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♪ (Music playing) ♪ Hi my name is Luige DelPuerto I am the editor of Colorado Politics in the Denver Gazette and I'm also a first generation immigrant.

I started out as a reporter and became editor and then top editor and then publisher of the Arizona Capitol Times which is like Colorado Politics in Arizona.

I was born in southern Philippines and in this coastal village which is a very poor part of the Philippines and when I say poor I mean very though abject poverty.

That is my childhood.

So I went to journalism, I wanted to change the world like every idealistic young man and young woman.

Something like that.

Married my wife Pearl who is a nurse, nurses from the Philippines typically end up in the United States.

That's just the way it goes.

So we knew at some point that we were going to apply for a visa and we were going to go through the process and at some point we were going to get here to the United States.

It was just a matter of time, I wanted to write about corruption, and the political system.

And really hone in my skills as a journalist that ways I was toward the end of my career over there I was one of the national security reporters I covered cool attempts, there are two ongoing wars in the Philippines one a succession movement in the South, and the other is a communist rebellion which is throughout the Archipelago and of course corruption is endemic in the country.

And so I really enjoyed doing that.

But at the end of the day I couldn't allow my wife to go to the United States and not be with her, and that's how I ended up here.

We spent most of our time actually in Arizona.

Which meant I wrote about immigration a whole lot.

A few years ago the company in Denver said hey, do you want to move to Denver so this opportunity came up and we said okay.

Let's go.

The saga, the intractable problem of fixing the border and a "comprehensive solution" to legal and immigration have been around for longer than 20 years.

I think last time we actually did something comprehensive about it and I call it an intractable problem because everybody is trying to do something about it and they are all failing.

The most recent one a comprehensive sort of bipartisan proposal to "fix this problem."

And in the last 16-17 months we've seen that intractable problem from the southern border spillover now into the interior cities of the United States.

And whereas before people in Denver in New York and Chicago and kind of look at the border and say sure, that's your problem.

Or maybe they are not saying that is your problem but they don't really have to deal with this problem.

Now we had to deal with this problem.

We are now directly feeling the physical strain among many strains.

I sort of find myself always on the outside looking in even when I am very close to the subject.

And part of that is as I noted before I'm an immigrant.

The history of humankind is a history of migration.

People have moved from one place to the next, we have settled on islands, we have crossed land bridges and populated continents.

And that migration has often produced peaceful coexistence in some instances.

Integration, cooperation may have some easy alliances.

But also it has produced conflict and war.

But that's the history of the world, that's the history of mankind and I always view immigration or migration as a positive good.

Now if you look at the last hundreds of years of human history which by the way is a very small slither of our history as human beings we are now in this nation state building phase and now we have this country called the United States and sort of going against the grain we think of it that way, if you look at any other country in the world it is based on race, ethnicity, tribal affiliation, common language, shared history.

But the United States is a country saying well maybe we transcend those maybe we are based on this ideal of the individual bestowed with this divine spark if you will.

And that means we have inalienably rights and we as individuals need to be free and so now we are in this country what we are really saying is this ancient impulse that we have to affiliate with our tribe versus this kind of shared ideal, the idea of the United States and often they clash.

But it's also challenging this country is also challenging us to say look, yes, people are migrating.

We welcome them, but we don't have that shared history that other countries have.

I think what we need to do as a country is to find ways so we can emphasize and celebrate the things that unite us more.

These would be the things that differentiate us.

I think it's really important for us to do that.

I truly see this country as a land of opportunity.

Because it has allowed immigrants like me I can identify as a Filipino-American my child can identify as a Filipino-American for example but I would rather that I identify myself as an American per se and I want my child to grow up in a country where you know he's not thinking about race he's not thinking about ethnicity he is not thinking about tribal affiliation.

He's not thinking about the things that we share together and how we can celebrate those.

And how we can promote those and I think it's incumbent on the political leaders not just political leaders but also ordinary citizens and residents, to think of the United States that way.

I often tell my boy you know you think of the future as the blank slate, well I don't look at the future of the black slate I look at the rearview mirror and see what would've been and that's how I think we can navigate the future by looking at what we've done, we have succeeded to do, what we are trying to accomplish still as a journalist my job is to figure out what's happening in society and to figure out what's happening with this problem of migration.

Immigration.

And to present it to our readers in the most straightforward and analytical way that we can.

We want to ask the really difficult questions about what is happening.

We don't want to shy away from exploring those.

I think to view it as a red or blue issue is exactly the wrong prescription for this country.

It's incredibly complex at some level and yet quite simple.

On another level.

My job is to figure out what people are saying, what people are doing and what they are attempting to accomplish and write about it.

I can tell you from my experience from where I came from that tribalism is probably one of the worst things that can happen.

The logical end of tribalism is war and conflict.

And I certainly don't want that for the United States, and I don't want that for my boy.

My name is Violeta Chapin.

I am an Associate Dean and Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder.

I also direct the immigration clinic where students work on immigration related cases under my supervision.

I was very randomly born in Costa Rica.

And I say that because neither one of my parents is from Costa Rica, they just happened to be living there when I was born.

My father is a US citizen.

