Colorado Employers Seek to Protect Illegal Workers

Past the tables of a small restaurant, behind the cash register and beyond the pie display, Apolonio washes the lunch dishes.

The 18-year-old illegal immigrant from Nayarit, Mexico, earns his living without fear of being deported. “No me preocupa la Migra” --”I’m not worried about the INS,” he said in Spanish.

Apolonio is one of hundreds of legal and illegal Latin American immigrants who constitute most of the menial workers at the upscale ski resorts of Colorado’s Rockies.

Earning a starting wage of $9 an hour, they live in communities like Carbondale, 25 miles northwest of Aspen, where 600-square-foot apartments rent for about $800 a month. Many share homes so they will have extra cash to send to families back home.

They have become a powerful force in resort country, where businesses struggle to find workers in an economy that boasts a 2% to 3% unemployment rate.

Residents in the Roaring Fork Valley have gone to extensive lengths to protect them, even refusing to allow the Immigration and Naturalization Service to open an office here.

“That was driven by Aspen and 25,000 pillows and beds that have to be changed and those people fed,” Mayor Randy Vanderhurst said of the campaign.

INS officials estimate 45,000 people are in Colorado illegally, filling jobs that residents don’t need or want--dishwashers, maids, construction workers.

As part of a nationwide crackdown on illegal immigrants, the INS last year wanted to install a quick-response team in western Colorado to stop smuggling and deport those convicted of criminal activity.

Members of the Aspen-based Public Counsel of the Rockies hired a lawyer, who defeated the INS by arguing that its plan to build an office violated zoning codes.

Mike McGarry, a commercial building maintenance worker, supported the INS, contending that undocumented workers keep wages down. “Instead of allowing the market to work its way, now what they’re saying is, ‘We’re going to pay the foreign nationals, and we don’t care if they’re legal or illegal,’ ” he said.

INS regional director Joe Greene said residents in Sioux City, Iowa, and Dalton, Ga., raised similar concerns but did not block efforts to establish quick-response offices.

Residents there, as in Carbondale, have asked INS agents to help immigrants process paperwork instead of working to deport them.

“It’s menial things that people talk about, but they are very essential to how things are run,” said Roger Gomez, who represents GOP Rep. Scott McInnis in the rambling district that holds most major resorts. “We have a problem . . . in relation to labor shortages.”

McInnis is developing a program to allow city and county officials to help process documents for illegal immigrants who would qualify for legal status.

“We lack the legal seasonal force to meet the basic needs,” Gomez said. “If we’re fair in our approach, we can have those immigrants pay their fair share of taxes and get this labor shortage fixed.”

In other states struggling to find workers, lawmakers are working to increase the number of work visas that can be issued for nontechnical jobs.

Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Democrat, wants exemptions to immigration quotas to attract workers for its meatpacking plants. Arizona Gov. Jane Dee Hull, a Republican, wants to bring back the World War II-era bracero program, under which Mexicans picked U.S. crops as guest workers.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, the INS has opened an office in Glenwood Springs, 12 miles northwest of Carbondale, where four agents focus on stopping migrant smuggling along Interstate 70 and deporting illegal immigrants convicted of crimes. Other offices have opened in Alamosa, Brush and Craig, while additional agents were assigned to Grand Junction.

By the end of September, 27 quick-response teams were set up in offices in 11 states, including Colorado. An additional 11 offices will be leased or built by January, said Nancy Cohen of INS headquarters in Washington, D.C. Another 11 are to have space leased or built by January, including the one in Glenwood Springs. Seven offices in other states received extra agents.

“The truth of the matter is, these people are willing to come to America to do the type of work they’re doing,” said Scott Sutton, a landscape construction supervisor with Colorado Springs-based Niebur Golf Inc., which built a golf course in Eagle last summer. “The white guy doesn’t want to get paid $9 to $10 for bagging groceries.”

Sutton suspects many workers he supervises are undocumented.

“They’re not our first choice, but our best choice,” he said.