Brown's One-sided Immigration "Symposium"

Let me start with the caveat that I didn't attend Brown's immigration symposium convened to discuss a poll (that I've already touched on) and am relying on this morning's report from the ProJo. That out of the way, stepping back, it really is remarkable, if unsurprising, that a supposed institution of higher learning would hold a symposium on such a hot-button issue as immigration--illegal and otherwise (as is standard "immigrant" advocacy practice, they conflated the two in the poll, too)--and offer only one side of the argument. According to the article, here's a sample of the wide-ranging views represented at the conference:

[Bishop Thomas Tobin] urged that people recognize that immigrants, “regardless of the status of their paperwork, are children of God and our brothers and sisters in the human family.”

Brown history professor Evelyn Hu-Dehart called the term “alien,” as applied to illegal or undocumented immigrants, “a very problematic word” used to distinguish “between good and bad immigrants...I ask you to think about that word — alien not only as a stranger, but dangerously different and undesirably opposite of the warm and fuzzy feeling we conjure when we think of the [American] melting pot.”

Nasser Zawia, dean of the graduate school at the University of Rhode Island, said that as a Muslim, Arab and member of the Yemeni community, “I guess I’m the ‘enemy alien.’ I’m also part of the community in conflict with the United States. I’m always, the ‘other.’ ”

Symposium organizer Alexandra Filindra, of Brown University, said she was heartened by the survey results showing 68 percent of Rhode Islanders favor extending in-state tuition rates to undocumented children who graduate from Rhode Island high schools.

Dr. Michael A. Olivas - President of the American Association of Law Schools and Professor of Law at the University of Houston. Olivas is an advocate for allowing illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities.

Dr. M. Daniel Carroll, Professor of the Old Testament, Denver Seminary has his own blog. He approaches the issue from the same moral Christian perspective as Bishop Tobin.

Dr. George Borts, Professor of Economics, Brown University is a Club for Growth cited advocate of Free trade. Borts has written an op-ed calling for immigration reform and denouncing the labels of "alien" and the rise of what he calls "nativism".

Dr. Cynthia Garcia Coll, Professor of Education, Brown University seems to center her research on immigrant children and often turns up at rallies (for instance, the DREAM act rally) that support immigrant--illegal and legal--rights.

Now, there is certainly some generality here given the rudimentary research I did, but I think it's safe to believe that all of the above could be considered sympathetic to illegal immigration. I know that Terry Gorman of RIILE didn't stand a snowball's chance of being invited, but there wasn't at least one person with perhaps a different view than the majority of the panel that could have been added? Were 4:1 odds too much? This sounds more like a pep rally than an actual examination of all sides of the issue.