The parking lot party is being put on by Keep the Faith – TT, a fundraising organization meant to galvanize support for Tebow’s controversial high-profile public approach to sports and religion. A portion of proceeds go to the Tim Tebow Foundation, a charity that “exists to bring faith, hope and love to those needing a brighter day in their darkest hour of need.” The foundation mostly spends its money battling cancer.

Tancredo, a talk radio regular in Colorado, either as guest or as host, is promoting the event today on KHOW 630 AM’s Caplis & Silverman show.

Tebow is ripe material for talk radio. His overt religiosity has made national news, raising politically charged questions about freedom of expression and faith and the public square. The widespread reaction to his demonstrative Christianity– mostly positive, casually mocking or indifferent– points to a public relatively sympathetic to arguments, now often used as a policy lever on the right, that the United States is a Christian nation, politically as well as culturally. Indeed, in the post 9/11 era, it’s difficult to imagine any American Muslim celebrity wearing his or her faith on their sleeve the way Tebow wears his Christianity.

In fact, that question points to an earlier chapter of Colorado sports history.

In the 1990s Denver was home to Nuggets basketball star Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, a convert to Islam who drew the ire of much of the nation when, out of religious conviction, he decided against standing for the National Anthem before games.

“I won’t compromise my beliefs,” he said at the time. “That’s my stance on it. I didn’t intend to make it a public issue but it’s at that level now. But I won’t waiver in my decision. The Supreme Court even said it’s constitutional to burn the flag, so why give me a problem for not standing? I come to play basketball, so watch me play basketball. I think because I’m in the public, the public eye, I’m visible, it’s easy to target.”

Tebow is winning for the Broncos and so his teammates seem to have accepted for now his routine kneeling exhortations to the New Testament Savior and his anti-abortion TV ads and so on. In U.S. sports as in U.S. politics, however, it’s a given that many of the players pretend to be more Christian than they are.

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Joe Arpaio

According to multiple national news outlets, Arpaio will campaign with Perry in New Hampshire on Tuesday, where he will give the Texas governor a political tip of the cap.

Neither the Sheriff’s Office or Perry’s campaign responded to New Times‘ request for confirmation of the reported endorsement, and none of the news outlets reporting the political nod are naming names — ABC News cites “a source with knowledge of the endorsement” as the source of the information. CNN is equally vague, attributing its report to a source within the “governor’s campaign,” while NBC cites a “a source familiar with the matter.”

Arpaio was heckled as he spoke at “Choose Liberty,” a recent event organized by the Eastern Orlando Tea Party and Americans for Prosperity.

Numbers USA — an organization that supports “Attrition Through Enforcement” immigration policy and wants “lower immigration levels” — blamed Perry’s poor showing in the Florida straw poll on his weak stance on immigration enforcement.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has criticized Perry for supporting in state college tuition for undocumented students in Texas. The Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports immigration enforcement measures like Arizona’s controversial S.B. 1070 has said “Perry cannot run on is his very questionable, liberal immigration record.”

The New Times adds that “Perry isn’t exactly the hawkish border bully we’d expect Arpaio to support — given some of the sheriff’s other options,” and “in a recent debate between GOP presidential candidates, Perry made what many consider to be a political misstep for a candidate hoping to woo Conservatives: he showed a little compassion.”

Former Colorado Congressman and anti-illegal immigration crusader Tom Tancredo has no patience with Republican presidential frontrunner Rick Perry, the Texas governor with the Hollywood hair who fired up the right when he announced his candidacy but who has stumbled under the national spotlight ever since. In the wake of last week’s GOP candidate debate, Tancredo decried Perry as an arrogant “name-calling, open border, pro-amnesty politician.”

In a release sent out by his “Team America” political action committee (“Dedicated to securing our nation’s borders”), Tancredo typically held nothing back, roaring through the release with the kind of rhetorical engine revving that conjures the smell of exhaust and burnt tire rubber. He rang every kind of alarm bell by comparing Perry to both Bush and Obama. Four of the first six sentences of the release end in exclamation points and one with a word in all caps:

Dear Friend,

I need your help getting the word out on Rick Perry. Right now Perry is the Republican frontrunner for president– we can’t let him win! When it comes to immigration the man is George W. Bush’s clone! If Perry gets to the White House we’ll be back to fighting massive blanket amnesty for illegal aliens. You can count on it!

At last week’s presidential debate Perry had the audacity to call those of us who oppose in-state tuition for illegal aliens HEARTLESS!

