Leadership Quote by Janet Napolitano

A neat bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu is happening here: Arizona, a state, gets framed as if it were a nation-state with a trade policy, borders, and a vulnerable workforce to defend. By pairing “The United States and Arizona,” Janet Napolitano collapses the distance between national anxiety and local pain, telling Arizonans their job losses aren’t just a headline out of Washington but a pocketbook emergency on their block. It’s a classic move from a governor and national-security-minded Democrat: localize the crisis, then imply the need for coordinated action.

The phrase “losing jobs” does quiet ideological work. Jobs aren’t “changing,” “shifting,” or “evolving”; they’re being taken away, a zero-sum framing that invites an opponent. The opponent is safely vague: “offshore locations.” No countries named, no companies shamed, no policy specifics offered. That vagueness is strategic. It lets her gesture at globalization as a force and a culprit without picking a fight with any one trading partner, donor class, or industry. Everyone can project their own villain onto the sentence: China, Mexico, corporate executives, weak trade enforcement.

The timing matters, too. Napolitano’s rise ran through an era when “offshoring” became political shorthand for middle-class insecurity and the sense that elites were cashing out the social contract. The line is less an economic diagnosis than a permission slip for intervention: workforce retraining, incentives to keep employers home, tougher trade posture. It’s a compact appeal to solidarity and sovereignty, tuned for a constituency that wants empathy without a seminar and action without a footnote.