This is another story you need to read in its entirety to maybe (maybe!) figure out. The Karen need jobs and things aren’t going so well for them in Denver, growers need workers and yet somehow this can’t be worked out.
Help Wanted: San Luis Valley crop growers and shippers desperately seek workers and are willing to recruit Myanmar refugees in Denver eager for jobs and a return to agrarian roots.
It sounds as if it could be a neat solution to two problems. Instead, it has created a backlash.
The mayor of a town in the valley has misgivings. The director of the health care system there has them, too. And the head of the immigrant resource center in Alamosa doesn’t think it is a good idea.
“We don’t want to go where there is a problem, where they don’t want us,” said Rocky Martin, leader of a Denver community of about 325 Karen, an ethnic minority displaced by Myanmar’s military junta.
The story of the Karen and the San Luis Valley underscores the gap between an immigration policy that discourages the use of migrant workers and an agricultural economy that makes it nearly impossible to use anyone else.
It almost sounds like the growers are agitating to get their migrant (illegals?) back.