This story, written by MSU Met Media reporter Mariana Ortega Rivera, is part of Bucket List Community News’s collaboration with Metropolitan State University of Denver for the election.
Amid the 2024 election cycle, a significant portion of immigrants in the Denver metro area say the issues that deeply affect them and their communities are being ignored or misrepresented by politicians of both parties.
With no clear path to comprehensive immigration reform, many immigrants feel disenfranchised, particularly those who are unable to vote but whose futures are heavily influenced by election results. The lack of permanent solutions, combined with the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes in the media and political rhetoric, has left this community yearning for genuine representation and meaningful change.
“We’re not just here to steal jobs, as a lot of people like to say, or be violent, or, you know, everything that they’re saying about people from Aurora,” said youth specialist and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient Raquel Lazcano. “We want to make a difference and contribute to this country. A lot of us were raised here since we were babies. We love this country as much as our own and we just want to be represented.”
For those directly impacted by immigration laws—such as DACA recipients, asylum seekers, and undocumented workers—the stakes in this election could not be higher. But many express frustration over the constant promises of reform that never seem to materialize.
“Because I wasn’t born here, I am severely limited,” said MSU Denver mechanical engineering major Kevin Muñoz. “I remember being hopeful. It was Biden who said that people who were really young when they came here, he would put something in place where you can apply for that. That never happened. I think it’s just one of those things where I kind of wish a lot of what was said was actually brought when they come into office.”
Muñoz has been in America since he was two yet his visa application is still in limbo six years after he filed it. Despite being allowed to work with work authorization, not being a U.S. citizen prevents him from voting, stopping his chances of voting for a candidate that can represent him.
“Since we can’t even vote in the election, it just feels like our futures are kind of laid on the hands of like American citizens who this won’t affect, which is interesting,” Muñoz said.
According to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), more than 500,000 individuals have DACA. The DACA program, which protects young immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, remains in legal limbo currently in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, with no clear path to permanent residency or citizenship.
”We don’t have any permanent thing, and it’s been years of court days, court hearings for everything, where there’s nothing permanent,” Lazcano said. “I just want something permanent.”
During the Republican National Convention in July, Trump promised the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” which would involve sending military troops to the US-Mexico border and allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to conduct raids. On the Democratic side, Vice President Kamala Harris has advocated for stricter immigration restrictions than the Biden administration and continues to push for the bipartisan security bill that Trump urged his party to reject earlier this year.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, immigration is driving strong economic growth, with future immigration expected to boost real GDP by 2% over the next ten years, as well as increasing government revenue. While the United States Census Bureau predicts that if immigration levels were reduced, the population would begin to decline in 20 years; with zero immigration, the population would begin to decline the following year, harming economic growth.
“A lot of our minimum wage workers happen to be immigrants and [regarding] the mass deportation, I don’t think people realize how much that would affect not just service jobs, but so many other jobs that they don’t realize immigrants are taking care of,” Muñoz said.
Muñoz expressed his concern regarding stereotypes the media and certain politicians are reinforcing, such as that they are “eating the cats and dogs” or that “Venezuelan gangs are taking over Aurora.”
“I feel like the media is portraying immigrants wrong, or at least in a very bad light,” Muñoz said. “I feel weird about speaking Spanish in public; I’m almost embarrassed about it, even though it’s super common to speak Spanish, but I can’t help but feel like someone’s going to tell me, ‘Oh, you’re not allowed to do that, because that has happened before when I worked at Chick fil A.”
Despite the growing immigrant population in the United States, many believe that neither party truly represents their interests. “I feel like we’ve always been used as pawns,” Lazcano said.