Posted 07.01.2010

Laboring over reform

Arizona's tough take on immigration has reopened the call to address labor needs

By Eric Peterson

In 1851, Hispanic shepherds ventured north from present-day New Mexico into the San Luis Valley and settled the town of San Luis. You could say they were the first Coloradans.

Just three years earlier, the quirky alpine valley had been Mexican soil, but the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo shifted the border several hundred miles southward. The aforementioned first Coloradans were likely Mexicans before the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, but the treaty granted them citizenship.

The politics of immigration reform have wavered over the intervening years, and today amnesty is something of a dirty word. After a hot economy helped attract millions of documented and undocumented immigrants alike for the last two decades, President Obama sits at a familiar crossroads.

In the early 1950s, President Eisenhower faced a similar "crisis" to that of the 1990s and 2000s. About 3 million undocumented immigrants had crossed into the U.S. from Mexico in the years before his election in 1952, thanks in large part to an unquenchable thirst for labor during World War II.

Eisenhower saw a solution in patrolling industry more than the border. Under his watch, Border Patrol and the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Services rooted out corruption in their ranks and initiated a sweeping deportation program that shipped undocumented workers not to the border by land but to Veracruz by sea.

These tactics led to a 95 percent decline in illegal immigration by 1960, accomplished with a Border Patrol consisting of 1,000 agents, a far cry from the 18,000 today, and no border wall. The plan worked because it didn't rely on brute enforcement alone.

Later, as a new wave of Mexico-to-U.S. immigration began, then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan was a pragmatist. In 1977, Reagan said undocumented immigrants were "actually doing work our people won't do," adding, "One thing is certain in this hungry world: No regulation or law should be allowed if it results in crops rotting in the fields for lack of harvesters."

This is the third ColoradoBiz cover story on immigration reform in the past five years. Despite plenty of rhetoric, the central problems remain unsolved. Colorado took a legislative stand in 2007, new restrictions turned migrant labor off, and farmers resorted to prison labor to harvest the fall crop. Now Arizona has taken matters into its own hands by passing a controversial immigration bill into law this April.

But in other corners of the country, the seemingly immobile party lines around the argument are being redrawn. Thanks in part to the backlash generated by Arizona's legislative move, this formerly model wedge issue is straining to stay intact under pressure. And a different, often pro-business, tone is resonating throughout the debate this time.

Gil Cisneros, president and CEO of the Lakewood-based Chamber of the Americas and a leading voice among Colorado's Hispanic Republicans, has come down hard on his own party's immigration hardliners in the past. His focus is on the needs of small businesses: "They're screaming for more help."

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