The city of Aurora rolled out a 10-year plan to make immigrants and refugees feel not only welcome but a critical part of the city, as well. 

Mayor Mike Coffman, a champion of diversity and legal immigration as a Republican congressman until 2018, spoke with reporters and a community leaders in a webinar Tuesday.

Aurora is the most diverse city in Colorado and one of leaders nationally. The often-noted fact is the local school systems serves students who speak 140 languages and about 1 in 5 residents were born outside the United States.

Now, Aurora is the only city in the state that has a formal immigration and integration plan, and, again, one of the few nationally. 

That plan, called “Aurora is Open to the World,” is available by clicking here.

Coffman described the city’s diversity as a hallmark, not a setback.

“Our goal, certainly, is to help them achieve the American dream through access to resources and assistance to assistance in terms of starting a small business,” Coffman said. “There’s also an international component to this in terms of making Aurora an economic center and cultural center internationally.”

That’s already paying off, he said, attracting not only the attention of international companies that could become local employers,  but also the city’s first diplomatic outpost, the Consulate of El Salvador. Coffman said South Korea, hopefully, will be the next to locate in the sunrise city.

The plan promises to work on a lot:

• Immigrant entrepreneurship
• Housing and home ownership
• Job skills and certifications
• English language skills (including online courses)
• Relationships with police and fire departments
• Preventive health care and healthy lifestyles
• Promotion of international business relations
• Leadership development
• Integrate immigrants into the “cultural life of the city”

Aurora is often lumped in with Denver and Boulder by opponents of illegal immigration as a “sanctuary city,” a safe place for undocumented people to live and work.

Coffman said the city doesn’t fit under that description when it comes to law enforcement. The city hold undocumented people 72 hours, as the law prescribes, before they’re transferred to a county facility. Aurora also makes its lists of inmates available to federal agencies. 

“We are not an immigration enforcement entity,” he said. “Our law enforcement is not dedicated to that purpose. That is a federal responsibility.”

Rodolfo Cardenas, a Spanish-language radio host on KNVR Hispanic Radio, asked about city police’s sometimes rocky relationship with communities of color.

Coffman said those “reforms and restructuring”  are covered in their own plan for the police department to take on cultural bias and competency training. That plan is available by clicking here.

“We have a goal, and it will take some time, to make our police department more reflective of those communities they serve,” he said.

The city has been at this awhile, creating the Office of International and Immigrant Affairs in 2015. Last year the office began managing a citywide language access plan.

“I’m always in awe of immigrant-refugee communities and their desire to make something extraordinary out of their lives that they were not able to do in the country they came from,” Coffman said.