Perry told moderator Chris Wallace that none of his opponents had worked as hard as he has done on issues of border security and immigration and that the decision to give undocumented college students in-state tuition was a state issue and was voted into law by a vast majority of state legislators.

“If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than that they have been brought there by no fault of their own I don’t think you have a heart. We need to be educating these children because they will become a drag on our society.”

The exchanges over immigration were perhaps the most heated of the night.

Rick Santorum called Perry a big government leader “worse than Barack Obama.”

The virulent Tancredo attack recalls the disgusted and mocking approach “The Tank” took toward amateur GOP/Tea Party gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes last year before, fed up, Tancredo decided to jump into the race himself. He routinely referred to Maes as naive and ridiculous. He blasted him on the radio and in daily public appearances as not up to the job. The clash helped Democrat John Hickenlooper waltz into office with a landslide victory.

Perry charged up the GOP field last month when he entered the race but he has performed badly in debates, often searching for words and pausing blankly while trying to make points. His attacks on President Obama have also been unoriginal and heavy handed. The timing and substance of a recent attack drew questions about Perry’s awareness of the nation’s geo-political status and interests. On the same day Obama defended Israel at the United Nations by taking an internationally unpopular stand against Palestinian statehood, Perry held a press conference to call the president an “appeaser” of Israel’s enemies.

Tancredo in his release also called into question Perry’s touted record of job creation and did so in typical Tancredo fashion, arguing that many of the new Texas jobs went to illegal aliens.

“Of the jobs Perry created since 2007, 81 percent went to immigrants, 40 percent to illegal immigrants!!”

A larger excerpt from Tancredo’s release:

Obama and Perry-two peas in the immigration pod

… Only those without hearts, Perry said, would be against his 2001 signature legislation which made Texas the first state to give in-state tuition to illegal aliens. This phony compassion didn’t cost Perry a penny-but it’s been costing the taxpayers $100,000 for every illegal alien who took him up on this sweet deal.

The delegates in the hall were astounded at his position and his arrogance, but it came as no surprise to me. Perry has long shown himself to be a name-calling, open border, pro-amnesty politician.

Four years ago I ran for president to pressure the Republican candidates to take a hard line against illegal immigration. For this Perry called me a racist! I called his office and demanded an apology and got nowhere.

That’s when I started to take a closer look at Perry and found an alarming pro-illegal immigrant consistency to both the man’s words and record.

Perry is for open borders and against building a fence: In a speech in Mexico in 2007, Perry said he supported completely open borders, calling for the “free flow of individuals between these two countries who want to work and want to be an asset to our country and to Mexico.” And he came out against building a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border. When in Mexico…

Perry is for massive blanket amnesty: In 2006 Perry came out in favor of blanket amnesty for illegal immigrants, albeit without citizenship, supporting “a guest worker program that takes undocumented workers off the black market and legitimizes their economic contribution.”

Perry opposes Arizona’s tough anti-illegal immigration law: Perry said of Arizona’s tough anti-illegal immigration law, SB 1070, “I have concerns with portions of the law passed in Arizona and believe it would not be the right direction for Texas.”

Perry opposes E-Verify–even for state employees: Last year Perry spoke out against using E-Verify even to prevent illegal immigrants from getting jobs as state employees, who get their paychecks from the taxpayers. He insisted it “would not make a hill of beans’ difference. Maybe not to Perry it wouldn’t–but it would mean a world of difference to some unemployed American workers and their families!

The Governor is running his whole campaign on all the jobs he has created in Texas and says he’ll do the same when he is President. Lets’ hope not! Of the jobs Perry created since 2007, 81% went to immigrants, 40% to illegal immigrants!!

We can’t afford Rick Perry as President. We need someone who will fight to get Americans back to work and our country back on track. Amnesty, in-state tuition, and jobs for illegals, along with open borders, aren’t part of that formula! And neither is Rick Perry.

We can beat Obama next year-but we must do it with a strong leader who will secure our borders, enforce our laws, and never give amnesty to illegal immigrants. Our future depends on it! And Rick Perry will do none of that!

Please help me get the word out about Rick Perry. America can’t afford four more years of a politically pandering, pro-illegal immigrant president-whether they are Republican or Democrat! We need our laws enforced now!

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It “will describe my ongoing fight to provide security for our citizens and to defeat those who profit and grow more powerful by refusing to secure our borders,” Brewer said in a statement.

