Immigration

Who’s in Charge of Immigration?

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By Ed Quillen

Sometimes I feel derelict in my duties as a citizen. For instance, I avoided paying much attention to the recent arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court about the Affordable Care Act. Like everyone else, I have only so much attention, and I’d rather focus it on things I might be able to do something about. It’s not as though you can write to a Supreme Court justice the way you can write to your congressman (although our congressman has never paid any attention to anything I’ve written).

Further, often it’s easy to predict how the U.S. Supreme Court will rule: 5-4 in favor of Money. This goes back some years. Colorado used to have a law that banned paid petition circulators. It made sense to me; if the state has the power to forbid the buying and selling of votes, why not the power to forbid the buying and selling of petition signatures?

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From the Editor

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“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” – Emma Lazarus

 

This excerpt from The New Colossus appears on a bronze tablet that resides in the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. It is very likely that statue was the first sign to welcome each one of my grandparents to their new home back in the 1890s.

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Why do Mexicans migrate to the U.S.?

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Sidebar by Nancy Hiemstra

Immigration – September 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine

Current immigration trends from Mexico to the United States can be most directly tied to changes in the global economy in the last 40 years. In the 1960s and ’70s, Mexico and other Latin American countries were encouraged by the Western world to borrow heavily in order to develop national industry and infrastructure. It was easy to get loans because the profiting OPEC countries deposited a lot of their profits in U.S. banks as the world’s oil dependence grew; and these banks, in turn, gave huge loans to developing countries at variable interest rates, which were initially very low.

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The Community Immigration Initiative

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Sidebar by Nancy Hiemstra

Immigration – September 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine

In 2004, a local non-profit organization in Leadville, Full Circle Youth and Family Services, applied to join the Colorado Trust’s Immigrant Integration initiative. After an intense selection process, Leadville was designated as one of the Trust’s ten Immigrant Integration Communities. Consequently, the Trust is giving Lake County $75,000 each year through 2009 to foster integration.

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Modern Leadville: Two worlds, one town

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Article by Nancy Hiemstra

Immigration – September 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine

AS THOUSANDS OF TOURISTS drive through Leadville every year, they likely remember it as an Old West mining town. They pass signs inviting them to visit local museums, take a train ride, and walk on the Mineral Belt Trail. Some might notice there are several stores with Spanish names, and fewer still will observe that the trailer parks outside of town are mainly populated by Latinos.

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Ambition and Immigrants

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Column by George Sibley

Immigration – September 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine

ONE OF MY ALL-TIME FAVORITE Coloradans is former Governor Dick Lamm. There’s never a dull moment around the Guv; he makes us think about the things we need to be thinking about, usually by taking a strong and extreme stance himself — as when he suggested some years ago that, rather than trying to live forever in a useless dotage, aging Americans had an obligation to “move over” and make room for the succeeding generations. And he always gets all the howls of conventional knee-jerk outrage you would expect from the generally ahistorical and thoughtless masses of an immensely wealthy, arrogant and increasingly fragile imperial culture driving relentlessly toward its decline and fall but not wanting the closing party interrupted yet with reality.

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Bring your birth certificate

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Letter from Marianne Dugan

Immigration – July 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine

Editors,

Calling immigrants from south of the border “illegal aliens” is too Roswellian for me. How about using a more descriptive term, like economic refugees. This might serve to remind the more mean-spirited among us that refugees have other, more pressing concerns than regional borders.

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Too many chiefs

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Letter from Slim Wolfe

Immigration – June 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine

Too many chiefs

Dear Editors:

I’d like to thank the Book Haven and all who made the Earth Day Sustainability Fair a success. Notable, however, was the lack of participants from the ag sector. As everywhere, we seem to have too many chiefs, not enough Indians. Vendors and management and preaching can get us started, but we all need to follow through. New approaches to education are essential, so thanks to the folks who represented Waldorf schooling.

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Perfecting escapism

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Letter from Slim Wolfe

Immigration – May 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine

Editors:

After reading Hal Walter’s excellent bit of political hackery (as he calls it) on immigrant labor, three questions come to mind which rarely get asked:

1) Why do we in the U.S. think we deserve more drudge labor than we can provide without outside help?

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Immigration is purely an economic issue

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Letter from Paul Martz

Immigration – May 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine

Editors

My first reaction to reading Hal Walter’s column in the April edition, even after reading the postscript apology, was one of disbelief. I quite frankly found his apparent conclusions about the current illegal alien situation to be abhorrent. He seems to be saying that all other legitimate considerations aside, it’s OK to exploit these people if it’s for the good of the economy.

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Talkin’ ’bout our immigration

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Essay by Martha Quillen

Immigration – May 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine

ON THE NATIONAL FRONT, immigration has clearly been a leading issue. But in Salida, it hasn’t quite caught up with Christo’s curtains. Hal Walter’s last column, however, sure brought it home to us. Hal wrote, “To me, any opposition to immigration seems rooted more in racism than in economics.” And in response, numerous people called to tell us how wrong he was.

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We don’t need no stinkin’ fence

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Column by Hal Walter

Immigration -April 2006 -Colorado Central Magazine

ONE OF THE MOST TROUBLING THINGS about pending U.S. immigration reform legislation is the provision to build a fence along the border with Mexico.

The prospect of such a fence speaks volumes about the social changes in our country. Just two decades ago President Reagan called on Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” Now in an age when a seemingly no-brainer personal freedom issue like gay marriage can make or break an election, we have the recent political storm over immigration in a nation made up of immigrants and descendants of immigrants.

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One migration solution

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Letter from Slim Wolfe

Immigration – January 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine

Ed,

The solution to your migration dilemma might just be the policies of the present administration. If we destroy the middle class and break the cycle of upward social mobility, or better, if we land in a great depression, there will be no more jobs in service industries or agriculture, nor will there be any motivation for the world’s disadvantaged to come here in search of an economic bonanza. Those of us with retreat cabins (as in your cover story) will retreat, and the rest will become trash-recyclers. It’s happening today in Buenos Aires, they even run special trains for the dumpster entrepreneurs and their booty. As our Patriot Acts continue to lessen our civil liberties those furriners won’t even have the lure of freedom to bring them here. Couple that with the great mass of dead protoplasm created in Iraq which may, in 300 million years replenish our petroleum reserves, and you’ll have to admit we’re sitting pretty.

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