Fiery debate rages as immigrants pour in

'90s influx caught nation unprepared By David Olinger and Gwen Florio Denver Post Staff Writers

Sunday, November 17, 2002 - So many people live illegally in Colorado that, if brought together, they could form the state's fifth-largest city, bigger than Boulder or Fort Collins.

Lured by a robust economy, as many as 125,000 undocumented immigrants now call Colorado home. They fluff hotel pillows and cook meals at Colorado's mountain ski resorts; pick peaches and pumpkins on the Western Slope; toil on the bloody floors of meatpacking plants on the Eastern Plains; and hammer roofing on new homes spreading across a booming Western state. Many of their children attend Colorado public schools.

They are among the mass of new residents, legal and otherwise, whose arrival in the past decade makes up the largest wave of immigration since the influx that built this nation.

Thirty-one million immigrants - an estimated 8.5 million of them illegal - now live in the United States. That's more than a tenth of the population, the highest percentage of immigrants since 1930.

The surge caught America unaware and gave rise to a sometimes rancorous national debate.

Employers call those new immigrants indispensable; critics say the cheap labor carries a high cost to schools, hospitals and prisons.

"Many Americans feel themselves overtaxed as it is. They worry about schools, they are concerned about jobs, they worry about the state of social services, and they're concerned about crime," said former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich, now a professor at Brandeis University. "An influx of immigrants serves as a focal point of those concerns."

When the issue turns to whether the economy and society can support millions of undocumented immigrants, the debate - already heated - becomes incendiary.

In fact, illegal immigrants in Colorado are costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, especially in schools. But in other areas, their costs are disproportionately low compared with their overall numbers.

Critics such as former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm say the numbers and costs will grow. He contends the illegal newcomers could eventually triple Colorado's population, further straining its natural resources. He says illegal immigrants depress wages of legal citizens. There is no defense, Lamm said, for letting millions become U.S. residents by crossing the borders without permission.

"A nation has to have a border, and a nation has to enforce that border," Lamm said. "Illegal immigrants jump the line."

U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, who reignited the immigration debate in Colorado earlier this year with his attempt to deport Aurora honor student Jesus Apodaca, says nothing less than "maintaining Western civilization" is at stake.

But Estevan Flores, executive director of the Latino Research and Policy Center in Denver, responds that skin color, not fiscal concerns, really drives the immigration backlash.

"The browning of America," he said. "Some people don't like that."

The numbers

In Colorado, half the state's roughly 370,000 immigrants arrived in the past decade, mainly from Mexico.

Half of the immigrants who came to the U.S. in the 1990s live in California, New York and Texas. Colorado, despite its influx, is home to only one in 84, according to the 2000 census.

By their nature, undocumented immigrants - and the associated costs - are hard to count. The figures of 125,000 in Colorado and 8.5 million nationwide come from the Urban Institute's Jeffrey S. Passel, one of the most respected experts on the topic.

Passel also estimates that 80 percent of Mexican immigrants nationwide in the 1990s were undocumented. That makes his estimate of illegal immigrants much higher than official INS figures. But Robert Warren, a senior INS statistician, called Passel's numbers reasonable and predicted the agency will raise its own estimates soon.

Seeking concrete numbers in Colorado, The Denver Post interviewed state and national experts, analyzed government statistics, and examined the areas where critics contend that illegal immigrants are most costly: schools, prisons, jobs and medicine.

The Post found validity to some claims about the cost of immigration. The newcomers tend to move into poorer communities where housing is cheaper, burdening towns whose limited resources make them least able to afford the influx.

Blue-collar Commerce City, for instance, watched its foreign-born population grow 612 percent in 10 years; wealthy Cherry Hills Village saw a 4 percent increase.

Schools, in particular, are strained. To accommodate a surge in Spanish-speaking children, some Colorado districts have scrambled to build new schools. The districts have ventured as far as Mexico for bilingual teachers, turning in one case to a school custodian for translations until a Spanish-speaking teacher was found.

Yet in other ways, the passions aroused by immigration are based on false or exaggerated claims.

The Mexicans who came to the state in the 1990s, legally or otherwise, are not causing crime waves in their communities. Denver neighborhoods that saw a meteoric rise in Hispanic population saw drops in crime just like the rest of the state and nation in the 1990s.

Immigrants are not filling up Colorado's prisons. And changes in Medicaid rules have kept poor immigrants from overwhelming the health-care system.

Some specifics:

Prisons: Lamm and Tancredo each have complained publicly about illegal immigrants filling prisons. Tancredo estimated to The Denver Post that 17 percent of Colorado's inmates were undocumented. But as of September, 6 percent of the state's prisoners were foreign-born and only 3 percent were Mexicans wanted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Schools: A Colorado Department of Education project found and enrolled almost 30,000 children of migrant parents, including 8,348 from Mexico, between December 2000 and last July.