Reuters reports she will write the book with Jessica Gavora, a writer who has worked for former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Earlier this week, Brewer announced she would take the fight to have SB 1070 fully implemented to the U.S. Supreme Court, after a federal judge’s stay on key provisions was upheld by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in April.

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After extensive and energetic debate, a bill which would allow undocumented students who attended high school in Colorado access to in-state tuition, passed second hearing in the Senate in a 20-13 vote. The bill passed on party lines.

If the Colorado Asset bill passes the House, Colorado would follow 12 other states in enacting in-state tuition legislation for undocumented students.

Bill cosponsor Sen. Angela Giron, D-Pueblo, opened the debate with an emotional call for her fellow lawmakers to support the legislation that she has been vocally pushing since before she began her first year as a freshman senator representing Pueblo.

“This is the issue that helped persuade me to run for Senate,” Giron told the Senate floor. “I come from a community where high school graduation parties rival wedding parties… but sadly, for many the dream of education cannot extend past high school.”

Following Giron’s remarks, fellow co-sponsor Sen. Mike Johnston, D-Denver, presented the economic and fiscal reasoning behind the bill. He argued that the bill would not cost taxpayers significantly, but rather would increase revenue for higher education by increasing enrollment. Under the bill, undocumented Colorado students would not have access to the state subsidized Colorado Opportunity Fund and so there would be no direct state subsidy to undocumented students, supporters say.

“If we are investing in these kids’ K-12 education, then it doesn’t make sense to close the door before they can get a university education,” said Johnston.

Conservative senators countered by saying that the bill would in fact cost taxpayers money, and that it would incentivize more people to illegally cross the border if they knew their children could receive access to a Colorado university education. Republican senators also argued that until federal law is changed, without legal status the undocumented beneficiary students would still have no employment opportunities even if they graduated from a Colorado university.

Sen. Ted Harvey, R-Highlands Ranch, argued that the bill was misplaced compassion, and that it would be unfair for Colorado taxpayers. “Is it compassionate to reach into the pocketbooks of struggling Americans to pay for the education of illegal immigrants?”

Republican Sen. Keith King, R-Colorado Springs, argued that in-state tuition fees do not cover the costs of each university student and that the proposed legislation would place an unfair burden on Colorado’s financially distressed higher education system. In many Colorado universities, in-state tuition fees only cover half of the true costs of educating each student.

Johnston told the Colorado Independent that the Republican fiscal argument against the bill is not well substantiated because it does not take into account that adding the estimated 250 beneficiary students spread around state universities wouldn’t incur substantial extra operational costs for the schools. Rather, he maintains, while pointing to success stories in other states with similar legislation, that it would boost the universities economically by increasing tuition revenue.

“Just because you add a few extra students to each university, doesn’t mean that will increase the lighting bill or the university will necessarily have to hire new teachers,” said Johnston. “But it does mean the universities will see an increase in revenue from the tuition rates… Texas implemented in-state tuition and saw a $27.2 million annual increase in tuition and fees at their colleges and universities.”

Supporting his line of reasoning, Johnston pointed to the multiple colleges -including UNC, Metro State, DU, and Colorado’s community colleges – that have come out in support of the bill. According to Johnston, so far, there has been no open opposition to the bill from any Colorado university.

Colorado Immigrants Rights Coalition Organizer Julie Gonzales said that she was impressed by the powerful rhetoric and moral questions that arose in the debate but was disappointed with the Colorado Republicans for being preoccupied only with federal immigration policy and using it as excuse to block state immigration reform. “[GOP Senators] seemed to miss the point that the debate was about the ASSET bill.”

Following the vote, Giron, who was visibly struggling to hold her composure after emotional floor testimonials, said the bill would face its true challenge in the House. “We will make it out of the Senate, but it doesn’t yet feel very celebratory,” said Sen. Giron. “It’s really all about the [House] committee.”

Last July Bolton enjoined sections of the law that would have required non-citizens to carry resident documentation at all times and that would have pressed local police to participate in checking immigration and citizenship status in the state.

Critics decried the bill as encouraging racial profiling. They said it granted authorities constitutionally slippery powers that could easily be abused.

SB 1070 would have pushed officers to lean heavily on suppositions, expanding the kind of gray areas in police work the law normally tries to narrow. Officers would have been asked to target people they merely suspected of being illegal immigrants, for example, and would have been authorized to make warrantless arrests of people they merely suspected of committing offenses that could lead to deportation.

The Obama Justice Department argued that federal law rules in matters of immigration and that Arizona’s law would hinder the federal government’s ability to carry out national immigration policy. Judge Bolton mostly agreed, as has the Ninth Circuit Court.

