President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Kamala Harris
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) V. Archuleta
98%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Marshall Dawson
95%
5%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
50%
50%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(D) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank
(D) River Gassen
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) John Fabbricatore
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen
(R) Sergei Matveyuk
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
70%↑
30%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
July 10, 2010 06:45 AM UTC
11 Comments
Once again, it’s “No Drama Obama” on the scene (invisibly).
This is, obviously, a better solution than the very public but inefficient raids of the Bush years. By getting employers to actually consider the consequences of hiring illegal immigrants, and by doing so with a minimum of effort and a maximum range of effect, Obama appears to be actually doing what the current immigration law envisions as an effective way to stem the tide of illegal immigration in this country – and, oddly enough, it works if you actually enforce it.
You can argue over the deportation issue, but the fact is, if INS audits scare the employers into going straight, undocumented immigrants will move themselves out of the country at far less expense than a deportation proceeding (or they’ll figure out a way to become legalized), and they’ll do it together with their family in a way that doesn’t hurt the way tearing apart the family in deportation hearings can.
It’s not perfect – there’s a lot of room for improvement – but it’s a good step for an Administration that has its hands tied by the current law.
the problem is Obama and the Democrats will get no benefit politically. The right will attack him simply because he’s Obama, and I fear the left will come at him because he is acting against illegal immigration. Maybe this is why he is keeping it low-key?
and thanks for the recommendation. Much appreciated.
Where I lived in college, we had a large migrant contingency that came through every year because of all the fruit orchards in the area. There wasn’t a local college kid out of 28,000 on that campus that would have done that job. Long hours, brutal heat, crap wages.
My hope is that Obama continues to make marked changes with employers as well as the employees, which will be ungodly unpopular but long overdue.
And the rest of us will have to get used to paying the true value of things or learn to do without. An alien concept to we privileged Americans I know, but there will be sacrifices. The WalMart mentality must be stopped.
I am old enough to remember when fresh fruit was “in season” and that’s when you ate it, or you ate canned fruit. Not any more.
I grew up on a farm and we had a load of different fruit trees, as well as blueberry, strawberry, blackberry, rhubarb, grapes, and gardens. You canned as much as possible for the winter and ate the fresh stuff until you got sick of it.
If people in this country paid a fair price to pickers, they’d never eat fresh fruit or vegetables again because they’d balk at the price. Or maybe they’d finally learn to grown their own.
Everybody on the right as well as the left bitches and moans about illegal immigrants. Well, cool. Then let’s do something concrete about it, starting with who employs them and what they pay them under the table. See how sincere the “righteous rage” is when they start paying $8 for a head of lettuce.
The policy change is the emphasis on going after the employers who knowingly hire illegals rather than the workers (although they land up with no jobs). That’s where it should have been all the time.
We don’t have an illegal immigration problem – we have an illegal employer problem. It’s all about money and the exploitation of an underclass, not unlike slavery which existed for the same reason.
And to change the economic system of slavery took a civil war and 600,000 dead Americans.
all the way up to that civil war part and 600,000 dead.
I think we’ve had incredible social progress in the last century without the need for a civil war. I think this issue is amenable to corrective action more like the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act than it is like the Emancipation Proclamation and Civil War.
Civil upheaval maybe. War? Not so much.
I used that as an analogy to illustrate how resistant to reform an entrenched economic system can be when the people making the rules are by and large the beneficiaries of maintaining the status quo of that system.
And this explains in large part why comprehensive immigration reform, a problem for decades now, has not been done.
For a greater analysis of what I’m talking about, see my diary “Who’s Land Is This Anyway?”
http://coloradopols.com/diary/…
But every time I linked to it, CP logged me out. Does that always happen on older diaries?
And I think we a re for the most part in agreement it seems to me. Except maybe for who the beneficiaries are. While Richmond may benefit in lower cost and higher profits, every consumer of any good, service or produce which comes from the sweat of the illegal laborer’s brow benefits in drastically lower prices, especially in produce and services. We all have to sacrifice to solve this issue.
Not happening with me.
True that Richmond’s use of illegal labor lowers the price of their product. And that’s why the use of that cheap, illegal labor is such a difficult issue, because there are a lot of people who benefit from such an economic system.
Most of our consumer goods are manufactured in China or other low wage countries. We can’t import our houses, so instead we import cheap, illegal labor to build them.
At some point, somethings got to give.