Border wars personal out West

Victims or criminals? Emotions run strong and deep when talking about illegal immigrants, and sometimes the rhetoric is harsh. In Greeley, residents Ricardo Romero, above, and Joy Breuer, left, are on opposite sides of the immigration debate, seen by some as one of the most important issues facing the United States. Here in the West, where the Latino population has exploded over the past two decades, the topic holds particular power. But are presidential candidates addressing immigration in a way that will move voters? Or are they failing to provide what so many voters seem to want answers — in favor of vague talking points?

GREELEY — When Joy Breuer looks around her hometown, she sees two kinds of immigrants: “the good Mexicans” and “the Latinos.”

By her definition, good Mexicans “come to America to become U.S. citizens, become a part of the community. They work very hard to learn the language. They show a lot of respect to everyone as well. They just want to be an American.”

The Latinos? “The Latinos are here to establish another Mexico,” she said. “That was their goal: to make Spanish the second language — and then the first language — of this country.”

Breuer, who runs the Greeley for God ministry, stands at one end of the polarized debate about the millions of people who have streamed across the southern border of the United States in search of a better life.

From the office she calls “God’s House” to presidential campaign stops across the country, the debate over immigration policy has taken on a harsh tone. It has been particularly heated in the West, where Rocky Mountain states have witnessed a huge surge in immigrants and Colorado U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo made illegal immigration the centerpiece of his now-ended presidential campaign.

In a poll conducted for The Denver Post, Republican voters in Colorado ranked immigration second only to the economy as a presidential campaign issue and rated Mitt Romney — one of the severest critics of illegal immigration — as the best candidate on the issue.

Colorado Democrats rated immigration as much less important than the economy, the war in Iraq, health care and the environment.

“It makes sense to me that Republicans will be talking about immigration a lot more than Democrats,” said Katy Atkinson, a Republican political consultant.

It’s “a very, very tricky issue,” she said, because voters who call illegal immigration their top issue differ about the right policy response. But as Greeley recently demonstrated by ousting a mayor who criticized raids that arrested illegal immigrants at work, “it could be deadly if voters see you on the ‘wrong’ side of that issue.”

Breuer, a voter who counts illegal immigration as the paramount issue of 2008, is leaning toward Romney.

Another side

Ricardo Romero, a veteran Latino activist in Greeley, stands at the other end of the immigration debate.

While promises of deportation may please some voters in the primaries, he expects they will prove costly to Republicans in the general election.

“If you want to win in California, if you want to win in New York, Texas, Illinois, Arizona, Florida, you have to court the Hispanic vote,” he said. “So we’ll see if we’re adept enough at paying back. And I think we are. Our people are going to leave the Republican Party.”

In this presidential campaign, most Republican candidates have emphasized building a border fence, penalizing employers and cities that provide jobs and sanctuary to illegal immigrants and deporting illegal immigrants who commit crimes.

“The current system puts up a concrete wall to the best and brightest, yet those without skill or education are able to walk across the border,” Romney said.

Candidate Mike Huckabee also promises to send illegal immigrants home. “If illegals cannot find work, they will go back where they belong,” he said. “I will do everything I can to hasten their trip home by denying them employment.”

Democratic candidates have echoed the call for better enforcement, but they advocate creating a path to citizenship for immigrants already living and working in the United States.

“We need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace,” Sen. Barack Obama said in response to a Denver Post questionnaire. “But for reform to work, we must also respond to what pulls people to America. Where we can reunite families, we should. Where we can bring in more foreign-born workers with the skills our economy needs, we should.”

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton responded that she favors “a path to earned legalization to undocumented immigrants who are willing to work hard, play by the rules, learn English and pay fines.”

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the lone Westerner left in the presidential race, has drawn fire in the Republican primaries for co-sponsoring an immigration reform bill with Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy that combined border enforcement with an “essential worker” visa program.

One looming question is whether voters angry about illegal immigration will outnumber Latino voters who perceive the backlash as a racial attack.

In one year, a Pew Research Center survey found, the gap between Latinos identifying themselves as Democrats and Republicans jumped 13 percentage points, giving Democrats a 34-point advantage. The survey also noted that Latinos make up a sizable share of voters in four “swing states” that George W. Bush narrowly carried in 2004: Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Florida.

Offering help to others

In Greeley, Breuer and her husband provide free meals to the needy each Sunday in a local park, including Spanish-speaking people who might be in the country illegally. She doesn’t ask a hungry man about his immigration status.

At the same time, she blames illegal immigrants for a slew of community ills, from gang violence to crowded emergency rooms to deteriorating schools.

She applauded the federal raids in December 2006 that rounded up 1,282 Swift & Co. meatpacking plant workers in Greeley and other cities.

Fifteen months after the raids, Ricardo Romero is still assisting families of 32 workers who chose to contest their arrests. He and others have been helping them survive on donations of soap, toothpaste, clothing, diapers and $100-a-month food cards.

“The sad thing about this, they were arrested in December 2006 and they’ve been given court dates in September and October of 2008,” he said. “They can’t leave the jurisdiction of the court. And they can’t work because they’re undocumented.”

Romero said “this incredible backlash against the Mexican people” has offended Latino residents like him who have lived here for generations. “All of us — all the Mexican population in the United States — have relatives that are undocumented. They’re married to nieces, married to nephews, married to aunts.”

Political fallout

Tom Selders knows the potency of the backlash vote firsthand.

He was mayor of Greeley for two terms, winning easily with 65 percent of the vote in 2005. But after the Swift raids, he went to Washington last year to protest the federal treatment of illegal immigrant workers.

“People with leg irons and handcuffs — was that really necessary?” Selders asked in a recent interview. “Is this what our country is about? This is something from the Third World or the Middle East. We don’t need this grandstanding.”

Selders won just 39 percent of the vote in his quest for a third term. He was accused of being soft on crime, especially crimes committed by illegal immigrants. One group distributed fliers suggesting Selders was good for gang business.

“It’s the reason I was defeated. There’s that emotion in the community,” he said.

Selders, who calls himself “a not very good” Republican, said he has been disappointed by the tenor of the immigration debate in the 2008 campaign.

“We need to talk about it. We need solutions,” he said. “People are here as a result of a failed federal policy. We can’t deport 12 million people. There’s not the political will. In Colorado, what would that do to our tourist industry? What would that do to our agriculture?”

As immigration reform proposals stalled in Congress, legislators introduced hundreds of state immigration bills, creating a patchwork of laws.

Fierce legislative battles erupted in Arizona, whose southern border became the favored crossing site after federal agents clamped down on border cities in Texas and California.

As record numbers of illegal immigrants poured across the Arizona desert in the 1990s, Phoenix became a warehousing hub for a nationwide network of immigrant and drug smugglers.

In response, Arizona has passed laws denying public benefits and bail on felony charges to illegal immigrants.

Colorado, Utah and Nevada also passed new laws restricting benefits to illegal immigrants, and Colorado and Arizona forbade employers to knowingly hire them.

Roxana Bacon, a retired immigration lawyer in Phoenix, said the responsibility for immigration “is exclusively federal, and they have just blown it.”

Yet in the 2008 campaign, “I don’t think any of the presidential candidates have proposed comprehensive immigration responses,” she said.

Meanwhile, “it has become a racial issue: brown-skinned people who don’t speak English. This is ugly. We should know better by now,” she said. “It breaks my heart to see my country disintegrating into people throwing rocks at each other.”

Western issues

States across the West are coveted in this election cycle, but are candidates speaking to issues that matter to voters in those states? In three stories, The Post explores issues important to the West.

Today: Immigration

Monday: Housing and the economy

Tuesday: Water and the environment