Medicine: Immigrants make up 8.6 percent of Colorado's population. Yet only 2.6 percent - about $41 million - of the state's Medicaid expenditures went for emergency care in 2001-02.

Jobs: Neither state nor federal labor departments track the number of jobs held by undocumented immigrants.

Jobs: A vital resource

But "the primary reason people are upset about undocumented immigrants is the fear that they are taking away jobs," Reich said.

In fact, wages frequently are depressed when immigrants flood an area. But that phenomenon usually vanishes when immigrants move up and out of entry-level jobs, Reich said.

"Immigrants tend to be relatively ambitious people. They would not come here if they were not," he said. "It's often very difficult to get into this country legally, and it can be exceedingly difficult to get in illegally, so you have to be ambitious in order to leap over the fence."

In Colorado, many employers say they couldn't manage without immigrant workers.

"I don't know how I would operate my business," said Jim Bridge, a Summit County hotel manager.

Trabajo - work - brought Rosa to Summit County.

Rosa, 32, came to the U.S. from Mexico nine years ago without documents.

"I'm not afraid because I'm not the only one," she said in Spanish. "Somos muchos," she added with a toss of her long hair. "We are many."

Until she had her last child three months ago, she worked as a maid in a hotel along Interstate 70 at the Dillon-Silverthorne exit. Her husband still works in maintenance there.

"Ten years ago, there was a big debate about immigrants taking jobs away from natives," said the Urban Institute's Passel.

But today, he said, "almost all of the economists think that there's not a real displacement effect."

The Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan Washington-based group, estimates there were 5.3 million undocumented workers nationwide last year. That's 4 percent of the nation's workforce. More than half of all undocumented workers come to the U.S. from Mexico, Pew found.

Those include people like 25-year-old Octavio, who switches construction specialties as opportunities arise. Octavio came to Leadville from Mexico, via California, in April. Labor that fetches only $7 per hour in California goes for $10 an hour in ski country, said Octavio, an undocumented immigrant who supports his wife, Viviana, and two young children on his wages.

Schools: Almost 30,000 new

A 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling entitles all immigrant children to a free public education, regardless of their parents' legal status.

One indicator of the immigrant population's effect on school budgets is a state Department of Education program that pays about $205 per student to districts that enroll children of migrant workers.

Program officials don't ask whether parents are in Colorado illegally.

To date, the program has located almost 30,000 students whose parents come from other states or countries to perform seasonal work. Of those, at least 8,348 travel between Colorado and Mexico.

The Denver school system calculates its yearly cost per student at $6,206. By that yardstick, Colorado spends at least $50 million a year to educate migrant children from Mexico alone.

Moreover, the state program has just begun searching for migrant children in the Interstate 70 corridor, where foreign-born populations mushroomed during the 1990s.

In northeast Denver, an affordable-housing boom helped bring about 8,000 new Hispanic residents to the Montbello neighborhood during the 1990s, census data show.

Three new elementary schools have opened there in the past four years. A new middle school admitted students this fall while it was still under construction.

The Jessie W. Maxwell School opened in 1998. There, a semicircle of second-graders sits politely each morning before Doris Nelson, absorbing, one word at a time, a new language.

One recent day they learned English words for colors, clothing and body parts.

Raising an eager hand, Jovanny translated his teacher's words. "What are pants?" "Pantalones," he said. "Shirt?" "Camisa." "Petticoat?" "Fondo."

"Do boys wear that?" she asked.

Jovanny scooted backward, looking shocked, then laughed. "No," he said emphatically, "I don't."

Circle time is reserved for six of Nelson's second-graders who spoke only Spanish when the school year began. All are from Mexico, and except for Jovanny, all are new this year. Nelson also teaches 25 Spanish-speaking first-graders; 22 came from Mexico.

Nelson grew up in Puerto Rico and New York, moving permanently to the United States as a young mother. Her first child, who was 5 then, is now finishing a doctorate at Harvard.

"When my kids came, they were monolingual Spanish-speaking. I think, given the right environment, children can do great things," Nelson said.

The school where Nelson teaches is named for Colorado's first African-American principal. When it opened, 80 to 90 percent of the students were black, principal Robert Woodson said. Four years later, he estimates 40 percent are Hispanic.

In four years, Maxwell has expanded bilingual classes from one grade to all grades. It offers bonuses of up to $5,000 to Spanish-speaking teachers. Its librarian recently stood in line at a Denver hotel to compete with colleagues for hard-to-get, expensive Spanish-language books.

