Grand Junction, CO – A few years ago, an article ran in the Denver Post about prison inmates who loved to work in the fields with their bare hands at centavos each hour. The article, clearly a farce on our broken immigration system, suggested the arrangement was a solution to getting rotting crops out of the ground. Legal migrant workers, as well as undocumented workers, were avoiding Colorado after reports of aggressive enforcement. Farm owners suffered huge losses because they could not find enough labor to salvage their crops. Perhaps forced labor worked in Russia after the second world war. Using prison labor to prop up a workforce is not a hallmark of a democratic society because it encourages the creation of more criminal laws in order to incarcerate more people for the sole purposes of building a workforce.
CLUB 20, a business advocacy group for Colorado’s 22 Western Counties where the shortage of this labor was prominent, passed a resolution supporting the “bipartisan nature” and “broad coalition” of the Senate’s immigration overhaul bill. The bill was written by the bipartisan “Gang of 8” Senators that included Colorado U. S. Senator Michael Bennet.
The CLUB 20 resolution, which was passed by unanimous consent at today’s fall meeting of the CLUB 20 Board, encouraged the Colorado Congressional delegation to support the principles of the bill.
That immigration bill, which passed the Senate in June, makes important fixes to an outdated visa system, provides significantly more tools and resources to secure the border, establishes a sensible system for the future flow of immigration, and creates a tough but fair path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The immigration bill passed the Senate in June with a bipartisan 68-32 vote. The House of Representatives at first proposed a conservative form of immigration reform that leaves over 50% of immigrants out reform. However, even the conservative proposals have not been allowed to move forward in the House.
“There’s no place more affected by our broken immigration system than the West Slope,” Bennet said. “From peach growers to tourism companies to local businesses, our Western Slope communities are hurt by our country’s immigration policies. The rest of our state is also suffering – ranchers on the Eastern Plains, high-tech companies along the Front Range, and ski resorts in our mountain towns. Colorado needs an immigration system that works for us, not against us, and CLUB 20, by virtue of its vote today, recognizes this salient fact.”
“CLUB 20 represents the interests of Colorado’s western counties. Those counties are hurt by our country’s broken immigration system,” Steve Reynolds, Chair of Club 20, said. “Something needs to be done. Some fix needs to be made, and while the Senate’s immigration bill might not be perfect, it’s a good compromise that will help Western Colorado. The alternative – doing nothing and maintaining the status quo – is not acceptable.”
Senator Michael Bennet has been at the forefront of immigration reform. In personal conversations and sometime publicly, he speaks about his own family history in immigrating to the U.S. Immigrants have made America what it is, including Alexander Graham Bell, and in more recent times, Google through it's co-founder, Sergey Brin. Reform would pass in the U.S. House with strong bi-partisan support if it could get to the floor for a vote. A few conservative Republicans are holding up the reform bill.
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