Denizen of A Different Desert (Phoenix 2009)

Friday, March 27 (Phoenix). The days of Cowboys and Indians in The Wild, Wild West may be long gone from Phoenix, but when it comes to renting cars here, the locals will "scalp" you and "hold you up at gunpoint" if you pick up your rental car at the Sky Harbor Airport. Taxes and other fees imposed on those who rent cars at the airport will about double the rental cost.
To avoid this Arizona brand of highway robbery, we arranged to pick up our rented Chevy Impala at a Hertz location tucked in behind a Mercedes dealership near downtown Phoenix. It cost us $30 for the cab ride from the airport into town, but saved us over $100 on our four day car rental contract.
Like our taxi experiences elsewhere in the U.S., our cab driver was not born in America; he had come to The States 27 years ago and to The Valley of The Sun 18 years later. A genial and articulate man, with only a slightly accented but firm grasp of the English language, he said he was one of about 10,000 Somalis living in the Phoenix area which he described as somewhat similar to his semi-arid homeland. Strangely enough, it is the "frozen tundra" of Minneapolis-St. Paul, and not Central Arizona, that has become the largest U.S. "Mecca" for Somalian emigres; 90,000 reside in The Twin Cities, and another 120,000 live even farther north in Toronto, Canada.