How one Utah city bucks the divide over immigration

For Mayor Lorin Palmer, the first alert about changes underway in the town of Herriman, Utah, came from a school principal. A teacher shortage at the high school seemed imminent as the number of immigrant students soared.

Since then, Mayor Palmer has focused more on new arrivals, many from Venezuela, and how to match them with resources that support their self-sufficiency. Last month, Herriman City Hall hosted a resource fair, arranged by the state and nonprofits, where those eligible could apply for work authorization.  

“We’re trying to do the right thing,” says Mr. Palmer, a Spanish speaker, who spent a church mission in Uruguay. He’s called for more coordination from nonprofits, and supports a new community center that will offer free English classes. 

The local government is trying to build rapport with the new arrivals, many of whom fled governments they feared. Citing limited public resources, officials here don’t want to be perceived as a “sanctuary city” – but also recognize that trust among newcomers and longtime residents alike enables more community cohesion. If migration at the southern border is a crisis of scale, Herriman is trying to build trust one newcomer at a time.

Responding to historic increases 

As global displacement reaches historic levels, so has illegal immigration reached record highs under the Biden administration, with more than 2 million Border Patrol encounters along the southern border a year. Budgets are strained in places like Chicago, Denver, and New York, which provide social services to migrants and asylum-seekers. Those cities are targets of a busing campaign by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

These new immigrants, who’ve entered both lawfully and unlawfully, are arriving in smaller cities too, like Herriman and others across red and blue America. As neighborhoods, food banks, and schools receive more newcomers, residents have offered assistance in heartfelt ways, even as some grapple with a broken immigration system.

Julie Shaw is one Herriman resident who is moved to serve new immigrants but also questions the limits of local resources and federal border security.

At the recent resource fair, Ms. Shaw volunteers to babysit children of parents processing forms. She helps kids fit wooden pieces into an alphabet puzzle. She also thinks about the fitting together of her own community.

“I totally understand wanting to come to this country because of economic reasons,” she says. However, “that’s what makes it complicated, right? You can’t take in the whole world.” And while she opposes illegal immigration, Ms. Shaw also believes in fixing the system to allow more immigrants to enter lawfully. 

The system is the problem, says the volunteer. “Helping people is the most important thing.”

The helpers 

In Herriman, tidy rows of houses sprawl in tans and bluish-grays, the same colors seen in a nearby mountain range. The peaks remind Venezuelan asylum-seekers of the Andes back home. 

The state’s Latter-day Saint pioneers were asylum-seekers of another era, fleeing religious and political persecution in the 1800s at the hands of fellow Americans. Utah today, home to the global Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is a story of rapid growth. Herriman’s population of roughly 60,000 has nearly tripled since 2010.

“We’re trying to keep that small-town feeling ... while also dealing with the growth,” says Mayor Palmer, who holds weekly lunches for any residents. It helps, he says, that the community is full of people with “shirt-off-your-back” generosity. 

For Marisha Manzano, at the Herriman Police Department, it wasn’t shirts but coats that made a difference.

In winter 2022, Officer Manzano began a coat drive for parents attending English classes in the local school district. Some had stopped coming in the cold. “If I can help keep Mom and Dad warm, they can work, they can learn English, and they can be there to help support their children,” says the school resource officer, who continued the effort this winter.

At Herriman High School, Todd Quarnberg alerted Mayor Palmer to the area’s growing immigrant community last year. The principal admits he is overwhelmed with new arrivals. 

“We don’t have enough teachers because we didn’t know they were coming,” says Mr. Quarnberg in his office. The principal is calling on the state for more funding, especially for bilingual staff. A hundred unexpected students enrolled last summer, he says. 

The current student body around 2,500 grows by two or three more immigrant students each week. Beyond Latino students, who make up most of the influx, the school is starting to welcome Rwandan students as of the past month.

Despite the challenges, “anybody that crosses my threshold, of this school, I’m going to help,” says Mr. Quarnberg. “If we don’t educate them, we’re just causing a cycle of have-nots reliant on assistance.”

Marian Alvarez, a soft-spoken high school senior, arrived in Herriman this fall, legally paroled into the country. Even with temporary permission to stay, Marian says adapting to a new culture has been hard. 

“When you arrive with nothing, it’s disorienting. You don’t know anything,” she says in Spanish. “If someone helps you, welcomes you – it’s nice.”

What is the scope of arrivals? 

