Legislative Interim Immigration Committee Hearing

I attended the Utah State Legislature’s Immigration Interim Committee a meeting conducted on August 27, 2008, at Park City’s Ecker Hill Middle School. The speakers that spoke at this meeting were almost all rightists who complained about being branded as racists and then went on used both racist code and out and out racist comments.
Kent Lundgren, retired border Patrol agent, started things off by commenting that “U.S. immigration laws haven’t been racist since the 1930’s”
Randy Terrell, of the Oklahoma State Legislature,
“Immigration lawyer cartel”
“Illegal Alien Lobby”
“crime, gangs and drugs are attributable to illegal aliens”
“as for remittances we should track wire transfers”
Eli Cawley of the Utah Minutemen complained about “Illegal Alien Identity theft” and an “invasion of of illegal aliens”.
There was a student who told a story of patiently waiting in line to immigrate legally. Another talking about not being able to get a job because she couldn’t speak Spanish and the “illegals” were taking them all.
This was more or less the tone of the meeting.
Many of the speakers claimed to speak on behalf of exploited workers but I’ve never seen them at any actions, union or non-union, defending the rights of workers.
The Sutherland institute seemed absolutely rational by the standards of the preceding speakers. The Sutherland Institute released a summary report of recent research, Utah's Citizens and Illegal Immigrants: Side-By-Side. Then they were grilled by some members of the legislative panel for “inviting
I ran into the same problems trying to find about how you get on the agenda or when the hearings were being held. The other thing that struck me was the demographic make-up of the people in the meeting. I attended a meeting in Park City after an ICE raid in 2007 and it sure didn’t look anything like this meeting.

http://picasaweb.google.com/hopperlangford/ImmigrationParkCity




http://picasaweb.google.com/hopperlangford/ImmigrationParkCity