My mom is originally from El Salvador, and at the time the immigration laws were such that if you had a parent who was a US citizen and you were born outside the United States you're automatically a US citizen so my dad took me to the US Embassy and I've always been a US citizen.

So I was interested in seeing how it is that I could be a lawyer to help people who had sort of less access to justice in whatever way that looks like, and so I graduated from law school, I joined the public defender service for the District of Columbia.

And became a public defender working in DC helping people charged with crimes at all levels sort of starting with misdemeanors and graduating up to felonies, and I loved being a lawyer and standing up in court for folks who sometimes are unable to speak their voice, and so I think it's been a really interesting journey for me to move into the immigration space when I was at the public defender I was one of the few lawyers who spoke Spanish, so I was getting more and more clients who were monolingual Spanish speakers and sometimes they were not citizens of the United States.

So I had to learn about immigration and consequences of criminal convictions.

And then I joined the faculty at CU Boulder in 2009 to teach the criminal defense clinic.

We have clients who were lawful permanent residents.

We have clients who are here on a visa.

We have clients who are completely undocumented.

And we help them navigate a variety of legal proceedings.

Federal government has long been in charge of immigration.

There has to be a sort of formal process for both admitting immigrants and potentially expelling them.

Our Immigration and Nationality Act was created in 1965, it has been something the question of immigration has been something that has been one of the most litigated talked about sometimes very divisive topics in our society the last time we had any real substantive reform to our immigration laws was in 1986 when Pres.

Reagan signed the immigration Reform and Control Act.

It needs to be Congress who changes the laws and we had a tremendous amount of difficulty as a country agreeing on how to reform the laws.

The reason why we have 11 million undocumented people living in the United States is because we have very few lawful ways for people to be able to adjust their status.

We have about 800,000 almost a million dreamers, people refer to themselves as dreamers, they are DACA recipients and so many people have heard of DACA recipients they're young people who were born here in the United States, born in another country but were brought to the United States or arrived in the United States when they were very small.

And they essentially have grown up here in the United States we've had undocumented students enrolled in colleges and universities across the country we've had three undocumented students come to the law school they are these extraordinary young people who we also have been unable as a country to normalize their immigration status, the dream act has always been a bipartisan piece of legislation, it's been introduced in Congress now at least 19 times, and it has failed.

19 times.

So our inability to normalize the status of just the dreamers who according to polls enjoyed an extraordinary amount of bipartisan support, is an example of this country's and this immigration system's inability to address what seems like fairly common sense problems.

Pres.

Obama said it years ago, and I agree with him, which is that every single undocumented student who graduates from college should get a green card, the day they graduate.

That just makes sense.

This sort of question of immigration to the United States affects all of us.

It is definitely something that we've been unable to resolve for a long time and are there ways to put pressure on the system to force people to think about it more?

And I think the arrival of so many thousands of migrants in Denver have forced a lot of us in Colorado to really experience what it's like and what it looks like on a very visceral level.

To have an immigration system that is not properly set up to sort of allow people entry in a dignified and efficient and organized way.

That's why we have this chaos in a way you and I have to say that I am grateful for that, that migrants were bussed to other cities so that we could really begin to talk about this in a way that maybe we had not before.

If anyone has not already they should go volunteer at the migrant clinics that are happening in Denver all day long.

My students and I have gone this semester a few times to the migrant clinics in Denver and one thing that has struck me every single time is the extraordinary volunteers that have all showed up.

They are all different ages they're from all over Colorado, different places in Denver and they are showing up together unpaid on a Tuesday or on a Sunday right, to help strangers people they don't know access a process that will have real tangible benefits for them.

Denver has set up well with the collaboration quite frankly resources from US citizenship and immigration services which is a federal immigration agency to sign up newly arriving migrants for either a work permit or what's called temporary protective status and its extraordinary the USCIS has done this, I have never seen US CIS do this in the way they have and it's been an extraordinary response from our community our local folks to come and see in sort of real-time what it looks like.

There are people who desperately need help and refuge.

And I think in speaking to folks directly about their motivations you learn wow you are not here to just take advantage of America which I think is a lot of people unfortunately think and they would honestly rather be in Venezuela if Venezuela was not in complete economic freefall and if it was not impossible for them to live there and you know most Americans have never experienced that, Colorado has been extraordinarily focused I think on having sort of equitable systems that are available to people who live here, regardless of who they are right, we need to find lawmakers who can come in the middle to figure out ways to normalize the sort of living situation of people who have been here a very long time we are helping all these newly arrived migrants apply for work permits.

It was jarring because we have so many clients in our clinic that have lived here for decades, they have US citizen children, they pay taxes here forever and they have never had the opportunity to even apply for a work permit.

That is just nonsensical to me and I'm glad we are giving the Venezuelan migrants the work permits they need them for sure.

But what about all of our eleven million undocumented essentially neighbors who have lived here for so long they certainly should have at least basic access to that.

And I think there's a good time to be talking about it because a lot of states are experiencing labor shortages and they need employees and everybody would prefer for everyone to be lawful.

