A Job Washington Won't Do
Colorado is 400 miles from the border but right in the middle of the immigration debate.
BY FRED BROWN
Thursday, April 20, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
DENVER--Colorado is a Spanish word. It means "red" or "ruddy." Its other meanings include "embarrassed" and "risqué."
The word is more than apt. Colorado is a reddish state--not fully red, in the political sense, because while it voted to re-elect President Bush, it also gave Democrats major victories in a U.S. Senate race, an open congressional seat and control of both chambers of the state Legislature during the same year. And lately it has also been rather an "embarrassed" state, embarrassed and conflicted by its position at the center of the national debate on immigration.
Colorado's southern edge is 400 miles from the Mexican border. Denver is 200 miles farther north. It is not exactly a border state, but like larger states even farther north, it is heavily affected by immigration. Colorado's agriculture, construction and hospitality trades, which rely on a forgiving approach to workers without papers, add to the pressure and the conflict.
Social and cultural flashpoints are everywhere; emotions are highly charged. On March 20 and 21, half a dozen vans and SUVs transporting workers to jobs north and east slid off snow-swept, icy Colorado interstates. The aging vehicles overturned, spilling out dozens of Mexican nationals. In the aftermath, some 100 undocumented workers were detained for a day, then sent back to Mexico. While injuries resulting from the "night of the icy roads" were minor, the effects on the body politic were more far-reaching, and troubling.
The incident came about the same time a Mexican national was returned to Denver to face murder charges for shooting a Denver policeman last fall. The man had been in the U.S. illegally. Then more than 50,000 people marched in Denver on March 25, protesting congressional legislation that would have made illegal immigration a felony. Many of them waved Mexican flags, an inflammatory blunder that wasn't repeated at smaller demonstrations later in April.
Most Coloradans think of themselves as open-minded, independent, live-and-let-live sorts. But the explosion of controversy, anger and even fear about illegal immigrants flooding into the U.S. from the south has revealed a less-accepting side of the Colorado state of mind. There is a gathering concern about the tide of unassimilated newcomers, and little consensus about solutions.
These inchoate feelings are stoked by Tom Tancredo, the Republican congressman from Denver's southern suburbs and fierce anti-immigration activist. He "lit the fuse," says John Straayer, a political science professor at Colorado State University. He has also tapped into a deeper unrest, claims Denver Latina activist Polly Baca, going backward to the last days of the Spanish Empire in Colorado. "You have a congressman who taps into this blatant tension, feelings of hatred that have always existed," she said.
On talk radio, there has been an outpouring of opinion, most of it stridently opposed to the illegal tide. Letters to the editor, a somewhat more considered medium, have also spiked. Cohen Peart, the letters editor at the Denver Post, said it's rare for a single topic to get more than about a 20% share of the letters submitted, but immigration fills two-thirds of his inbox. Some 90% are anti-immigration. Mr. Peart's counterpart at the Rocky Mountain News, Steve Oelrich, said the flood "seems to be continuing pretty unabated."
The immigration issue has distracted the Legislature, further divided the political parties, and left lawmakers scrambling to find areas where the state might realistically address the problem. The Legislature, controlled by Democrats for the first time in 40 years, has seen perhaps two dozen immigration bills introduced, mostly by Republicans. Only a handful survive with less than three weeks left in the 120-day session. House Speaker Andrew Romanoff says "the only consensus is that no one's satisfied."
Both sides exploit the issue in the interest of politics, but Colorado's best interests seem to be secondary. Republicans, who take more than a little pleasure in forcing Democrats to confront the issue, predict little of substance will come out of this session. They think that works to their advantage. "I think it is a wedge issue," said the House Republican floor leader, Mike May. "Our position is radically different from the other party's. Will we take that to the polls? Sure."
Democrats, meanwhile, have targeted business and traffickers. The idea, says Joan Fitz-Gerald, the Senate president, is to punish the exploiters. "The most consistent message we get from constituents is to hold employers responsible," she said.
Mr. Tancredo, who has been implored to run for president, told me his concern is driven by what he calls the false economies and politicization of immigration. He believes immigrants consume more in government services than they contribute in taxes. Further, he traces his anti-immigration animus back 30 years, when he was a classroom teacher and disturbed by the inefficiencies of a new Colorado law--the first in the country--requiring bilingual education for students whose parents spoke no English. Some of those students were quite fluent in English, Mr. Tancredo said. "It was a bad precedent . . . making education decisions that were strictly political."
One of Mr. Tancredo's more unusual allies is former Gov. Richard Lamm, a Democrat. He is backing a ballot issue that would deny state services to unauthorized immigrants, although he is not convinced it would survive a court test. "This is not my first choice," he said. "Basically we're seeking a referendum on illegal immigration to put pressure on Washington."
That's the one thing on which all sides agree. The major responsibility is Washington's--the problem is far larger than the states can confront one by one. Yet Capitol Hill, where reform is now suspended in the limbo between abstraction and political calculation, seems to have no understanding of the urgency of the problem. It must address America's dysfunctional, compromised national policy, because the states, as Mr. May put it, "are left holding the bills for the feds' failure to enforce the border."
Mr. Brown is a columnist for the Denver Post.
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