If you love this country and fear for its future, be grateful for Latino immigrants

Opinion: As important as their work ethic, Latino immigrants bring their love of freedom to this country.

Phil Boas
Arizona Republic
Francisco Apodaca works his stand at the Versalles Palace Event Center in Phoenix on Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2023.

My brother-in-law Boyd was a creature of Los Angeles.

His family moved to the City of Angels when he was a boy in the 1950s – early enough for him to watch the Los Angeles Dodgers play their first home games in the L.A. Coliseum and to attend opening week at Disneyland, where Walt, himself, greeted visitors.

I was thinking about Boyd as I read about the powerhouse that is Latino Phoenix, the part of our population that contributes $65.1 billion to our metro Phoenix economy. Boyd was on my mind because he was present at the creation when his home, Los Angeles, became a predominately Latino city.

Boyd’s knowledge of Los Angeles was encyclopedic and intimate. He knew the best beach for surfing (Huntington), the best Mexican food (El Tepeyec Café in Boyle Heights), the best doughnuts (a little shop in Watts).

A man changed by combat in a far-flung place

As a teenager he signed up for the U.S. Marines and was shipped off to Vietnam for some of the worst fighting in the war. He had a couple of narrow escapes from death and that changed him.

The young hell-raiser who before the war rode a fast motorcycle, consumed keggers of beer and got in bar fights had completely smoothed out. Civilian life was so much better than the horrors he endured in Vietnam’s never-ending Battle of Khe Sanh that it seemed to him there was nothing in civilian life to ever get upset about.

When I met him after the war, he was one of the kindest people I knew. Every weekend it seemed he was busy doing good deeds for friends or members of his church. I couldn’t believe he had once been a barroom brawler.

He and his brother took over his father’s metal polishing business, and on weekends Boyd used the shop truck to help move church families into new homes or transport yard equipment so he could mow the lawn of an elderly widow.

A mostly white city changes with immigration

Boyd knew Los Angeles, and one of his most deeply held convictions was that the best people to hire in the city were Latino migrants. They were honest and hardworking and could always be counted on to show up for work, he said. He wasn’t romanticizing immigrant people; he had plenty of lived experience that told him he could trust them.

Eventually those waves of young Latinos working in Los Angeles had families, and a population bomb exploded and changed the L.A. bedroom community where Boyd had grown up and later raised four girls with my sister.

Diversity:Why migrants from many countries are arriving at the border

Downey, Calif., in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s was a suburban enclave whiter than Wonder Bread. It was the childhood home of Karen and Richard Carpenter, who composed their first songs there as teenagers. It was also home to the third ever McDonald’s restaurant and what is now the oldest still standing.

In the 1980s and ‘90s it quickly transformed to a minority-majority city and my sister would tell us that her almost entirely white neighborhood and kids’ schools had grown far more diverse. Years later, when Phoenix was undergoing a similar demographic transformation, I decided to write about it and called her to ask what we could expect.

Frankly, she said, “we like the people moving in a lot better than the people moving out.”

What Latin American newcomers contribute

Now understand this about my sister and her husband, Boyd, who eventually was diagnosed with cancer and passed away. At the time I wrote about them, they were conservative, Reagan Republicans and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who used to call themselves “the Mormons.”

They were the very essence of white-complected, red-state America.

And the memory of those days returned to me as I read Arizona Republic reporter Daniel Gonzalez’s story on the huge economic output of Latinos in metro Phoenix, output that eclipses the entire state economies of Maine and North Dakota.

The immigrant peoples of Latin America and their children who have settled here over generations are driving growth in metro Phoenix and Arizona, according to a new report funded by the Bank of America.

They are building businesses and forming families in metro Phoenix faster than any other cohort. Latino population growth in metro Phoenix is double that of non-Latinos. And Latino participation in the workforce is four times greater, Gonzalez reported.

Latinos are harnessing the free market

Further, Latinos are huge consumers of goods and products in the metro area to the tune of $44.5 billion, larger than the entire state economy of Wyoming.

They have been good for the Arizona economy and good neighbors. And as certainly as that is true, so is the reverse. The United States economy has been good to Latin American immigrants, a bounty of prosperity.

Not all Latinos immigrated to the United States. As my old newspaper colleague Joe Garcia at Chicanos Por La Causa is fond of reminding me, many Latino families, such as his, did not cross the U.S. border. The U.S. border crossed them.

Regardless, American Latinos have used their ingenuity and work ethic to harness the U.S. free market, generating enormous wealth and growing political clout in this country.

They are also earning and sending money back to Latin America and the Caribbean to help raise the standard of living there – $127.6 billion in 2021, according to the Inter-American Development Bank.

We have border problem and a border boon

Yes, we have a border that is out of control. It needs repair so we know who is coming in, we don’t overwhelm social services and border communities, and we don’t seriously suppress wages.

The vast majority of migrants are eager to work in the United States, where all Americans benefit from their labor. Generally speaking, the first generations of immigrants are unskilled, but their offspring are getting college educations and doing high-skilled work and building new businesses.

These multigenerations of immigrants and U.S.-born citizens who make up the American Latino population express a strong appreciation for what the American economy has done for them, and do not want to kill the golden goose.

That’s why the biggest segment of Latino voters is suspicious of any effort by America’s far left to turn the United States into a socialist country. A plurality of registered Latino voters – 41% – express negative views of socialism, while just 23% view it positively, according to a 2022 NBC News Telemundo poll.

It is true that large numbers of young Latinos are drawn to socialism, but so are large numbers of European-American young people. As goes the aphorism mistakenly attributed to Winston Churchill, “If you’re not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative at 40, you have no brain.“

Latinos in this country are largely moderate, center-left, but many have either seen or know well what happens when socialists take over the economies of major Latin American nations such as Cuba and Venezuela. Those economies languish for decades.

Don't fear migrants. They could save this nation

Admittedly, ill-conceived and destructive U.S. foreign policy over the years has contributed to Latin America’s problems, but I would respectfully submit to my friends on the left that it is a net boon, and by far, for Latin America to share the Western Hemisphere with the richest democratic nation in the history of the world.

On the flip side, there is a reason that people like my sister and brother-in-law came to love and respect Latin American immigrants when they arrived and changed their city and neighborhood. This country and its freedoms mean more to those immigrants than many of the white people who have lived here for generations and take them for granted.

I would respectfully submit to my friends on the right that the migrants you fear crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are not only going to build the new economy, they’re going to save the country.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.