Consider the fence mended.
Colorado’s Latino leaders on Saturday praised Gov. John Hickenlooper’s support, dismissing previous strife.
“There have been many issues that for the first time in the state we were able to pass and he never not once hesitated in signing any of the legislation we put in front of him,” said Democratic Rep. Crisanta Duran, the first Latino woman to serve as either party’s majority leader in Colorado.
On Saturday at Denver’s Agave Mexican Grill and Cantina, Duran and a host of elected leaders celebrated Latino progress. The group had spent the day at the sixth annual Colorado Latino Forum Public Policy Summit, where workshops and forums explored immigration reform, Latino education, culturally responsive health and human services, criminal justice issues and Latino environmentalism.
They heralded Hickenlooper’s support of legislation , which provides in-state tuition for Colorado college students in the U.S. illegally. They cheered his support for allowing these and other such residents the ability to secure a driver’s license, even though Latino for leaving the program underfunded.
“The state of Colorado is, by nature, inclusive,” Hickenlooper said, noting how it draws more residents from other states than any other state in the nation. “We are a destination for the largest number of people, and that, by nature, makes people open to everyone. We just need to take that natural inclination and make sure we push it a little forward. I think … in many ways we are going to be the place by which progress is measured on a lot of these types of initiatives, and we should embrace that.”
when he was quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying that “a lot of young Latinos, the vast majority, don’t care about a pathway to citizenship.”
One of Saturday’s speakers urged Hickenlooper to form an advisory board of immigrants in the U.S. illegally who can offer their perspectives.
“I never said that a pathway to citizenship wasn’t important,” Hickenlooper said. “I guess what I was trying to suggest is that not everything necessarily had to happen all at once.”
Don’t worry about that, said Rep. Joe Salazar, D-Thornton, whose comments on rape during a February 2013 legislative debate
“Your actions have spoken louder than words,” Salazar told Hickenlooper on Saturday, “so we know we have a good partnership going on with you.”