I am trying to remain hopeful it will really matter who wins the presidential election and that's something that all of us I think are thinking about who advocate for and care about immigrants so to the extent that we have a president in charge who believes in the importance of immigrants to this country to the history of immigrants in this country I am hopeful that we can come up I think collectively with commonsense solutions.

My name is Julie Echter and I'm the VP of Echter Garden Center in Arvada.

I'm on the board for an organization called CNGA.

It's the Colorado Nursery and Greenhouse Association.

Our job at CNGA is to kind of advocate for our businesses and help them progress and move forward.

I think ever since COVID we have kind of been in this labor shortage where we cannot find people to do the jobs that we need.

We are a very seasonal business.

We go from about 35 year round employees to over 100 in the spring.

So we have to bring on a lot of people really quickly and train them.

But we are small businesses and we obviously cannot offer the perks that a lot of big corporations can.

I live in Edgewater, I'm kinda close to one of the hotels they turned into a shelter so I was watching this migrant crisis play out on my streets and it was really getting to me, just on every corner there was a person holding up a sign saying I need work.

And I was like it just seems like such an obvious connection between all of these people in our industry.

And I was like this seems like it could be the answer to our labor issues.

So I kind of started doing research and I wanted to sponsor people to get their work permits and then bring them into work for us.

Luckily Denver started doing all of these legal clinics where they actually help them do the paperwork and do the fee waiver for them.

But yeah we brought in four people from Venezuela, they have been our best employees probably all year.

They are very dependable and very hard-working and we love them.

So I really wanted to help kind of create a bridge between the migrant population and other businesses in the industry as well.

There's kind of this big Facebook group, it's like Highlands moms and neighbors so that's kind of where I started learning about all of this, I joined that group and there's just so much information on there.

But I reached out to that group and said hey, I want to do this project and kind of connect migrants with jobs in the grain industry so I had a lot of people reach out saying they were working with migrant families.

José and Nikki are husband and wife.

They have a 10-year-old boy.

They came from Venezuela.

They really love plants.

They are amazing and been a great fit.

They live in Arvada so they came in and interviewed with us.

They were awesome and so excited.

But they have been working for us for the last two months now and they are just amazing.

I guess right when we hired Nikki and José I had channel 7 reach out and they wanted to do an interview about Echter's hiring migrant workers.

I was really excited because I had started the project we were calling it the New Roots Project it's a platform to connect migrants and other business that are hiring.

It airs right after they air the story about Denver cutting budgets to help with the migrant crisis.

So after that we just got so much blowback and I was getting emails and really awful Google reviews people saying we are never going to shop with you again.

We don't support this you are taking away jobs from Americans.

I tried to explain to everybody that I was not hiring these people over other people just because they're migrants.

We interviewed them just the same as anybody else.

So that was kind of tough.

But then NPR or CPR came out did another story and they kind of talked about all of the blowback that we had gotten so when that story aired we actually got a ton of support after that it's tough because it's such a polarized topic I think it seems like a win win for these people to get work permits and start working so our city is not having to pay to take care of them and that's all they want is to work and be able to support themselves.

It's hard trying to explain that to masses that are just reading like a headline, but after the CPR story actually went to NPR and we got a lot of really good feedback after that.

A lot of people have been coming in and saying we are shopping with you solely because you guys are standing up for this issue that we believe in.

It was a journey.

I guess the process that these people have to go through.

I think there is a misconception that like people are sneaking in, they are not sneaking in, our government let them cross the border.

Like there's the group that was given TPS status but like the majority of people here don't fall into the TPS category.

Any of the people that came around like the CBP One app which was a great thing for the government to put together like a legal pathway for them but they had to make an appointment at the border so to say you have to be at the border at this day at this time these people literally walked there like it's just kinda crazy.

And those are the only two groups that are eligible to get a work permit right away.

Everybody else has to apply for asylum and wait 150 days before they can apply for a work permit.

The asylum process is so complicated and confusing.

It's all in English, nothing is given to them in Spanish it costs anywhere between $6000-12000 to go through an asylum case so to tell these people yeah you have to start this process before you can work.

They came here with nothing so you have to find a lawyer to help you with this asylum process.

It's just unreasonable, there should be a fast process for these people to be able to get work permits.

People coming from South America are not treated the same as refugees or immigrants from other countries, so if someone's coming from Ukraine they show up they can get a work permit immediately there's all this financial assistance for them, but anyone coming from South America they show up and they are treated like they are a criminal.

The Facebook groups I think there's ones that are like each different kind of part of Colorado or different parts of the city in Denver I think it's a great way to get involved in kind of understanding what's going on.

There's a lot that are making LLCs to try to get around the work permit issue, there's a lot that are like doing house cleaning and yard work, car detailing, I think if you're getting that stuff done if you can kind of like try to utilize the populations that really need extra help, they also do a great job and usually for like a very reasonable price.

I think everybody needs to be more empathetic to the situation we are all so privileged that we are born into the lives that we were and we don't have to go through walking across nine countries to try to find a better life and risking your kids lives and your own life just putting it all out on the line to try to find a place where you can make a real living, we are really privileged and a lot of people come from places that life is a lot harder and we should have some empathy for them.

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