Arizona Immigration Law Spurs Exodus to New Mexico

July 31, 2010.

A judge may have stayed the harshest provisions of the state’s new immigration law, but that hasn’t stopped the flow of scared migrants into New Mexico.

In the late afternoon of July 29, after hundreds of marchers and protesters had taken to the streets of Phoenix in opposition to Arizona immigration policies, a 20-year-old college student posted a Facebook update via her mobile phone: Just saw the “Welcome to New Mexico” sign :D

“Martina,” the Facebook poster, her 19-year-old brother and their parents are unauthorized immigrants who moved from Phoenix to Albuquerque, New Mexico on the day the law went into effect. A series of increasingly harsh immigration laws enacted in Arizona, culminating with the passage of SB 1070 in April, prompted the family’s decision to join what some officials say is a steady exodus of unauthorized immigrants from Arizona—an outmigration that has continued even after a federal judge in Phoenix slammed the brakes on key elements of the harshest state immigration law on July 27.

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Post by [Chengwin Saephanh]