Despite Missouri politicians, KC moves forward with plan to attract immigrant workers

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Republican office-holders blasted Kansas City’s Democratic mayor when he told Bloomberg News in April that the city would welcome an influx of new immigrants with work permits to boost the area’s economy.

“We need a lot more employees,” Quinton Lucas said. “If there are people who are willing and able to work, then I believe that there could be a place for them.”

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey pounced, claiming the mayor’s remarks were a reflection of the Biden administration’s “radically progressive agenda.” Then like others, he falsely accused Lucas of promoting illegal immigration.

Also joining in was Mike Kehoe, the state’s lieutenant governor who this week won a Republican primary for governor where immigration was a central issue. He called Lucas’ invitation “crazy.”

But Lucas was merely restating the views of the Greater Kansas City Building & Construction Trades Council and the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, which has a long-running campaign aimed at encouraging more immigration to help the local economy called Welcoming KC.

Why? Because the region needs more workers, especially construction workers to help support a building boom that continues unabated, says Ralph Oropeza, business manager for the building and construction trades council who was born in this country to immigrant parents.

“I think we have over $50 billion worth of work on the books right now to go into Kansas City, in our metro, not just Kansas City,” he said, referring to both public and private projects. “And so, how are we going to do that, you know? I mean, there’s not a lot of people lining up to want to do construction, right?”

Skilled trades jobs for electricians, carpenters and plumbers can be filled with union workers who travel from city to city, he said. But it’s a different story for jobs requiring fewer skills that the industry relies on to get roads, bridges and buildings built.

“It’s really hard to line up and want to do cement mason work or block layer work or roofing work or just general labor work, and so they need help,” Oropeza said.

Rather than back down in response to the anti-immigrant rhetoric that grows ever more heated in this fractious political year, Lucas and the Kansas City Council have committed themselves to developing multiple pro-immigrant initiatives. While lauded by some key business leaders, the efforts have also created some confusion and controversy, with some accusing the city of becoming a “sanctuary city” while others say the steps don’t go nearly far enough to truly help those newly arriving to the area.

World Cup’s impact

For more than a year prior to the uproar over his comments, Lucas got almost no pushback for promoting initiatives to help immigrant workers assimilate in the area.

He has also long supported efforts aimed at welcoming visitors from all over the globe, which is especially important now as Kansas City prepares to host six men’s World Cup matches two summers from now.

“It’s especially important we foster a welcoming and inclusive community ahead of the World Cup, when thousands of people from all over the world, from different cultures and ethnicities, will be traveling to our community for the first time,” Lucas’ spokeswoman Jazzlyn Johnson said.

“As we continue to build international relationships, the World Cup will be their first impression of our community and it’s vital we ensure they feel welcome and are able to move around and seek services around our community easily, especially if they don’t speak English.”

But the sentiment hasn’t come without its share of pushback.

At a council committee meeting last spring, several residents testified in support of a resolution from Councilman Nathan Willett declaring that Kansas City was not going to become a so-called “sanctuary city.”

But Willett’s measure died after Lucas stressed that it was a meaningless gesture, because it’s already illegal for cities in Missouri to shield immigrants without legal status from the enforcement of immigration laws.

While the city’s state-controlled police department does not proactively enforce federal immigration laws, it is compelled to “cooperate with state and federal agencies and officials on matters pertaining to enforcement of state and federal laws governing immigration.”

‘We are welcoming to everyone’

Earlier this year, the council ordered the creation of an Office of Language Access, which will make it easier for those who speak little or no English to use city services. With an annual budget of $900,000, that office is now hiring staff while many of the city’s public documents are already being translated into multiple languages online with the click of a mouse.

“We can say that we’re going to be a welcoming city until the cows come home,” Councilman Jonathan Duncan said when the ordinance creating that office was passed earlier this year. “But this is real action that shows that we are welcoming to everyone regardless of the language you speak.”

Separately, the Mayor’s Commission for New Americans, which Lucas appointed last fall, is working on a report that will suggest how another new department, the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, will operate once it, too, is up and running.