The Arizona law divided lawmakers in DC and in capitol buildings around the country.

Influential Colorado state Republican lawmakers embraced SB 1070 and introduced legislation this year mimicking its provisions. Democratic opponents, however, shot down the suite of bills as a partisan and unconsidered approach to immigration policy reform.

Democratic Colorado Congressman Jared Polis has been an outspoken opponent of SB 1070 from the time it was introduced. He described it as one with a pattern of politically charged overreaching moves that underline the need for comprehensive reform at the national level.

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Rep. Claire Levy, D-Boulder, told the Colorado Independent Thursday that she was calling Secretary of State Scott Gessler’s bluff to prosecute individuals who may or may not be improperly on Colorado’s voting rolls.  She said, that despite claims made by both Gessler and bill sponsor Rep. Chris Holbert, R-Parker, that the bill is a soft means to ensure a secure election, the bill had far more to do with politics.

“If [Gessler] really believes people who aren’t citizens have been voting in Colorado elections, he should refer them to the Attorney General or the appropriate district attorney,” Levy said. “The fact that he hasn’t done so strongly suggests that this is more a political issue than a real election issue.”

The bill designed by Gessler has been pointed to by the Secretary of State and others as a way to weed out individuals improperly on the voter rolls, without prosecuting them.

The Republican sponsor of the bill, Rep. Chris Holbert, R-Parker, said that the only option the Secretary of State has to rectify the potential problem of improperly registered voters is to turn over voter information to district attorneys and encourage prosecution.

“Would you rather have someone who is registered to vote and is not eligible–would you rather have them receive a letter in the mail or a knock on the door from a prosecutor,” Holbert said.

The bill would require the secretary of state to check Colorado voter databases against other state and federally run databases to determine the eligibility of a person to vote. Those databases include, but are not limited to the Department of Revenue, jury recusal lists and federal immigration and customs databases.

“House Bill 1252 provides a low cost, soft touch to purging our voter registration database of people who are not eligible to be registered and therefore not eligible to vote in our elections,” Holbert said.

If the bill were to pass, individuals who are identified through database matching as suspected of being ineligible to vote would receive notification in the mail. They would then have 90 days after they or their families signed a letter of receipt for the notification to provide proof of citizenship.

For those born in the U.S. who cannot afford to pay for their confirmation of citizenship, the state would pay for its acquisition. As currently written, Colorado would not be asked to pay for naturalized citizens documents.

Gessler has said in committee hearings leading up to the floor debate that his office found 106 individuals that likely are improperly registered to vote. He said the 106 had obtained a driver’s license indicating their non-citizenship status before or on the same day they registered to vote. Still, Gessler said it was possible that they have become U.S. citizens since the time of their registration.

“This study…is conclusory, it is based on supposition, it is based on conjecture,” Rep. Claire Levy, D-Boulder, said. “The problem with this is that the Secretary of State is relying on an inference that a person was not a citizen when they registered based on information in a database that is not maintained for that purpose.”

Levy said the databases used did not have requirements that they be updated nor was there any idea of the timeliness of when information is entered.

“This bill creates the presumption that you are guilty until proven innocent and that is not the way this country functions,” Levy said.

The bill was lambasted Thursday by Democrats who called the bill a solution in search of a problem and said Gessler already had the right to purge voter rolls of ineligible voters without the help of new legislation.

Republicans in turn said they were charged with ensuring a secure voting system and said this was the bill to do just that.

The bill will likely pass the House but should face a stiff challenge in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Why is Colorado politically purple, instead of right-red or left-blue? Maybe it’s the fact that it’s a crossroads home to so many of the “Twelve States of America” mapped by economics-demographers Dante Chinni and James Gimpel. Colorado’s economy is like its landscape: High and low and multicolored. And what’s missing in Colorado may be as important as what’s here. It may surprise some residents to learn that, as a matter of general categories, Colorado is not only low on African Americans but also low on empty nest white folks and evangelical voters.

The American immigration "state"

“Patchwork Nation” authors Chinni and Gimpel have put together an interactive map of the various economic-labor classes in the United States that underlines the grave income disparities shaping– or as they put it “fracturing”– our culture and politics. Their map has been getting traction since the Atlantic published it this month.

The map suggests why Colorado is unlike the rest of the West and why Republican state lawmakers, for example, have gained lukewarm support for the Arizona-style immigration laws they have introduced this session.

