Olympic Hospitality an Irony for Utah Latinos

To the nieces and nephews he was helping support in Mexico, Gilberto Rejon is a hero. In the eyes of the U.S. government, he is a security threat.

Rejon sneaked across the border four years ago and settled in Salt Lake City, where he was earning $7.25 an hour loading cargo onto airplanes. That is, until December, when he and 68 other undocumented workers at Salt Lake City International Airport were arrested on federal felony charges--a prelude to the blanket of security that has covered this city in advance of the Winter Olympics.

Latino leaders are furious over the indictments, which far exceeded penalties imposed on most other airport workers in crackdowns across the country since Sept. 11. Rejon spent 18 days, including Christmas, in jail. Although it was never alleged that he had any terrorist involvement, Rejon now is considered a criminal and is prohibited from working in the U.S. While he awaits deportation, he tries to think how he will support his wife and two daughters.

“I came here with my family looking for . . . the so-called American dream.” Rejon said. “I don’t own any guns. I don’t drink. I don’t do drugs. I’m a law-abiding citizen here. I pay taxes, regardless of the fact that I’m an illegal immigrant.

“But they handcuffed me in front of my kids. Basically, my dream vanished and my nightmare began.”

Latino populations are booming all over the American South and West, but in few places has there been such a cultural fault line as in Utah, where Latinos--90% of whom are Catholic--have stampeded into the world headquarters of the Mormon church.

And Rejon and the other airport workers have become a potential political embarrassment as Salt Lake City welcomes tens of thousands of visitors--nearly all of whom are staying in hotels and eating in restaurants tended by the Latino immigrants whose numbers have exploded in this overwhelmingly white state over the last six years.

The Latino population in Utah was inconsequential only a decade ago, but the boom that hit Utah’s Wasatch Front in the last half of the 1990s drew flocks of workers from Mexico and other Latin American countries--some of them Mormon converts from church missions abroad. The most recent census showed a 138% increase over the last 10 years, to more than 200,000 people. At current growth rates, Latinos will make up 20% of Utah’s population by 2010 and 40% of Salt Lake City’s. In such places as Park City’s Summit County, home to the major Olympic skiing venues, there was an astounding 638% increase in Latinos.

“Utah now is undergoing what California underwent 20 years ago. We are for the first time experiencing a non-Mormon migration,” said Mike Martinez, a Latino commentator and chairman of the Utah advisory committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The town of Ogden, which is looking at a potential 50% Latino population in the next several years, is now about 75% Mormon, said the Rev. Bob Bussen of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Park City. “Logan is 85%. Provo is 85% or 90%. And you start heading south from there, and it goes up.”

“You have a very, very Mormon community that is interfacing with the Latino community. This is hard stuff we’re dealing with here,” Bussen said. “The Mormon church has always seen the immigrant population as potential converts, and their whole thrust is to convert them. They’ve kind of reached an impasse where the Mexican community doesn’t want to convert, the Mormon community doesn’t really want them there, and they don’t know how to deal with each other.

“It’s not that there’s fighting or conflicts. It’s just that there’s no real interface.”

Conservative Utah legislators have moved to accommodate the growing non-English-speaking population, adopting one of the nation’s first laws that allows undocumented residents to obtain driver’s licenses without Social Security cards and debating measures that would allow children of undocumented parents enrolled in college to pay resident tuition rates and apply for legal residence.

In the glare of Olympic publicity, Salt Lake City also signaled its commitment to raising the profile of Latino issues by designating the mayor’s minority advocate, Robert Archuleta, as “mayor for a day” on Monday at Olympic Village. (The city’s school superintendent, Darline Robles, former superintendent of the Montebello, Calif., school district, also is Latino.)

Yet only 2% of Utah’s teachers are certified to teach non-English-speaking students, although the number should increase substantially in the next few years with efforts now underway. Latino leaders complain of substantial under-funding for alternative language programs in schools, which have been scrambling to maintain basic programs for English-speaking students.