“What it should look like, how it should be staffed, what issues it should care about?” are the questions the commission wants answers to, commission chair Bridget Romero said at a recent fact-finding meeting at the North-East Branch of the Kansas City Public Library.

Access to affordable housing, protections from unscrupulous landlords and fair wages were at the top of the list among the immigrants who gave testimony that night.

An immigrant without legal status from Mexico named Laura told the commission through an interpreter that she and her family have struggled to find decent places to live during the five years they have resided in the United States.

“When we first arrived we would live in some of the cheapest apartments we could find,” she said. “There were six of us in a two-bedroom apartment and we paid $700 a month sharing this space with rats and cockroaches.”

Others described the difficulties that language barriers present in accessing health care and the need for affordable legal help in their asylum cases and other matters.

Lisandra Rodriguez, a staffer at Della Lamb Community Services, the second largest refugee resettlement agency in the area, said many of the immigrants she works with have professional credentials and degrees earned overseas that aren’t recognized here, causing hardship.

“I have a lot of my clients that are engineers, doctors, nurses, psychologists that I literally almost cry because I know there are places that can benefit from them,” she said. “And because we can’t validate them, they can’t get the job.”

How the city’s new immigrant and refugee services office will be able to help with that is unclear, but the chamber of commerce supports “licensing and recredentialing for immigrants and refugees who have credentials from outside the United States.”

Chamber of commerce support

That’s one of the goals in a report the chamber published four years ago that both inspired Lucas’ remarks to Bloomberg and a number of public policies growing out of the report’s celebration of the region’s growing diversity.

“Welcoming KC,” which is both the report’s title and the name of the pro-immigrant advocacy group that sprung from it, was the product of 18 months of work by 40 local organizations whose efforts were supported by the chamber.

Its main message was that the Kansas City region needed more immigrants and refugees to help fill jobs and grow the economy.

“There is a workforce shortage in Greater Kansas City,” Joe Reardon, chamber president and former mayor of Kansas City, Kansas, wrote in the report’s introduction.

“That’s why the KC Chamber and the members of Welcoming KC are working to make KC a designated welcoming city. We know by using all the assets across our entire community, we can welcome immigrants, refugees, and other newcomers to grow the region’s globally competitive workforce.”

The report noted that the immigrant population here has grown at a much faster rate than the general population overall. According to the Welcoming KC report, the number of recent immigrants in the region stood at 33,000 in 1990. By 2018 it was 150,000 and growing.

“Without the contributions of our immigrant neighbors, the city will not continue to grow,” said Greg Valdovino, who co-chaired the committee that drafted the Welcoming KC report and serves on the mayor’s New Americans Commission.

At the library meeting in July, Valdovino said that he, too, is an immigrant and understands the need to help people who arrive here from other countries in need of support.

“My family immigrated to Kansas City, when I was just a young kid. We moved from Mexico to the United States. And it was through the services of the community where we live that really helped us acclimate to the country,” he said.

Ongoing gaps

While he appreciates that sentiment, the mayor’s invitation for workers to come here and the city’s new initiatives in support of that, Trinidad Raj Molina worries that Kansas City does not have enough support services in place to accommodate a surge in immigrant workers.

Between the lack of emergency housing for newcomers and an immigration court that rejects more than 80% of asylum claims from refugees seeking permanent legal status, Kansas City is not as welcoming as its leaders would like to think, says Molina, accompaniment coordinator at Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation.

“The city tries to get people to come here to a place where they’re not going to have a great chance winning asylum,” he said.

While he has no statistics to rely on, Molina says he’s noticed a surge in asylum seekers coming to Kansas City this summer on the promise that it’s a welcoming community only to feel disappointed.

“It’s like, every week right now, when they get off at the Greyhound, they’re on the streets,” he said. “And they feel misled, because they thought they’d heard there was housing here. And it turns out, there’s no infrastructure here.”

While it may be under construction, he said, there’s clearly a long way to go.