Six months ago, it looked like Colorado’s roughest ballot-issue fight of 2006 would involve a constitutional proposal to deny some state services to illegal immigrants.
Immigration, of course, is an issue in this year’s campaigns, as a glance at any selection of attack ads shows. But you won’t see that amendment on your Nov. 7 ballot because the state Supreme Court had problems with its wording and tossed it out in mid-June.
After a round of theatrical Supreme Court bashing – some justified and some just hot air – Gov. Bill Owens and the legislature’s Democratic leadership went to work July 6 in a special session on immigration. Any possibility that the legislature would put immigrant restrictions on the ballot quickly faded, despite the protests of some lawmakers who harrumphed that voters had a right to decide the issue.
Instead, lawmakers passed and Owens signed a package of bills, the centerpiece of which requires state agencies to verify the legal status of applicants if they are to receive non-emergency state services. (A couple of other items, dubbed Referendums H and K, got tossed to voters.)
The new identification law kicked in Aug. 1, and state analysts have been looking at the data since then.
To our complete lack of surprise, the new requirements don’t seem to have identified any huge number of ineligible recipients. The state reported last month that the number of public assistance recipients since Aug. 1 was virtually unchanged from the same period a year earlier. That logically raises the question of whether there were many ineligible people to weed out in the first place, and therefore whether the special session was necessary. The full story, however, won’t be known for a year as successive waves of assistance recipients have to re-certify each month.
Meanwhile, state officials also found there has been a rush to get the state identification cards necessary to qualify for benefits. Officials speculate that the law prompted people who were eligible but without proper ID to get the right documents.
Now, with the fall campaign almost over, key figures like Gov. Bill Owens and House Speaker Andrew Romanoff say that the law could benefit from review during the regular session of the legislature, which convenes in January.
The main unintended consequence of the law is that its strict ID requirements have tripped up some people – the homeless, mentally ill and elderly – who lack the documents needed to get ID.
We’re confident lawmakers can sort that out, and we’re glad the restrictions were put into law, where they can be improved if necessary rather than locked into the state constitution.
