Working in Iowa
Getting a Room at the Real American Inn
May 18, 2010
By Dave Swenson
By Dave Swenson
Arizona’s attempt to enforce national immigration laws has struck somewhat disparate chords across the country. There are those arguing that if you are not authorized to be here, then you require no expectation of privacy, and Arizona state and local police officials are well within their responsibilities in enforcing the new state law. On the other side are those believing this is a gross usurpation of national power motivated primarily by misguided fear, if not outright bigotry, made especially poignant at a time of widespread economic hardship.
Pro-cause spokesperson Sarah Palin dubiously announced “We’re all Arizonans now,” while California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger joked at a college commencement in Georgia that he’d passed up another commencement address request in Arizona for fear his heavy accent would get him arrested. There are, not surprisingly, calls to completely boycott Arizona, as several California cities and minority groups have done, and there are calls on the pro side to buy-Arizona and travel to Arizona to show solidarity with the anti-immigrant cause.
While a slim majority of Americans currently express support for the Arizona law, the boycott-Arizona faction currently has the public opinion economic advantage in that they are sowing serious discontent within the vast Arizona tourism and hospitality sector. Officials across that state publicly bemoan the damage to the state’s image and ponder the longer term consequences of a tarnished Arizona brand.
With the issue smoldering in Arizona, it is easy to discount other displays of anti-foreigner behavior in the states and conclude xenophobia and active hostility to newcomers, whether here legally or not, is mostly a border problem, or, historically, a Southern problem.
If we paid attention in school, we know that all new arrivals in the U.S. got a raw deal. The Chinese, Irish, Poles, Italians, Slavs, those from the Caribbean, latter-day Asian migrants, and all manner of Latinos found themselves at the bottom of the economic ladder historically, although generally still a step above our severely dispossessed Black and American Indian residents. Our recurring inclination to treat different groups with additional, if not questionable and often harsh, scrutiny did not need any prompting or refining from Arizonans.
We also know that good old fashioned USA natives can act quite stupidly when threatened by anything foreign. In the early 1980s, out-of-work manufacturing workers once made quite a spectacle of themselves destroying a Komatsu excavator with sledgehammers as a protest against losing manufacturing jobs to the Japanese. The excavator was actually made in the USA.
More tragically, some may recall an Indian Sikh, a dark-skinned man with a beard and a turban, was shot and killed at the Mesa, Arizona gas station he owned just a week after 9/11. “’I’m a patriot,’” the convicted assailant claimed, according to the NY Times. “’I’m a damned American all the way.’” Given his crime, I suspect he was correct in that last assertion.
I am an inveterate distance runner, and I travel to small places in the Midwest, the South, and the West every few weeks or so to races. As I consider myself quite thrifty, I always seek the least expensive yet still tolerable accommodations possible. Sometimes I call ahead, and sometimes I take my chances when I get to the town.
If you look carefully, you will notice that many motels, especially in rural, tourism-dependent areas, will advertise themselves as “American owned.” What they mean is that a good old fashioned white native is the proprietor, not someone who originally came from another country. I have seen the signs in Iowa, Wyoming, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas in just the last 5 years.
The message is clear to the traveler: choose us because, implicitly, a motel owned by a white native is superior to one owned by anyone of foreign extraction.
Those other hotels are often owned by an assortment of Asian or sub-continent immigrants; frequently persons of Indian or Pakistani descent. There is in fact a national trade group called the Asian American Hotel Owners Association representing their interests (AAHOA). According to their promotional literature, AAHOA members account for 50 percent of all economy lodging, the kind that I seek, and they own 37 percent of all U.S. hotels. That’s a lot of hotels.
Given those figures, and given the fact I am a cheap traveler, the odds are even that the kind of room I try to rent is owned by an Asian American. Those odds increase tremendously when I see an “American owned” sign.
You see, the last thing I am going to do is spend money validating a roadside bigot -- or for that matter visiting Arizona.
__________
Dave Swenson is a long-time analyst of Iowa political, social, and economic issues. He is a staff research economist at Iowa State University and an extension-to-communities economics educator. He also teaches community and regional planners (those nefarious agents of totalitarian control) how to do economic things in their profession.
| Comments |
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You nailed it on the head! The sign actually said (South)1pt type AMERICAN OWNED 98 point type.!
steffen schmidt
| sws@iastate.edu
| May 28, 2010 9:16 PM
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