Whereas enormous swaths of the economies of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, for example, are defined by the low-income high-poverty immigrant sector, Colorado’s immigrant economy is balanced more evenly with more profitable sectors the authors call “monied burbs” and “boom town” and “tractor country.”

It would appear that the state’s mixed demography and economy translate to cultural and political compromise. Hard-line politicians on the left and right won’t rise in Colorado.

As Campaign and Elections magazine points out today, “Colorado has always prided itself on voting for the person before the party” voting in Republican lawmakers and Democratic governors and flipping the delegation in Washington over the last decade.

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“This nation has over 15 million people who are here illegally, and yet I don’t hear one word about comprehensive immigration reform.”

Polis said the piecemeal approach lawmakers have taken so far, where the student path-to-citizenship DREAM Act, for example, was broken off for consideration while other areas languished, is no longer good enough.

“Comprehensive immigration reform has strong majority support in polls from Republican voters, from Independent voters, and from Democratic voters. Comprehensive immigration reform would finally establish real border security, real employment verification, and require that people who are here illegally register, pay a fine and get right with the law. It’s common sense for America, and it’s time for Congress to take action on this critical issue.”

Polis also steered his colleagues away from easy solutions. He singled out for consideration the E-Verify citizen-identification checking system being proposed as a simple first step. Some analysts have argued E-Verify causes more problems than it solves, that it more often misidentifies legal residents as illegal than it does properly identify scoflaws, who know how to game the system.

“Lately I’ve heard that we might be discussing mandatory E-Verify. That would make the problem worse. E-Verify encourages a black market in Social Security numbers. We need real employment verification with fingerprints or retinal IDs so we can identify who’s here and don’t simply contribute to a black market in Social Security numbers which can be bought and sold, only increasing crime in this country. My constituents are calling on Congress to take action on comprehensive immigration reform. I urge my colleagues to bring this important issue forward.”

In May of last year, fresh off his appointment to the House Judiciary Committee, Polis told members of Congress that it would be a mistake to let the heated politics of health care reform scare them off of immigration reform. On the contrary, he said, state lawmakers feeling pressure to take up local legislative solutions, as they did in Arizona, make it clear that it’s past time for federal action.

“I rise today to encourage my colleagues to live up to a challenge that has been put before us by the people of our country, by the people of Arizona, by the people of my state, and that is the challenge to replace our broken immigration system with one that works,” he said then.

The Judiciary Committee will likely be the place where any immigration reform legislation begins its journey through the lawmaking system.

During his freshman year in Congress, Polis visited Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities in Colorado and decried their lack of transparency and cost ineffectiveness. He pointed out how people held in the facilities are often treated like criminals even though their only crime may be not having their working or residency papers in order or readily available. Often immigration applications are being reviewed when people are apprehended. Fathers and mothers, family breadwinners, are locked up without adequate representation, effectively disappearing and leaving dependents without resources.

It would be cheaper and maybe more fair and efficient to put these people up in hotels, Polis said on a visit to the state’s main detention center in Aurora.

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DENVER– When hundreds of Coloradans flocked to the capitol here Monday for the state’s fifth-annual Latino Advocacy Day, it was a rare recent instance in the state and around the country where support for policies that embrace immigration, U.S. Latino communities and the rights of undocumented residents stole the spotlight from support for policies that set deporting “illegals” and establishing border security as top priorities.

Attendees rallied on the west steps of the capitol and then fanned into lawmaker chambers to talk about the issues that matter most to them this legislative session. Top of the list was opposition to the Arizona-style immigration laws introduced this year, which have mostly failed to gain traction, and support for a bill that would offer in-state college tuition to undocumented students.

“I came here today because I know how much what goes on in this building can affect my life, my family’s life and my friends’ lives,” event speaker Cecelia Rodriguez told the Colorado Independent. “The most pressing and necessary bill we can pass is SB 126, the Colorado ASSET bill, which would make it possible for more graduating [high school] seniors in Colorado to attend colleges here.”

The ASSET bill is the work of Pueblo Democratic Senator Angela Giron, who received a hero’s welcome Monday as she moved through the capitol halls toward a committee room. The crowd cheered and Giron waved and then posed briefly for snapshots with supporters.

A young woman named Laura from Durango came to see Republican Ellen Roberts, her district representative. Laura said she came to relate her experience as an undocumented Colorado high school graduate who now attends university in New Mexico, where she and all undocumented Colorado residents can pay in-state tuition.