There is only one Latino in the state Legislature, and of more than 100 state trial judges, only a handful are Latino.

And in what some say was a reflection of Utah’s attitude toward the migration, 77% of voters in 2000 approved an English-only ballot initiative.

“Let me say this,” said Ken Thompson of South Ogden, head of an anti-illegal immigration group, “this may be stereotyping, but, if you go to an illegal Mexican working at the airport, and he has access to airplanes, or he’s manning a baggage check or whatever, and an Arab terrorist walks up to him and says, ‘I’ll give you $10,000 if you plant a 9-millimeter on the airplane for me,’ well, here’s an individual who’s never stood up, held his hand over his heart and said, ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag and to the country for which it stands.’ You think that Mexican is going to head south with the 10 grand? You betcha.”

Just such a scenario is possible, said Paul Warner, the U.S. attorney in Utah, who has weathered a storm of criticism for the airport arrests--including statements of condemnation from Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson.

“I make no apologies for it, then or now,” Warner said. “We’re not going to allow anyone, as long as I’m U.S. attorney, to have access to planes when they’ve lied about their INS status, they’ve lied on their FBI application form, they’ve lied on their Social Security status.

“This had nothing to do with targeting Latinos. It’s about protecting my airport. News flash: I’ve got the Olympics coming. I have got to have an airport that’s reasonably safe for hundreds of thousands of international visitors coming. What would have happened if we hadn’t done this and then something happens?”

Most of those indicted in the airport roundup face penalties of up to 40 years in prison and $1.5 million in fines, although sentences for those who have pleaded guilty to a federal charge of making false statements on their badge applications have been reduced in most cases to a few weeks in prison and fines of about $100. The real penalty has been the felony convictions (most immigration cases usually end in simple deportation proceedings), which could mean an end to employment prospects and a permanent bar to legal immigration to the U.S.

Latino advocates say that’s too harsh a penalty for people who have come to take low-paying jobs in the belief that their hard work was wanted. They have wondered publicly why employees, who had to sell their cars, furniture and refrigerators to post bond, were arrested and the employers who hired them were not.

“At this point, they’ve been told by the judge they cannot work and they cannot leave. What are they supposed to do?” asked Frank Cordova of the National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy group.

The arrests quickly became a human drama. Livia Reyes and her husband were both arrested, leaving their 3-month-old baby with no one but a neighbor to look after him. Some breast-feeding mothers and pregnant women were among the arrestees. Warner moved to dismiss 14 such cases on humanitarian grounds.

But for others, there appears no hope of reprieve. “I look at my cases. Did my client work with false documents? Yes. It’s a very difficult case to defend,” said Mark Alvarez, a lawyer representing several of the airport workers. “All I can do is make a moral argument that the problem lies not with our people but with our system, the hypocrisy of allowing people to work here when economic times are good and then treating them harshly when economic times are not so good. A wink and a nod becomes a smack and a kick.”

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 ended political discussions of amnesty for illegal Mexican workers in the U.S. But the subsequent economic downturn had a more insidious effect, Alvarez and others believe. “Some people who may have been willing to consider the possibility of granting some kind of documentation are now no longer willing to,” Alvarez said, “because those workers are now seen as competition.”

What, Latino leaders ask, is to become of the children of the arrested airport workers, many of whom were born in the U.S. and are American citizens?

E. Ortiz, an airport window installer who faces criminal charges, says his year-old son needs surgery and his wife plans to remain in Utah if he is deported. His 5-year-old daughter stopped eating and her nose began bleeding uncontrollably when she saw Ortiz’s arrest on television, he said.

The church has not spoken out on the airport indictments, but senior leaders in recent years have issued strong calls for tolerance and compassion in response to the changing face of the Mormon homeland. Martinez believes this is, in part, a recognition of the substantial growth of Mormonism in non-English-speaking countries.

“The church understands in a way their members don’t that more Mormons speak Spanish now than speak English,” Martinez said.