors became presidents, they set out to craft an immigration accord to match Mexican workers with U.S. employers. Bush proposed a plan to grant a kind of temporary amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants in the United States. And that helped spark the current debate in Congress over immigration reform.

The way Hernandez sees it, Congress now has a chance to create a more honest and realistic approach to the immigration issue, one that benefits both of the countries to which he lays claim: the United States and Mexico.

That’s right. In defining his allegiance, as Mexican-Americans are forever asked to do by nativists, Hernandez refuses to choose between the United States and Mexico. For that, a racist and anti-Mexican Web site once labeled him “an American traitor.” Sort of a Benedito Arnold.

Hernandez doesn’t care. For him, this issue isn’t political but personal. His mother was born in the United States and his father was born in Mexico.

This dual allegiance sets the tone for his new book, “The New American Pioneers: Why Are We Afraid of Mexican Immigrants?” In it, Hernandez recalls his experiences and profiles hardworking and taxpaying Mexican immigrants in the United States – the sort of people who, according to the author, not only mean no harm but are in a position to do this country a lot of good.

Hernandez makes a fair point. Immigrants, legal and otherwise, don’t bring much to this country except a mighty work ethic, a sense of optimism and the belief that tomorrow will be brighter than today. Elsewhere, I hear doom and gloom as the native-born cry in their $3 cups of coffee about how their government is “selling them out” to globalization and how America’s best days are behind it.

What a waste of good citizenship. Natives need to take lessons from immigrants. Maybe then they can reconnect with the spirit of America: that change isn’t about fear. It’s about renewal, which always brings strength, vitality and hope.

That’s the message that Juan Hernandez wants to share with his countrymen – well, the ones on this side of the border.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a columnist and editorial board member of The San Diego Union Tribune. E-mail: ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com

Citizen Staff Writer

If anyone needs motivation to practice preventive health care, they should have the impetus from Tucson’s crowded and painfully slow emergency rooms.

Patients may have to wait up to eight hours in a Tucson emergency room before seeing a health-care professional.

One reason is the serious shortage of on-call health specialists responding to emergencies. Another chief cause is the hordes of people coming to ERs for health problems that are not emergencies.

Uninsured residents, visitors without local doctors and illegal immigrants who don’t understand our health-care system tend to head straight to the hospital rather than to a doctor’s office or a clinic.

That impedes effective true emergency care for everyone.

Emergency care is far more costly than regular treatment in a doctor’s office – and taxpayers ultimately pick up the tab when uninsured patients don’t.

The crowded ERs and long waits for medical care also can pose complications for patients with severe problems who are forced to wait hours to be seen.

Certain conditions can worsen without quick attention. And while ER staffers do their best to treat the worst cases first, that’s impossible to guarantee with the scenario in emergency rooms these days.

There are no easy answers, but that must not keep us from trying. This is not just a problem in Tucson, so we suggest that Gov. Janet Napolitano call together the medical community, insurance companies, patient advocates and legislative leaders to begin looking at solutions.

A complex problem can be treated only in a complex way – and that may mean a combination of public-funding considerations, changes in state laws as they affect medical care, malpractice claims, how insurance companies operate and basic standards of treatment.

Clearly, something must be done. People who suffer serious health emergencies cannot be expected to wait hours to be seen. And people who are not in an emergency situation should have other venues so they do not clog the system for those in dire straits.

We encourage the governor to work with hospital and other health-care professionals to explore solutions to this dilemma, as this problem truly can mean the difference between life and death.

The lawyers win

Efforts to teach English to Arizona children have devolved into a free-for-all for lawyers.

As U.S. District Court Judge Raner Collins prepares to decide if a bill passed by the Legislature satisfies the state’s legal obligations, lawyers are leaping in.

There are the lawyers who originally filed the suit against the state. And there is Attorney General Terry Goddard, who is defending the state’s position.

Now there also will be a passel of lawyers hired by Republicans in the Legislature who fear that Goddard, a Democrat, may not be aggressive enough in defending their bill.

Imagine how much good could have been done for the children of Arizona if all the money that has been, is being and will be spent on lawyers had instead been spent on the English-learning program.

So far, the only winner is the legal profession.

And the losers, besides Arizona’s English-deficient children?

Taxpayers.

Citizen Staff Writer

Jim Kolbe is doing it the right way. The Arizona Legislature is not.

In the rush to do something – anything – to get a handle on the illegal immigration crisis, all sorts of tactics are being tried.

