National experts will share their views about the effects of immigration policies during a symposium scheduled Sept. 17-18 at the University of Wyoming.

The symposium, titled “Where Are We Now? Immigration Policy and Its Impact from a Wyoming and a National Perspective,” is free and open to the public. Most events take place in the UW Conference Center at the Hilton Garden Inn. The UW American Heritage Center (AHC) sponsors the two-day event.

Immigration touches on crucial issues of the changing work force, the role citizens want to play in the world and cultural identity, says UW AHC archivist Leslie Waggener, one of the conference organizers.

Topics to be discussed are nationhood, citizenship and belonging; values and social otherness; borders; questions of social justice; individual, national and cultural identities; ways in which people reinvent themselves, their cultures and their worlds in new contexts; and the role language plays in controversial issues such as assimilation and education.

The symposium begins Wednesday, Sept. 17, with a panel discussion at 6 p.m. in the AHC, located in the Centennial Complex, 2111 Willett Drive. Panelists will look at immigration through different angles related to the humanities, including culture, art and music.

The AHC and the UW student organization Movimiento Estuduantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) sponsor the event.

UW President Dick McGinity and AHC Director Mark Greene will give opening remarks at 8:30 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 18, in Salon C of the UW Conference Center. Wyoming retired U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson follows with reflection remarks.

Simpson and Romano Mazzoli, a Democratic representative from Kentucky, helped create the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which also is known as the Simpson-Mazzoli Act. An act of Congress that reformed United States immigration law, it was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan Nov. 6, 1986.

Other speakers throughout the day include UW faculty members; others from various universities; UW students; representatives of entities that focus on immigration issues; and Ruben Navarette, a prominent columnist whose syndicated column is distributed by the Washington Post Writers Group.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, who outed himself as an undocumented immigrant in a groundbreaking essay published in The New York Times Magazine, is the symposium’s keynote speaker.

Vargas will speak at a luncheon Thursday, Sept. 18, at 1:30 p.m. in Salon DE of the UW Conference Center. The Wyoming Humanities Council funds Vargas’ presentation.

 

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