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Immigration is explored by panelists

Web Posted: 05/08/2006 10:32 AM CDT
Hernán Rozemberg
Express-News Immigration Writer

At the end of the impassioned exchange, the moderator asked the seven panelists what they personally planned to do about the country's politically divisive immigration controversy.

Apparently surprised by the question, none seemed poised to answer clearly. However, they were much less timid the entire previous hour, as each pontificated on what has gone wrong with the immigration system and what needs to be done to fix it.

The gathering, a forum meant to expand views and perceptions of immigrants and immigration, was a live hour of television Sunday night at the downtown studio of KLRN, the local PBS station.

The event was organized jointly with KSTX, or Texas Public Radio, the first time the city's public radio and television stations teamed up on a project.

Panelists' backgrounds ranged from an opinion journalist to a former San Antonio mayor to a known immigration restriction activist from Georgia.

Behind the moderator's microphone stood mild-mannered and laugh-inducing María Hinojosa, a former CNN reporter now doubling as a correspondent for the national PBS show "NOW" and host of National Public Radio's "Latino USA."

Sunday's live debate steered clear of the complexities of policy reform and instead veered toward its implications and consequences.

For example, there was a probing of the genesis and impact of the multiple rallies and marches immigrants and their supporters have staged across the country over the past month.

Several concurred that the massive numbers — some demonstrations have drawn as many as 500,000 people — indicated the birth of a new civil rights movement, akin to African Americans' struggle for equality starting in the 1950s.

"For the first time, people are saying, 'We're not going to be invisible anymore,'" said former mayor Henry Cisneros.

"We broke the law, too," chimed in Michael Eric Dyson, a renowned author and commentator on African American affairs who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. "It was against the law for us to be free. Martin Luther King broke the law. Rosa Parks broke the law."

Other participants balked at the comparison.

Richard Langlois, Bexar County Republican Party chairman, pointed to a significant discrepancy between blacks, citizens who were trying to earn their place in society, and undocumented immigrants, lawbreakers from the day they stepped on U.S. soil.

"It's not a civil rights movement," Langlois said, "because they don't have any rights."

Panelists seemed to reach common ground on the issue of security, most recognizing that the United States has a right to protect and defend its borders.

Steadfastly maintaining that his whole beef is a deep concern over national security due to the nation's porous borders, D.A. King, an immigration restrictionist from Atlanta, tried several times — without much success — to keep issues of race and ethnicity out of the discussion, arguing irrelevance.

Dismissing the widely cited figure of 11 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants in the country, King said he believed there are more than 20 million — reason enough to shut the border so more won't get through.

"If we don't secure our borders, then we don't have any borders, and therefore we don't have a country," King said.

As seen across the country, from small towns experiencing migrants in their midst for the first time to politicians in Washington knocking heads over legislation, forum panelists seemed to agree to disagree over the problem and its solution.

And though most could not come up with a catchy 15-second sound bite on what, if anything, they personally could do to ameliorate the impasse, at least one panelist had his mission clear.

"I'm just going to keep praying that we can have a reasonable dialogue," said San Antonio Archbishop José Gomez.



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hrozemberg@express-news.net