But many of those tactics – especially at the state level – are ill-conceived, poorly thought out, tread on federal responsibility and will have little real impact except the legal and financial trouble they can cause.

A study released this week by the Pew Hispanic Center estimates that there are up to 12 million people in the United States illegally, accounting for about 1 in every 20 workers.

Illegal immigrants fill a quarter of all agricultural jobs, 17 percent of office and housecleaning positions, 14 percent of construction jobs and 12 percent of the jobs in food preparation, the study estimated.

Illegal immigrants come seeking work

Clearly, the vast majority of illegal immigrants are coming here to work, and the work they perform is vital to many segments of the U.S. economy.

Kolbe, R-Ariz., recognizes this and has the right ideas in how to approach illegal immigration. He would like to make comprehensive reform part of his legacy in this, his 22nd and final year in Congress.

Kolbe, with other members of Congress, is proposing legislation that includes a guest worker program. He is fighting nonsensical ideas such as building a wall the full length of the U.S.-Mexico border.

To gain support for his proposals, Kolbe recently brought eight House members and their aides to Cochise County so they could see the problem with their own eyes. It seemed to work, with several members surprised by the scope of the problem and the vastness of the area.

That is the right way to tackle the problem: by building support for a national approach that strategically and comprehensively addresses immigration.

Meanwhile in Phoenix, the Legislature is flailing around with all sorts of proposals. Some are aimed at stemming illegal border crossing, some seek to make life so difficult for illegal immigrants that they’ll leave, others are foisted upon us for bald-faced political gamesmanship. All fall short of the mark.

Governor can’t be forced to deploy Guard

One bill would force Gov. Janet Napolitano to assign more National Guard troops to the border.

That’s probably unconstitutional, because the governor is commander of the Guard, just as the president is commander of the armed forces. Congress can’t require the president to deploy troops, and legislators can’t require the governor to.

Napolitano yesterday said she will send additional Guard troops to the border, but not for enforcement.

For almost 20 years, Guardsmen have assisted efforts at the border. Napolitano wants to send more troops to perform administrative and clerical jobs, giving federal agents more time to catch illegal immigrants.

That’s appropriate as long as the troops don’t patrol the border. A National Guard spokesman has noted that placing the military on the border could spur immigrants to take up arms, leading to gunbattles.

Guardsmen are not trained for border enforcement, and putting the military on the border can only serve to antagonize.

The state has neither the authority nor the knowledge to wade into immigration matters. Instead, the Legislature should work with Kolbe and others in Congress to drive a comprehensive national solution.

The Arizona Republic

The political and legal battle over the state’s English learner program has gone from awkward and curious to truly bizarre.

This saga begins with a federal law that is Congress at its worst. The Equal Educational Opportunities Act provides, in relevant part, that educational agencies take “appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal participation by its students in its instructional program.” No guidance as to what constitutes appropriate action, no funding and no penalties specified for not complying.

In 2000, a federal judge looking at only one school district in the state, Nogales, determined that the state wasn’t spending enough on English learner programs to comply with the federal law. The state, in a serious mistake, did not appeal this finding.

More recently, a different federal judge, Raner Collins, started fining the state for not remedying the alleged inadequacy.

Last week, the Legislature finally enacted something that can, in good faith, be argued to satisfy what the federal court has found in misapplying a federal statute that is more sentiment than prescriptive law.

In 2000, the state allocated an extra $150 per pupil to fund English acquisition programs. The Legislature has almost tripled that to $432. In addition, school districts could apply to a new grant program that would be established to cover any shortfalls schools may encounter in implementing the English immersion approach voters dictated, also in 2000.

Gov. Janet Napolitano has allowed this program to become law without her signature, but trashed it in a letter to legislative leaders.

It is one thing for Napolitano to say that the state should guarantee more than the Legislature provides in per pupil funding, or that the Legislature should demonstrate its commitment to the supplemental grant program by appropriating money. That’s the sort of thing budget fights are all about.

Napolitano, however, goes further and contends that the legislative program doesn’t meet the requirements of the federal court order. The logical corollary of that is that the judge should start reimposing the fines, which is a curious position for the governor of a state to take.

One of Napolitano’s legal contentions, that the funding provided in the legislative program is arbitrary and capricious, is frivolous. The funding in the legislative program is based upon demonstrated need to implement specific state models of English immersion. It’s the opposite of arbitrary and capricious.

The more serious contention is that the program violates the anti-supplanting provisions of various federal funding laws.

