Arizona Boxing must change it’s work visa rules - Part 1

Unknown Jorge Marquez, unbeaten and undocumented, works nights to support a wife and four young kids. By day, he trains at a Phoenix gym for what he hopes will be his real job.

But Marquez is an apprentice without a trade, which is another way of saying he is an immigrant without papers or a potential purse because of the biggest fight these days in Arizona, once a busy and productive boxing market.

“There are a lot of guys, guys like me, wanting to fight,’’ Marquez, a junior-welterweight, said during a workout at Central Boxing near downtown Phoenix. “It’s not that they’re afraid to fight. It’s that they can’t. They don’t let us. We’re not legally here.’’

Actually, Marquez has been here, here in Arizona, for most of his life. He met his wife, a U.S. citizen, in Phoenix. Now 22, he has lived, gone to school and worked in Arizona since he arrived from his birthplace in the Mexican state of Chihuahua as a 3-year-old. But Marquez (3-0, 1 KO) hasn’t fought since a Phoenix card in June, 2007 because of immigration legislation that makes a work visa mandatory for any fighter from Mexico or Mars or anywhere other than the U.S. No work visa means no license from the Arizona State Boxing Commission.

The Arizona process ends right there in first-round stoppage that some say has put the sport in jeopardy in a state that is home to Hall of Famer Michael Carbajal and has loomed significantly in fights for Antonio Margarito, Juan Manuel Marquez, Julio Cesar Chavez, Oscar De La Hoya and Rafael Marquez in a legendary lineage that goes all the way back to late icon Salvador Sanchez.

“Right now, in my mind, Arizona is the toughest place in the U.S. to do boxing,’’ said Eric Gomez, vice-president and chief matchmaker for De La Hoya’s company, Golden Boy Promotions.

Both expense and bureaucracy are increasingly turning Arizona into a state that lot of promoters might want to avoid, despite a big Mexican and Mexican-American audience. In nearby states, there are fewer bureaucratic steps and none of the attorney fees that are the part of the price of having to jump through all those regulatory hoops. There is California, Nevada, Texas, and New Mexico.

Arizona’s crackdown on illegal immigration means that pro boxers are like any other laborer who has crossed the state’s southern border in search of a paycheck. Once, boxers could get a tourist visa, simple and quick, in a step for a license to fight on an Arizona card. Legislation that is also supposed to target employers, however, has led to a laborious and often expensive pursuit of a working visa simply called a P-1.

“The problem is that they don’t give a P-1 to just anybody,’’ Gomez said a couple of weeks ago before a Golden Boy card at Desert Diamond Casino, south of Tucson and just a few days of road work north of the border. “You have to have sponsor, first of all. You have to have a letter form an employee or a major company.

“But having that latter doesn’t mean you’re going to get that visa. There is still an approval process.’’

By then, Gomez said, the promoter could have a bill of between $3,000 and $5,000 in attorney fees and still no visa for a four-round fighter whose purse might be $1,000.

“It doesn’t make sense,’’ said Gomez, who has been putting together cards at Desert Diamond for the last few years. “It has been very, very difficult. I mean, we’ve had the hardest time making matches here.’’

It’s been so difficult that Golden Boy canceled a bout at Desert Diamond in early August featuring David Lopez of Nogales on Mexican side of the border against Samuel Miller of Colombia. Miller was granted a P-1 visa, but not in time for a scheduled middleweight bout with Lopez, who is popular in southern Arizona.

“We paid $3,500,’’ Gomez said. “We got Miller his visa. He went to the embassy in Colombia. We figured he had that visa. We had the date. But, no, the embassy said: ‘We don’t do it that way anymore. We don’t just give you your visa. We’ll mail it to you in about a month. That’s why we had to cancel.’’

Miller finally got the visa and a res-scheduled date with Lopez, who beat him at Desert Diamond on Oct. 10. By then, however, Golden Boy was leery of the process. A backup, a Lopez stand-in, was lined up just in case. But that didn’t work either, despite the best efforts from ringside commentator Ahmed Santos, who in the 1990s emigrated from Mexico to Carbajal’s Ninth Street Gym and won a junior-welterweight title. Mexican middleweight Humberto Corral had agreed to fight Lopez if, for some reason, Miller could not. But Corral could not get a working visa.

“It has impacted boxing a lot,’’ said John Montano, longtime chief of the Arizona State Boxing Commission.

Montano estimates that the legislation has cut the pool of available fighters for Arizona cards by 30 to 40 percent. But the Arizona commission has no count on the number of fighters who have been turned away because they failed to get a working visa. The process stops with immigration authorities before it ever reaches the next step – an application for a boxing license, according the Montano.

“It is serious business,’’ Montano said.

But some say it is also unnecessarily draconian. Roger Woods, the best matchmaker in Arizona, says the new legislation is hurting everybody.

“It’s real bad, because the kids from the other side can’t come and make some money,’’ said Woods, who runs a Tucson gym and has worked as an assistant matchmaker for Golden Boy. “I think something should be worked out where they can come across and fight here. That P-1 is hard to get. It’s costly. A lot of these kids can hardly afford a passport, much less a visa.

“Even if you have the money, you have to get an appointment. They want to know why. You gotta be working. You gotta have a bank account. You gotta show you’re paying rent. You gotta show you have a job in Mexico before you come across. All of that. There just should be some way for these kids to come across and let them fight, because they are only trying to make a living.’’

But north of Tucson in Phoenix – Maricopa County – there is fear of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his unannounced raids of work places and neighborhoods in an attempt to round-up as many undocumented immigrants and headlines as possible. None of the immigrant fighters want to get caught up in the sweep. They are afraid to go to another state, say California, to fight. Jorge Marquez, who is not related to the Juan Manuel and Rafael brothers, said there might be questions – potential legal problems — if he applied for a license in California without having an active one in Arizona.

Despite his dreams for a ring career, he said he can’t go to Mexico to fight, either.

“If I went there, I wouldn’t be here,’’ said Marquez, who said his mom was deported when he was 16, eight years ago. “I couldn’t get back.’’

Marquez sounds a little bit like Arizona boxing. It can’t go anywhere either

Editor’s Note: On Monday, Bart Barry will look at how Arizona immigration law got to this point, and what will happen if no change is made