Published: February 29, 2008 11:18 am            

Immigration hot topic at town hall meeting

Representatives Orr, Zedler host event in Burleson

Most of the 40 people who attended Tuesday’s town hall meeting in Burleson supported stricter voter identification and spoke against illegal immigration.

Texas State Representatives Rob Orr, R-Burleson, and Bill Zedler, R-Arlington, hosted the event at the First United Methodist Church through a partnership with the Texas Conservative Coalition.

Conservative leaders State Rep. Dan Flynn, R-Canton, and Linda Harper-Brown, R-Irving, with John Colyandro, executive director of the TCC Research Institute, helped host the event.

The two-hour meeting drew lots of interaction from concerned audience members.

Most in the audience supported increased voter identification requirements and opposed illegal immigration.

All attendees agreed illegal immigration was a problem.

Colyandro and audience members said that causes of the illegal immigration problems included lack of enforcement, extreme poverty in Mexico, opportunity, a broken system of work visas, the long wait and high cost of legal immigration, language and cultural issues, costs for medical care and education, and crime.

“We’ve had a Texas son in office for seven years in Washington, and he’s not done a durn thing to address the issue of illegal immigration,” audience member David Watson said.

Some audience members thought they’d seen progress on the border issue. Others said it was worse.

Flynn said that although there are problems with the border, many things have been done to fix the situation.

House bills 1, 126, 1196 and Senate Bill 11 were passed to help with border security, human trafficking, document fraud, and employer sanctions.

“There really are a lot of improvements that are happening,” Flynn said. “There are some successes. We haven’t solved the problem yet, but we are working on it.”

The illegal immigration discussion prompted a discussion on stricter voter identification requirements.

The entire audience agreed, through a sow of hands, that stricter voter registration and photo identification requirements should be implemented to make sure that only living, legal citizens are allowed to vote.

Zedler said Mexico has a more secure system of voter registration than the United States and had a higher voter turnout than Texas in 2006.

All but one of the town hall audience members agreed that voters must be able to speak English.

“If you can’t speak English, you shouldn’t vote,” audience member Larry Culp said.

Texas State Library and Archives Commissioner Cruz G. Hernandez, who also teaches ESL classes at Cleburne High School, said he believes in more secure voter identification.

“We definitely need some enforcement,” Hernandez said. “It’s about protecting the voters, making sure everyone’s vote counts.”

Hernandez said he supported immigration, but it should be done legally.

“I like the dialogue we had here tonight,” John C. Matthews said. “For the first time I think people are going to be able to look at the next legislative session and know what their representatives will be discussing. I think it’s good to get that dialogue started so people can be aware of what’s going on.”

Three topics were scheduled for the town hall meeting, which was TCC’s 14th in Texas, but emphatic audience involvement and discussion only left time for two.

Colyandro said the third issue, property taxes, would be discussed at another town hall meeting.

“We’ll definitely have more of these meetings,” Colyandro said. “The next event is in Katy, but I’m sure we’ll be coming back to this area again soon.”

        

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