Colo town shapes immigration view
YUMA, Colorado, Oct 19, (AP): The dilemma faced by Republican Senate candidate Cory Gardner over immigration reform is evident in his hometown of Yuma on Colorado’s high plains.
The Republican congressman’s race against Democratic Sen. Mark Udall is one of the key battlegrounds as Republicans seek to pick up the six seats needed to take control of the Senate. Colorado is the only state this year with both a competitive Senate race and a sizable population of Hispanic voters. Yuma is Colorado in a microcosm. The town, like the state, has been transformed by Latin American immigrants who have arrived to open businesses, labor in fields and hog farms, and take seats in public school classrooms. They have been welcomed — the Yuma town council in 2010 urged Congress to pass immigration reform legislation — and met with suspicion.
Andrea Hermosillo, a high school junior, lives only a few blocks from Gardner’s home in Yuma. This summer, she rode for hours to protest at Gardner’s main office in esn’t have to look far from his hometown the doorstep Andrea Hermosillo rode for hours to protest at Gardner’s main office, in a city closer to Denver in the congressman’s sprawling eastern Colorado district. She took part in a sit-in to demand that he support granting citizenship to many of the 11 million people living in the US illegally.
Important
“It was kind of weird, but it felt we had to be there,” Hermosillo said. “It’s important he know that it’s people in his town who feel this way.”
Bill Breithauer also lives in Yuma. The 72-year-old retired farmer has known Gardner since the two-term congressman was a child.
As Breithauer nursed a coffee at Yuma’s central gathering spot, a restaurant called The Main Event, he made it clear that he thinks what Hermosillo wants is outrageous. “How are they going to give them citizenship if they don’t speak the language and they’re up to no good?” Breithauer asked. “Cory’s all right. He knows what’s what.”
This is the riddle for Gardner in his race against Udall. The Democratic senator has called on President Barack Obama to limit deportations of people living illegally in the US, and he voted for a Senate bill that eventually would have granted them citizenship. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives did not vote on the Senate bill or any other immigration reform legislation. Gardner has straddled the fence. He opposes the Senate bill, but speaks warmly of immigrants. It’s an indication of how he has been shaped by his town and his place in a party where supporting an immigration overhaul is a political risk.
Gardner regularly tells a story of meeting a high school valedictorian who was waiting tables at a small-town diner in his district. He told her she had a bright future; she told him she was brought into the country illegally and couldn’t go to college.
Waiting
The following year, Gardner passed through the town again. The girl was still there, still waiting tables. “If you’re looking at the way our criminal justice system works, we don’t charge a 2-year-old or a 3-year-old with the same crime as adults,” Gardner said. “I have known them for a very long time, whether it’s just the people I’ve gotten to know through living in the community or its people my daughter goes to school with.”
Yet Gardner opposed legislation that would have let those young immigrants live in the US legally. He did change course this summer and voted against efforts to repeal a program that lets some who came to the US illegally as children stay in the country.
He has called for increased border security, a guest worker program and citizenship for people brought here illegally who serve in the military, but hasn’t gotten more specific.
“Cory Gardner has made the calculation that he can say a few nice things, fool enough voters and get away with this,” said Patty Kupfer of the immigration reform advocacy group America’s Voice, which supports the Senate bill.
Udall has hammered Gardner on the issue, even though in 2005, when immigration played less favorably in Colorado, Udall voted for a Republican bill that would have made being in the country illegally a felony.
“He’s said we should take immigration reform in steps,” Udall said at a recent debate. “Well, he hasn’t taken one step to move immigration to the finish line.”
Gardner’s combination of warmth and hesitation makes sense at The Main Event in Yuma, a town of 3,200 that began to change in the 1990s as Mexicans from northern Chihuahua state, were drawn by the area’s new hog farms and dairies.