The 21st century immigrant story

In Glenwood Springs Colorado, summer officially kicked-off with the annual Strawberry Days Festival.

For a hundred years, the Anglo community wouldn’t miss this event. Now the Hispanics don’t want to miss it either.

But if the Colorado legislature has its way, the influx of illegal immigrants to Colorado will soon slow down.

On August 1^st, Governor Bill Owens signed a series of bills targeting undocumented immigrants.

Immigrants applying for some government benefits like welfare now have to verify their legal status.

Contractors such as Mark Gould who have public projects have to check with the government to make sure their workers are legal.

And immigrants in need of certain healthcare services have to present legal certification.

David Adamson, director at the Mountain Family Health Center: I think it does have the effect of putting a chill over people that are in the country illegally.

Dave Adamson, director at the Mountain Family Health Center says the kind of prenatal care that Maribel got when she was pregnant with Diana is still available to illegal immigrants no questions asked— but the immigrants may not know that.

Adamson: It is very important that women get that care, ‘cause they’re gonna have a child that’s gonna be a U.S. Citizen.  But the very idea that they’re out there thinking that might not be the case, that’s an issue.

Mark Gould says the new law covering employment has hurt his business as well.

Mark Gould: I’d love to tell you that I could computerize the entire process in the construction industry. We go out of our way to use GPS on our bulldozers. We use as high level of tech as we can use, but we still need a guy at the end of the shovel at the end of the day.

Tom Brokaw Reports Mark Gould, owner of Gould Construction

Brokaw: And even if it cuts into your profits a little bit, you’re still willing to pay more just to get the workers?

Mark Gould: We’re going to pass on the costs so this isn’t about the profit margins. This is about being able to get the work done.

Ever since August, almost no one, Hispanic or Anglo… has applied for the unskilled labor jobs at Gould Construction despite a campaign of radio and newspaper ads.

Mark Gould: It is gonna cost more to build roads , build waterlines, sewer lines, houses than it did last Friday.

Under the new law, the company has to check the legal status of people it wants to hire with Homeland Security.

Mark Gould: From today moving forward if that process checks, which means if you have a name and a Social Security number and a birth date and it checks, then you’re golden.  If not, you’re not hired.

Gould had another problem— the company received a letter from Social Security naming 21 employees, hired the previous year whose Social Security numbers didn’t match any on record. The employees were notified about the discrepancy.

At the end of the summer, Gould fired 4 workers who had fraudulent Social Security numbers, including one of Sammy Sorenson’s most reliable workers at the Vail hotel site.

But Trino and his brother Juan Carlos were safe for now. The government hadn’t detected THEIR fake Social Security numbers.

Gould says this new Colorado law is forcing him to look for new ways to find workers for the next construction season. He’s inquiring about temporary work visas but with 66,000 available nationwide, he’s not sure how many he can get.

Mark Gould: I mean, I see it as that we’re gonna need to go down to Mexico, sponsor an employee, have that employee checked out from a criminal background, from a medical background, give them a biometric identification so that we know where they are and the government knows where they are and bring them in and have them work, and when we get done with that particular job, they get sent back.

Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado believes the crackdown on employers is long overdue because they have long profited, he claims, from illegal labor. 

Rep. Tom Tancredo (Colo.): Cheap labor is only cheap to the employer. We pay more for the infrastructure needed for the people who are here illegally than we ever get from them in taxes.

Brokaw: Wven people who have strong feelings about the presence of illegal immigrants here say, “I got to say it they’re doing the work.”

Tom Tancredo: Sure, they’re doing the work.  And they’re good workers. They are hard workers and they work for less.  And if I were an employer, oh boy would I be excited about that possibility.

Brokaw:  You think $14.00 dollars an hour is working for less?

Tancredo: Oh, yes, absolutely.

Ian Hunkins, Trino, and his brother Juan Carlos all earned 14-dollars an hour, that’s more than construction laborers earned a decade ago in Colorado according to the Department of Labor. But some states pay as much as 20 dollars an hour.

Brokaw: You’ve made a number of recommendations that you’d like to see happen. You would end the birthright citizenship for illegal aliens.  An illegal alien comes here, has a child, a son or a daughter, they become automatically a citizen.  You would take that right away from them.

Tancredo: I would.

Brokaw: A lot of people got off the boat here at the turn of the century and children were born and they were automatically american citizens, eligible to run for president.

Tancredo: If you read the fourteenth amendment, not just the amendment, but if you read the discussion leading up to the amendment, it was about slavery and the children of slaves and whether they should be able to have citizenship.  That was the purpose of the fourteenth amendment.

Meanwhile, an almost parallel existence is going on in America  -- between the legal and illegal populations.

In late September, Trino got married to a young woman who has lived in America for 20 years, illegally.

Together they plan to move to another Colorado tow.  Trino fully expected to be laid off by Gould Construction in the fall because it was the end of the Colorado construction season.

He’s wasn’t worried about the new laws hurting his chances for more work. Friends told him that he could get work at the Colorado oil and gas industry.

Even though Trino told us he only came here temporarily for the work, and the money.... now that he’s married, that could change everything.

If the newlyweds decide to have a baby here, who will be a new American citizen, it could make it just too hard for them to return home.

Trino and his new wife are just one couple of the estimated 11 million Hispanic immigrants beginning a new life here in America but for all the talk of sending people home, the truth is that this latest massive wave of immigration may now be irreversible.

Trino and his wife may never have heard of Ellis Island, the gateway to the United States for millions of earlier immigrants — the first step toward their American dream. They came for the promise of political freedom and, most of all, economic opportunity for the chance to earn a living wage and give their children a life so much better than their own.

That immigrant experience is central to American history and American character.

But as we see, in the 21st century, the immigrant story has taken a sharp turn into the shadows of broken laws, political controversy, cultural conflicts, and economic survival.

It is a dilemma so emotional and so volatile no one has been able to find a consensus solution — and so the illegals keep on coming, spreading out across the country, doing the jobs so many Americans would rather not take. In this nation of laws, the illegal immigrant has become a fixed and growing part of the landscape, at once a part of America but also separate— living, working and raising families in the shadow of the American dream.

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