The legislative program does use certain federal funds to offset the additional state grants. But only those that can be used for English language acquisition and the English learners’ pro rata share of other federal funds.

Properly considered, the supplanting argument actually cuts in the opposite direction. If the state picks up all the cost of educating English learners, then their pro rata share of federal funds will be used for other students and purposes.

Moreover, this is supposedly a federal requirement. It seems a bit odd to argue that federal funds cannot be used to partially satisfy it. And it’s certainly odd for a governor to argue that a federal judge should force state taxpayers to pay more to meet a federal requirement.

Napolitano’s position has put Attorney General Terry Goddard in a real pickle. Thus far in this litigation, he has taken the position that the governor speaks for the state and he is her lawyer.

But Goddard, as attorney general, has a general obligation to defend the constitutionality and legality of state laws. The judge in this case has kept the issue of whether federal funds can be used open. Given that the judge considers this an open question, it would be strange if Goddard decided not to at least make the case on behalf of the law.

Goddard did comply with Napolitano’s wish to ask the judge to immediately disperse the fine money that has accumulated to English learners.

The sensible thing would be for Collins to let the legislative program become law and see how it works. But, of course, the sensible thing would have been for the federal court not to get into the business of micromanaging English learner acquisition programs in Arizona in the first place.

Robert Robb, an Arizona Republic columnist, writes about public policy and politics in Arizona. E-mail: robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com

Syndicate

“Are folks aware of just how meticulously (Sen. John) McCain and his team are going about building their ’08 campaign? There’s probably not a GOP activist in South Carolina who hasn’t been contacted at least once by someone supportive of McCain’s candidacy. . . . As long as he continues to poll well against Hillary, and as long as the Republicans look as if they could lose power at a moment’s notice, McCain should be able to create the air of inevitability that Bush created in 2000.”

- Hotline editor Chuck Todd in National Journal

Officially, he is not yet running and won’t make up his mind until after the fall elections, but in a recent interview in his Senate office, McCain sounds as if an announcement of his candidacy is merely a formality.

He calls his 2000 campaign “the most exhilarating period of my life.” He repeats the phrase for emphasis.

McCain has sometimes publicly disagreed with President Bush on certain issues, but about the president’s handling of the war on terror since 9/11, McCain offers generous praise: “The war on terror is what re-elected President Bush. We were able to frame the debate in that (2004) campaign . . . that President Bush was by far the most qualified guy. By the way, I believe that to this day with my heart and soul.”

What may attract Republicans who believe Bush is not a true conservative is McCain’s willingness to oppose the president on more spending and bigger government, along with McCain’s language on the consequences of illegal immigration.

During our interview, McCain tells me: “The director of the FBI has stated, ‘There are more people from countries of interest coming across our border.’ So there is no doubt the threat (from infiltration of radical Muslims) has increased. That’s why immigration reform – of which border enforcement is a part – must be a prime issue.”

McCain believes the issue of a United Arab Emirates company managing U.S. ports, while important, should not be our highest priority: “If something were to happen at a U.S. port, it isn’t the port that will be the problem, but the port where (the cargo) originated, or where it passes through.”

McCain says that while he has a good handle on foreign policy, he intends to learn more on domestic issues, including economics, tax policy and health care: “I’m going to have to be smarter on some issues than I am now.”

He’s confident his “25-year record on pro-life” will satisfy social conservatives. About culture: “I’ve done some terrible things in my life, so I try not to be a judge, but it seems to me there is a poison in our culture that we have to address. Maybe it’s through the bully pulpit, but we can’t pass a bunch of laws to control it all.”

McCain is generous about two of his potential rivals for the GOP nomination. About Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, he says, “(He) is a far more decent person than John McCain is.” Virginia Sen. George Allen has “a very good record and is a very attractive guy.” McCain says it will be “very tough” to win the Republican nomination, and that “no one should be coronated.”

McCain thinks Sen. Hillary Clinton will be the 2008 Democratic nominee, “and anyone who underestimates her would do so at great risk.” Noting that he once ran against a woman for the Senate, McCain says of running against women, “You’d better be respectful. That’s the key. If you act disrespectful, it’s devastating.” He believes a woman will one day be president. He just hopes it isn’t in 2008 and that it isn’t Hillary Clinton, whom he clearly believes he can beat.

