Face The State Staff Report
In light of a new national study concluding that the U.S. illegal immigrant population has decreased 11 percent over the past year, immigration experts and local business owners say there are many reasons for the drop.
The study, released by the Center for Immigration Studies this week, credits law enforcement for the 1.3 million illegal immigrants it says have fled the country. Carlos Klinger, an Aurora accountant, agrees that a shift in policy has forced many local illegal immigrants to leave.
In 2006, the Colorado General Assembly met for a special session that produced a number of laws designed to discourage illegal immigration. Klinger said about 80 percent of his clients are illegal immigrants, but after laws from the special session began to take effect, he saw that portion of his clientele drop.
“They pay taxes,” Klinger said. “Even though they are illegal they still have homes and jobs.”
Klinger said his clients were able to operate in the U.S. because they had obtained an Individual Tax Number, which is used in place of a Social Security Number. Most of his clients owned restaurants or small shops. After the special session, he says a new statute requiring proof of residency to renew a food or liquor license with the state put a lot of illegal immigrants out of business. Klinger said when his clients could no longer obtain the proper paperwork to operate their businesses, they closed shop and left the state.
Gil Cineros, executive director of Chamber of the Americas, a pro-illegal immigrant organization, echoed Klinger's economic concerns and questioned the impact of a shrinking illegal immigrant population on Colorado. “It will have an impact on our economy because we don’t necessarily have the people to back fill these jobs, and the other people we do have might not want to do it,” he said.
Pam Fochtman, who owns a local landscaping business with her husband, said the new laws have made the administrative aspect of hiring personnel more complex. “It’s making it hard to find labor,” she said.
But UCLA Professor Gary Orfield, who specializes in civil rights, minority opportunity and integration issues, says the mass departure nationally of illegal immigrants is more about fiscal factors and less about new laws. He attributes the decline to a high unemployment rate and generally bad economic conditions. Camarota maintains that the picture is different in Colorado. He found the population decline started before unemployment began to rise sharply at the beginning of the year.
Orfield believes with illegal immigration on the decline, it is a good time to consider a long-term solution. He advocates revolutionary positions, including extending citizenship rights to illegal immigrants and allowing them increased access, including taxpayer funding, to the nation’s higher education system. “We don’t want to pay the cost, but we do want affordable labor,” he said.
This year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has deported 4,130 illegal immigrants from Colorado and Wyoming, of which 2,110 were convicted of what it considers serious crimes. ICE spokesman Carl Rusnok said his agency has been steadily deporting an increased number of illegal immigrants since 2005, and he believes such efforts have contributed to the decline. Current estimates show that illegal immigrants now represent around 10 percent of the U.S. prison population.
While CIS concludes that the illegal immigrant population has declined over the last year, it asserts that it has done so on the heels of a period of record immigration. According to CIS, 2007 marked the end of the highest seven-year influx of immigrants to the U.S., bringing 10.3 million new immigrants, more than half of them illegal. Even with an illegal immigrant population decline of over a million, the nation is still home to more than 30 million immigrants, representing the highest levels of immigrants since the 1920s.
According to the U.S. Census, Colorado's foreign born population has increased by 18,985 people, equal to nearly 25 percent of the state's annual average population increase, since 2000. With an estimated 2007 population of 4.8 million, more than 500,000 of the state's residents are foreign-born. The Federation for American Immigration Reform maintains that the state's foreign-born population has increased by 37.5 percent compared to a 10.7 percent increase in the native-born population in this same time period.