Mountain schools that suddenly need bilingual teachers range from Silverthorne, where nearly half the students speak a language other than English, to Eagle County, where Hispanic children accounted for virtually all enrollment growth during the past four years.

Crime: Prison proportion rises

In the Colorado prison system, the percentage of foreign-born inmates has grown slightly in recent years.

As of Sept. 30, 6.1 percent of Colorado's prison population - 1,126 of 18,382 inmates - was foreign-born. Of those, 708, or 4 percent of state prisoners, had "active INS detainers," and 558, or 3 percent of inmates, were Mexicans with INS detainers, said Kristi Rosten, an analyst for the Department of Corrections.

An INS detainer means the state cannot discharge a prisoner without notifying immigration officials first.

What is unclear is how many foreign-born inmates reached Colorado illegally. Colorado gets federal money from the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, but Rosten said federal officials do not disclose how many of its inmates are illegal immigrants.

The federal reimbursement is a small portion of the state's average inmate costs of $74.66 a day, she said.

For 708 foreign-born inmates with active INS detainers, that would come to about $19 million a year; for all 1,126 foreign-born inmates, $30 million a year.

In the past year, the state prison system has received $4.1 million in federal assistance.

A Post comparison of Denver neighborhood crime trends and census data found no evidence that Latino immigration boosted the number of reported felonies. In fact, crime rates dropped in neighborhoods where the Hispanic population grew as much as 692 percent in 10 years.

The results showed:

* Overall crime rates declined in the 10 neighborhoods with the highest Latino growth rates.

* None of the 10 Denver neighborhoods with the highest crime rates last year had high Latino growth rates during the 1990s.

* In general, the Hispanic population mushroomed on the east side of Denver while crime intensified in poor neighborhoods on the west side.

This comes as no surprise to people like Johnny Romano, the owner of Mr. Bail Bonds.

"Drugs. Drugs. It's all drugs," he said, steering his mauve Cadillac through a neighborhood where bail calls come often.

Asked to name the worst crime spot in Denver, Romano points out the driver's side to a neighborhood west of Federal Boulevard.

Romano has fingered Sun Valley, which had the highest crime rate of any Denver neighborhood last year. Census data show Sun Valley's Hispanic population declined in the 1990s.

In Silverthorne, where census takers counted 32 times as many foreign-born residents in 2000 as in 1990, police saw no increase in the crime rate.

Police Chief John Patterson finds the town's new Hispanics - particularly illegal immigrants - reluctant to report neighborhood crime.

"They're pretty much invisible, and they really don't report things that you or I might," he said.

"The type of crime we see being committed there, basically it's domestic violence. It's DUI. It's the same stuff everybody else is doing."

Ari Zavaras, a former Denver police chief and state corrections chief now running for mayor of Denver, said crime rates rise and fall with the economy, not immigration.

"I have never noticed crime being disproportionate due to immigration," he said.

Health care: Clinics fill gap

Just as immigrants, especially those lacking documents, can be reluctant to report crime, they tend to avoid the health-care system. That's partly because little health care is available: Medicaid changed its rules in the mid-1990s to limit noncitizens to emergency care.

A variety of free and low-cost clinics statewide provide basic care. However, for medical problems that go beyond the basics but fall short of saving lives, undocumented immigrants are out of luck.

Take the young woman sitting slump-shouldered at the Salud Family Health Center clinic in Commerce City.

The woman was embarazada, or pregnant, a development that would complicate her 25-year-old life.

As an undocumented immigrant, she is ineligible under Medicaid for even basic prenatal care. If the woman, a factory worker who would not give her name, has her baby in this country, hospitals will accept her only if she shows up at the emergency room in labor.

It was cheaper when Medicaid could provide preventive care, said Leighton Ku, a senior fellow with the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

"If you wait until you have to go to the emergency room, in many cases, that's more expensive," he said.

So, out of necessity, clinics like Salud focus on prevention.

"If I can keep this diabetic patient out of the hospital, it's cheaper for everybody in the long run," said Don Gutstadt, director of Salud's Commerce City clinic. The patient to whom he referred, a 48-year-old man who came from Mexico a decade ago, is undocumented.

So far, said the patient - who would not give his name - his lack of papers hasn't really posed a problem. As long as he can stay healthy, he said, he'll be fine.

The pregnant woman agreed. Then she remembered her changed circumstances. She put her hand on her stomach. "Now," she said in Spanish, "I don't know."

If the woman has her baby in Colorado, the child will be a citizen and become part of the increasing population whose presence causes so much controversy.

"This issue, for me, holds enormous intellectual allure. It's not just an issue of jobs or too darn many people who don't speak the same language," said Tancredo. "The implications to each one of these things are enormous. They at least deserve debate."

-- Anonymous, November 17, 2002