McCain faults the Federal Election Commission for not outlawing the “527″ committees that funneled millions into recent campaigns through a loophole in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. He worries that millions of dollars in contributions to 527s from people such as liberal activist George Soros could buy the election for Democrats in several close 2006 races. Invoking Soros could also win him approval among certain conservatives who have been suspicious of McCain in the past.

McCain is doing his homework and laying the groundwork for an election run. Whether he actually runs depends on shifting political winds over which he has minimal control.

Cal Thomas is an author and broadcast commentator. Mail: Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, N.Y. 14207. Internet and e-mail at www.calthomas.com

Citizen Staff Writer

Nearly 300 children in grades three through five at Lawrence Intermediate School are receiving a gift from their 13 classroom teachers.

The teachers agreed unanimously, by secret ballot, to give Lawrence an entirely new staff.

The teachers themselves determined in January that anyone of them who wants to stay must reapply for his or her own job.

That’s because, by a razor-thin margin, the school failed to make the grade under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Lawrence – labeled a “failing” school for four consecutive years – has brought its test scores up to performing levels in three of four categories: mathematics in grades three and five, and reading in grade five.

Among third-grade readers, though, only 52 percent met the mark. No Child Left Behind requires 53 percent.

At Lawrence, 83 percent of the children are poor enough to qualify for free and reduced-cost lunches. More than 60 percent of the students are Native American, and about 36 percent are Hispanic.

Schools with high poverty and minority enrollments face daunting challenges in most cases.

Yet Lawrence has made steady, albeit incremental, progress against these odds.

The improvements weren’t enough to satisfy federal requirements, however.

Nor did the rate of progress satisfy the staff at Lawrence.

The effort to reverse trends at a failing school is a monumental undertaking, akin to turning around a battleship.

The Lawrence staff should be commended for its yeoman service on these young children’s behalf.

We empathize with the extraordinary fatigue the teachers must be feeling after accomplishing so much for so many, only to miss one category by 1 percentage point.

Most of all, we salute them for deciding that their students deserve a fresh chance under a new staff.

That decision in itself underscores their strong and selfless commitment to the students at Lawrence.

We urge the Tucson Unified School District to ensure that any new staff members sent to Lawrence will be every bit as dedicated to student learning as the current teaching staff has proved to be.

Try new fire tool

Arizona firefighters are appropriately nervous amid what is our driest winter in a century.

Now, the Federal Aviation Administration expects to approve a formidable new firefighting tool next month.

A Boeing 747 has been converted into a supertanker that can carry 24,000 gallons of fire retardant in one trip – 10 times the capacity of a DC-4 prop plane or P-3 Orion, and 24 times the capacity of the Erickson Air-Crane.

Granted, the craft requires 800 feet of vertical clearance, making it veritably useless in canyons.

But officials for both state and federal agencies responsible for fighting fires should explore how this 747, if approved for firefighting duty, might be used to combat conflagrations elsewhere.

It could provide good service over flat-land wildfires and on smooth mountain flanks, spots that are as vulnerable as forested peaks.

Our desert state today is a dangerous tinderbox, and Arizona leaders must prepare to break out every possible tool for our fire crews to use.

Citizen Staff Writer

It is not unusual to hear legislators carping about “activist judges” who use their authority to “legislate from the bench.”

But in Arizona, the people we elect to set state policy by legislating have failed to do so. So now a federal judge has been forced to step into that void to make a major policy decision for the state.

This is not what should happen. Our elected leaders – notably, those in the Legislature – have completely failed us.

And more important, they have failed the thousands of Arizona children who did not grow up speaking English.

Last week, under pressure from a federal judge who imposed fines that reached $1 million a day, the Legislature passed a bill to increase funding for English-language learning programs.

Despite the judge’s threats, Gov. Janet Napolitano had rightly vetoed three earlier attempts to resolve this issue because legislative proposals were packed with unrelated dogma while failing to appropriate enough money to teach English.

Last week, Napolitano finally gave up and let the latest version become law without her signature. Despite lengthy negotiations, legislative leaders and the governor could not reach agreement. So now it is up to U.S. District Judge Raner Collins to decide if the bill is adequate.

This is an exceptionally complex issue that will take time for Collins to review. Nonetheless, we hope he acts as quickly as possible to accept or reject the proposal.

We think the legislative plan is inadequate for a number of reasons. Should Collins agree, we hope he provides some direction to the Legislature so future negotiations have a starting point.

Napolitano, in a letter to legislative leaders, outlined some problems with this bill:

• Per-student funding for English learning would increase from $355 a year now to $432 under the new plan. An increase is needed, but where did that figure come from? Napolitano points out the amount does not “bear any rational relationship to the actual cost of implementing a successful language acquisition program.”

