Publication Type: Internal Paper
Abstract: On December 13, 1999, the City Council of Aspen, Colorado�one of the nation�s wealthiest and most environmentally privileged communities�unanimously passed a resolution petitioning the U.S. Congress and the President to enact legislation that would stabilize the nation�s population. The language of the resolution suggests that this goal could be achieved by enforcing existing laws regulating undocumented immigration and reducing authorized immigration to 175,000 persons per year, down from the current annual level of between 700,000 and one million. Combining both classic nativist language on immigration and progressive environmental politics, the resolution identifies immigration as the major cause of ecological crisis. Since then, similar initiatives have been proposed in numerous states and cities across the West and Southwest. This paper addresses the current tensions regarding immigration, race, and environmentalism using Aspen, Colorado as a case study.

Increasing global capital expansion has had an accompanying effect of growing class inequalities � resulting in the contraction of the middle class in the Aspen area. The exorbitant cost of living, accompanied by a depression of wages, has driven the native-born middle and working class population out of the area. In this respect, the exclusive mountain resort town of Aspen is indicative of a growing number of towns and cities that find themselves increasingly dependent upon a tourism-based economy of the wealthy and those who serve them, many of whom are immigrant.

These events illuminate the complexities of policies regarding immigrant labor, environmental protection, and poverty in the context of globalization. We found that Aspenites use the environment as a way to promote a particular romantic image of the area as a post-industrial refuge. It appears that environmentalism plays a crucial role as a social solution, particularly because it can obscure the growing racialization of poverty in this idyllic, staunchly Democratic-voting, resort town. Environmentalism, as a palatable rationale for anti-immigrant policies, brings together the strangest of bedfellows � the compassionate left with the rational social conservative. In addition, environmentalism, as a social movement, brings with it a checkered past, due largely to its links with population control movements.

The paradoxical necessity and invisibility of �unskilled,� racialized immigrants is central to this environmental image, which forms the foundation of what makes Aspen, according to its wealthy residents, �heaven on earth.� Local policies such as these population stabilization resolutions are reflections of the paradox of immigrant labor and its uncomfortable reminders of invidious social inequalities. Our research focuses on Aspen and Colorado�s Roaring Fork Valley as an entree to a larger discussion of the place and persistence of race and the immigrant working poor in the global economy.