WASHINGTON — A proposed immigration overhaul to be unveiled on Capitol Hill this week would, if passed, affect almost every aspect of Colorado’s economy — from its eastern and western agricultural borders to the high-technology grid in Boulder and the high mountain tourism industry.
It would help dairy and peach farmers more efficiently bring in the skilled help they need by reconstructing a failed visa system.
It would allow the foreign-born University of Colorado engineering graduate to stay in state and work in the high-tech sector if she wants to.
It would give agricultural workers and undocumented kids who have graduated from Colorado high schools a rapid path to citizenship, if they don’t have criminal records.
And it would allow for all of the 11 million undocumented people currently living in the U.S. to pay back taxes and eventually apply for citizenship.
Some half a million people in Colorado are immigrants, both with and without papers to be in the country legally. Of those, 300,000 have jobs and collectively contributed $42 billion to the state’s economy in 2011.
“This broken immigration system was affecting every corner of our economy in our state,” said Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat, who is one of the eight chief authors — four Democrats, four Republicans — of the proposal. “It is affecting them in different ways. The peach growers have one view of things, the cattle ranchers had another, the immigrant-rights community had another, the ski resorts and the high-tech community, all of them are being hurt by the broken system.”
From those various perspectives, everyone has a different wish, which made this massive undertaking a delicate compromise between political, regional and interest groups.
Take Mary Kraft, a co-owner of Badger Creek Farm and Quail Ridge Dairy in Fort Morgan.
She has 75 employees and, without paging through every employee record, she says probably 20 were born in the United States.
Kraft needs immigrant workers who are skilled in animal husbandry, and she wants them to be able to stay. Taking care of cows is a year-round job. Every employee is expensive to train in handling cattle, and any major churn costs her money.
“It’s an interesting way of life,” Kraft said. “Not everyone thinks it is fabulous. … From an economic standpoint, immigration really makes agriculture move, and agriculture is the bedrock of all of how the whole state comes together.”
John Brackney wants consistency.
The CEO of the South Metro Denver Chamber said the business community desires stability so it can plan for the future.
“There’s too many unknown questions in everything these days, and it’s been difficult to plan the capital resources and hiring if we’re not sure what the law is going to be,” he said. “We just want a fair, straightforward solution. A rational compromise. We prefer a fairly rapid resolution of this, and then let’s go onto the next issue we can add consistency to.”
From his tours around the state, Bennet said the issue is so pivotal to the economy that, if passed, “it will be a very compelling statement that the United States of America is governed by the rule of law and is a nation of immigrants.”
In order for the Senate immigration proposal to become law, it will need to pass the Senate, the GOP-controlled House of Representatives and be signed by the president.
The final bill comes after a group of eight Republican and Democratic senators — including Bennet — have been toiling on the language with interest groups since December.
The last compromises were just agreed on over the weekend, and the specifics won’t be unveiled until Tuesday, though some details have been leaked:
It proposes a decade-long road to citizenship for much of the current undocumented population — and a quicker path for agricultural workers and kids who are graduating from American high schools.
It is meant to shed much of the current bureaucratic obstacles to obtain temporary work visas for places like ski resorts and farms, which need more workers at certain times of the year.
And the proposal would call for strengthening security along the nation’s southwest border with Mexico and creating a better employment verification system so business owners can effectively check whether a worker has papers.
The bipartisan effort, ugly at times and not without drama throughout the process, was four months in the making and negotiated mostly among the eight senators themselves — not their staffs.
“The four Democrats and four Republicans have approached this in absolutely good faith in every moment of the negotiations,” Bennet said. “To have the opportunity to be in a room where there is no partisanship, there was literally no partisanship. People were trying to solve each other’s problems, political problems, regional problems, for the good of the country. We need more of that.”
Besides Bennet, senators in the gang were Republicans Marco Rubio of Florida, Jeff Flake and John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Democrats Dick Durbin of Illinois, Chuck Schumer of New York and Bob Menendez of New Jersey.
Bennet said the gang has taken a sort of “blood oath” to not support adds and major amendments to the bill once it’s released in order “to keep a very complicated and complex deal intact.”
“It is unusual commitment but it reflects the complexity of the negotiation,” among Republicans, Democrats and all the various interest groups, from the unions to the Chamber of Commerce to the fruit growers, he said.
Bruce Talbott, who owns peach orchards in Palisade, said he seeks a “benevolent” system that honors the workers and the farmers.
Talbott has talked to Bennet about his roadblocks with the current visa system, which has forced him to hire out-of-work construction workers instead of the usual farmhands from Latin America who have years of experience.
He said the slow economy has delivered those laborers but that they have had to learn the peach business only to leave it as soon as construction picks up.
Talbott desires the certainty that he can count on a group of workers to arrive who know what they’re doing — from the early spring pruning to the full-time 60-hour-a-week harvest.
He pays his workers between $9 and $15 an hour, depending on their job.
“I want a program that treats growers well, workers well and that everyone uses,” he said. “However it’s sliced and diced is less important to me.”
Allison Sherry: 202-662-8907, asherry@denverpost.com or twitter.com/allisonsherry