So far, Utah appears nowhere near as operationally overwhelmed with newcomers as New York or Colorado. Denver has tracked nearly 40,000 migrant arrivals in over a year.

Places like Herriman represent a more traditional model of immigrants who disperse across the country organically, typically supported by the private sector, says Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.

Utah officials say there is no formal, public tracking of new immigrants. Salt Lake County, which includes Herriman, is trying to “understand the scope of the need” through community partners, says Katherine Fife, associate deputy mayor of the county. Since late 2022, official Denver data shows purchases of more than 1,700 travel tickets to Salt Lake City for migrants who request them.

Utah has taken various pro-immigrant policy positions in recent history, says Erin Hofmann, associate professor of sociology at Utah State University. In 2010, the Utah Compact, a public and private partnership, called for immigration reform. In that decade the Beehive State earned a reputation as a model red state for uniting religious, business, and immigrant advocacy groups, says Dr. Hofmann.

Now the state is “back in the middle,” she says. “The governor, the legislature of Utah have moved a little bit more towards what I would call typical Republican positions on immigration.”

Last month Utah Gov. Spencer Cox appeared at the Texas-Mexico border joining fellow Republicans in a call for tighter border security. At a press conference afterward, he said he’s “deeply concerned” about immigrant arrivals to his state “taking up resources.” 

Yet Governor Cox also last year penned a Washington Post opinion piece calling for state “sponsorship” of immigrant workers to fill jobs. That echoed Utah’s 2011 attempt to create a state guest-worker program, which never went into effect after objections from the U.S. Justice Department. 

Still, supporters of new immigrants continue to advocate for help filling labor needs. As of January, Utah’s unemployment rate stood at 2.8%, nearly 1 percentage point lower than that of the nation. 

Rule-breaking and security

Nearby in Salt Lake County, Carlos Moreno is of two minds about the newcomers. 

The West Jordan resident stresses that he’s “pro” immigrant – he is one, after all. After studying labor law in Venezuela, he came to Utah with a student visa in 2009. After speaking out against his government back home, he says he was charged with treason and conspiracy. Mr. Moreno applied for and won political asylum in the United States, and went on to successfully advocate for extending in-state college tuition to refugees and asylum-seekers in Utah. 

Yet “I want to see the border secure,” says Mr. Moreno, who was naturalized in 2022. He serves as the Latino liaison for the Salt Lake County Republican Party and is concerned that criminals are entering the U.S.

For some observers, such fears are justified amid instances such as the killing of a Georgia nursing student last month, resulting in murder charges against a Venezuelan man who entered the U.S. illegally.

For others, the salient fact is that there’s no hard evidence that immigrants, including those who are unauthorized, commit crimes at higher rates than their U.S.-born peers, as a recent Washington Post fact check concluded. 

Newcomer José, another Venezuelan, crossed illegally from Mexico into Arizona in 2021 to seek refuge.  

Back at the Herriman resource fair, he sits in line quietly in an electric-blue collared shirt. José, who preferred that his full name not be used due to privacy and safety concerns, has already applied for asylum and received his work permit. He’s been looking for job opportunities. 

José worked in Venezuela’s petroleum industry as an electrical engineer. Beginning in 2019, after he reported corrupt operations to his manager, he says he survived three attempts on his life. 

“Returning to Venezuela would be death,” he says in Spanish at a Herriman cafe. “The only country in the world where I can feel safe is here in the United States.”

José finds that people here are kind. Though José is allowed to remain in the U.S. while his asylum case continues, terror seized him last year when he says a police officer pulled him over on the road. 

It turned out to be a small issue with his license plate registration sticker, he says. To José’s relief, he says the officer was “very polite.” Plus, the officer spoke Spanish. 

One of the few Spanish speakers on the Herriman police force is Sgt. Jose Lopez, who recalls entering the U.S. from Mexico as a young child. Smugglers brought him unlawfully across the border, he says, to reunite with his parents, who’d come to the U.S. first and secured a lawful status. 

His parents settled in Utah “because it was a great place for family and opportunity,” says Sergeant Lopez, now a citizen.

At his job, building trust with new immigrants is a two-way street, says Mr. Lopez. Through conversations around town, he tries to build rapport.

He explains how it’s important to learn and follow laws here, which may be different from the laws people knew in their previous homes. 

“At the end of the day, it’s the overall goal, right?” he says. “To make sure that our community is safe, and that we have a good place to live and work.”