Immigration concerns served up at dinner table.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: On Colorado

IMMIGRATION ISSUES MADE BIG HEADLINES ACROSS THE nation in March after hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, including more than 50,000 in Denver's Civic Center Plaza, protested harsh measures being considered by Congress, and President George W. Bush revived the idea of a "guest worker" program that would help American business.

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Proponents of anything much less than closing our borders to new immigrants, led by Colorado U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, who was on the ColoradoBiz cover last July, chalked off the demonstrators as lawbreakers demonstrating for their own "illegal" self-interest.

But the emotional debate over immigration reform carried into April as the Senate considered legislation that would allow most of the estimated 11 million to 15 million "illegal aliens" now in the United States to seek citizenship over the next decade.

Tancredo calls that "amnesty," and gets all puffed up once again about the huge, current illegal population, but at a recent family gathering I got a different glimpse of a gut reaction to the problem, from a struggling small-business owner's point of view.

The owner is my young nephew, Mike Halloran, who is a certified arborist trying to make a go of a new tree-care-service company, Longs Peak Tree Care out of Louisville.

Halloran, who is fairly fluent in Spanish and who has worked in the nursery, lawn-and-tree care industry with Spanish-speaking workers and friends for years, has come to the conclusion that he had better not hire Spanish-speaking workers in order to protect himself against the business risks of hiring an undocumented resident.

"I'm not willing to take the risk that some form of identification is going to prove false," he told me in an interview after the family dinner where I first learned of his thoughts on the issue. This business owner is no longer a kid, although I've known him since he was, and he was telling me that something must be done about the thousands of illegal workers in Colorado and the millions across the USA in order to "level the playing field" for business people who want to play by the rules.

He says he looks closely at employment papers before hiring someone, and sends a job applicant packing if there is even a whiff of suspicion about his legal status in the country.

Longs Peak pays workers about $7 an hour, Halloran said, and he...