Giron and co-sponsor Mike Johnston say the ASSET bill would keep students like Laura in state and so, instead of draining resources, the bill would significantly add to the state’s bleeding higher education coffers. The bill sponsors have estimated that it would translate to roughly 900 more students attending colleges and universities here per year for a net gain of $2 million to $4 million.

Roberts told Laura she was sympathetic but that she couldn’t support the ASSET bill.

“I completely understand what you are talking about but this [bill] doesn’t necessarily cover all of the costs [it would incur],” Roberts said. “The benefit to being a resident is in-state tuition and I know because I moved here and wasn’t a resident at the time and had to wait a certain period of time before I could get in-state tuition.”

Roberts added that she thought immigration policy was a matter best taken up on the federal level.

The unloved Obama plan

The events in Denver came as President Obama unveiled a 2012 budget proposal that would increase funding for immigration enforcement and border security even while it would ratchet down funding for immigration services. Alternet’s Walter Ewing broke down the numbers.

The budget for Customs and Border Protection would rise 3 percent to $11.8 billion; Immigration and Customs Enforcement funding would rise 1 percent to $5.8 billion; and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would dip 5 percent to $2.9 billion.

Lawmakers either criticized the proposal as an inefficient use of resources or lamented its lack of vision.

Pro-immigration policy reform advocates who have been monitoring debate on the topic for years saw a deeper problem with the proposal. The fact that the president would seek to address the country’s inadequate immigration system by emphasizing punishment was as disappointing to them as it was unsurprising.

Messaging matters

At a University of Denver law school forum held last week sponsored in part by the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition the ACLU and Amnesty International, speakers lamented the lopsided nature of the current state of the debate, where firebrands on the right were pounding home simple messages that failed to adequately address the complexity of the issue.

DU graduate Chris Newman, legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said that there was reason to think the conversation might be at a low point and that it might now start to expand in more productive directions.

“Current debate is at a standstill,” he said. “Policy is being worked out on the fly and on the ground… The good news is that the laws aren’t working and need modernizing and that that’s a point of agreement on all sides.”

He said the failure of the nation’s laws has created a sense of crisis and that, for many reasons, Congress can’t move to address it, creating a political vacuum into which local demagoguery has rushed and been raised onto the national stage.

The prescription offered by leaders of the anti-illegal and/or nativist movement has benefited from clarity, Newman said, clarity on display most dramatically at the Arizona state house but also here at the capitol in Denver and in Washington. The goal is to pass laws that add security and infrastructure along the border with Mexico; that work to remove undocumented residents either forcibly or by creating legal hurdles and hassles that spur them to “self deport”; and that limit the number of foreign-born people who can enter the country.

By comparison, the pro-immigration reform side is burdened by complexity. Leaders agree on establishing a fair path to citizenship for undocumented residents but, beyond that, questions dominate. What sort of path to citizenship? Who should be allowed to immigrate to the county and in what numbers? What level of immigration enforcement is adequate? Should enforcement stop at the border and with federal authorities? What would efficient reliable guest-worker programs look like? What kind of labor laws should govern those programs and how will they be enforced?

Living in Arizona

Attempts to address these questions tend to lead away from demagoguery, said Alfredo Gutierrez, former president of the Arizona State Senate. In the present debate, so many issues are not being talked about in the kind of nitty-gritty way that leads lawmakers to introduce policy that can be implemented and tweaked to solve the problems most Americans agree exist and need to be solved.

“You don’t want to live in a place like Arizona. You don’t want to go down that road,” he said. “What we think of as abhorrent in other parts of the country– neo-Nazis marching to the capitol, racial profiling, prison camps in the desert, laws restricting medical attention for children unless they can produce papers– you don’t want that in Colorado. Hate is contagious.”

He said the dominant reductive security-driven approach to immigration ends in the quest for enemies. It forces us to search for people who are the problem. The problem, however, is not only about the immigrants. It’s a problem with a long history, where U.S. policies over the course of hundreds of years alternately encouraged and discouraged immigration, celebrated our immigrant national culture while also setting up classes of favored and less favored immigrants. It’s a problem complicated by the fact that industry labor requirements have set immigration policy officially and unofficially for almost all of U.S. history.

The anti-immigration forces ask a simple question to which I have a simple response, Gutierrez told the packed law school crowd.

“‘What part of illegal don’t you understand?’ they say. ‘What part of complicit don’t you understand?’ I say.”

[ Image: Durango Rep. Ellen Roberts on Latino Advocacy Day (J. Boven) ]

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