A prime example of this is the “Utah Compact”, which was created by the Salt Lake Chamber, the state's largest and most powerful business organization. The compact was designed to change the discussion from immigration enforcement, which was making strong headway in Utah, to support for illegal aliens, although this was not the purpose communicated to the public — and it worked. In fact, according to Robin Riggs, former executive vice president and general counsel of the Salt Lake Chamber: “We tried to make sure that it [the Compact] was characterized as something that came from the broader community, not from the Chamber.” and “If you look online and look anywhere where the genesis of this came from, you’re not going to find the Chamber’s fingerprints on it.”
Another example of The Utah Way is the way the predominant religion in Utah, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), supports and protects illegal aliens without ever openly endorsing illegal immigration. According to Riggs:
[T]hose of you who don’t know the specific religious politics in Utah, you know that this is the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Mormon Church, and they don’t weigh in on politics very often, at least not locally ... . And so when they do — or if they do, it’s big news. Well, they weren’t signatories to the Compact but they came out publicly and endorsed it which meant that you’ve got, you know, 70 percent of the population now raising eyebrows about it.
Okay, now our church leaders like this approach, like this more pragmatic approach. What is that — how does that play into those more conservative members who have an opposite view? And that almost immediately also changed the discussion a bit in Utah.
The Utah Way of keeping things under the radar was also evident when the Church managed to get a U.S. senator to slip an amendment to the United States immigration act into an agriculture appropriations bill. That amendment allows the Church to baptize and extend full membership, including calling illegal aliens to serve in voluntary positions while protecting the Church from criminal sanctions for doing so.