• Students are limited to two years of English-language learning although a study found that three years is needed to give a student the best chance to succeed. After two years of English learning, students may not be able to pass AIMS.

• State funding provided to school districts for English-language learners would reduce other federal funds by the same amount. That simply isn’t fair to schools.

When Napolitano pointed out shortcomings in the bill, legislative leaders sent out a news release accusing her of “sabotage.” But it is legislators who have sabotaged educational opportunities for thousands of Arizona children.

Legislators don’t like it when judges make policy decisions. In this case, their inaction has forced a federal judge’s hand.

Bike downtown

There are 150 new parking spots downtown – and every one of them is free.

There is, however, a catch: The spots are available only to bicycle riders.

The city, with $8,000 from a federal grant, is installing 150 new bike racks around downtown.

That’s a good adjunct to downtown revitalization efforts. And it’s the kind of downtown parking the city ought to be encouraging as an alternative to cars.

You now can leave your car at home while still enjoying what downtown has to offer.

The Arizona Republic

For years, Arizona politicians have played a con game about property taxes. They would hold the line on property tax rates and claim not to be raising taxes. They would then pocket and spend the additional revenue those rates applied to increasing property values brought in.

That gig may be on its way to being over. The shock of the huge increases in property valuations being handed out by county assessors across the state has focused public attention on the true relationship between property values and taxes.

The con game has been a moneymaker for local governments. If the property tax rate remains the same and property values increase by 10 percent a year, property tax collections double in seven years.

When value increases are incremental, it’s easier for politicians to get away with the con about holding the line on rates. It also enables them and others to imply that debt doesn’t cost anything. We’ll hold the line on property tax rates, goes the pledge. In reality, that means that taxes will go up as property appreciates.

There are some mitigating mechanisms already in state law. For operational purposes, there’s a limit on what local governments can collect overall in property taxes and how much residential values can increase in a single year. But these will not be enough to prevent a large tax increase unless politicians quit playing the rate con game.

The Arizona Tax Research Association has made valiant efforts over the years to expose the con and make politicians accountable for the stealth property tax increases they have been enacting. In the late 1990s, the Legislature passed a provision championed by ATRA called Truth-in-Taxation.

Under Truth-in-Taxation, rates are rolled back to reflect appreciation in property values. Elected officials have to vote to increase the rate from there.

The hope was that increasing the TNT rate would be considered a tax increase, resulting in appropriate public attention and reticence by elected officials. It hasn’t worked out that way.

The state Legislature is the only one to have taken TNT seriously, steadily reducing the school district tax rate used to calculate state aid. Otherwise, politicians in local governments have routinely restored the previous rate, pocketed the increased revenue from appreciation and claimed to be a friend of the taxpayers.

Statewide, although the average tax rate has declined slightly, property tax collections are increasing at about 8 percent a year.

This year, ATRA has proposed to put some teeth in Truth-in-Taxation, requiring voter approval of any increase to the rolled-back rate every two years. The Legislature is taking that seriously, as well as reducing the property tax rates it controls.

Tax wonks prefer to control rates rather than values. Limiting the growth in property values, as California did with Proposition 13, results in inequities in tax burdens over time. Let the market set the value and control taxes by controlling the rate.

As a matter of tax theory and tax equity, the argument is unassailable. As a matter of practical politics, there’s a substantial problem with it: So far, it hasn’t worked.

Most of the property tax action rests with local governments. The state controls only about 5 percent of property tax collections.

Perhaps requiring voter approval of increases in the TNT rate will put an end to the con game. Local governments, however, specialize in low-turnout, low-profile elections, in which the spending lobbies have disproportionate influence. So, even this isn’t a surefire control.

Taxpayers are beginning to grasp the relationship between increasing property values and increasing property taxes. Despite the adverse consequences from a systemic perspective, they may despair of mitigating the tax effects indirectly by controlling rates. Instead, there may be a renewed push to control values directly.

That will require a state constitutional amendment. There’s been some support for that in the Legislature in the past, which these sticker-shock valuation notices may rekindle. An initiative freezing values at their 2003 level, to be reappraised when property is sold, has already been filed.

In any event, the con game has been exposed. Despite the claims of local politicians, holding rates steady is a tax increase on any property that is appreciating.

Robert Robb, an Arizona Republic columnist, writes about public policy and politics in Arizona. E-mail: robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com