Back to the Drawing Board(er) Reflection

My group, Back to the Drawing Bord(er), carried out our deliberation this past Wednesday in room 304 of the State College Municipal Building. We came together to discuss this recently controversial issue: how should the United States approach immigration policy? Our goal was to talk with members of the Penn State and State College area about the values that we hold as Americans and how we should apply these values to immigration in the United States. It was clear to our group that there are many issues that have sprung up within our country regarding this issue as well as many positives that result from the mixing of people from around the world. After all, that is how we became a nation. In order to get the most our of what happened during our deliberation, it’s now time to reflect on what went right, what went wrong, and the stances that we took on the subject as a group during the deliberation.

The deliberation was certainly a success, so it’s true that we can take many positives away from what occurred. I felt like the best part of our deliberation was how well structured the entire gathering was. After starting just after 3:30 pm, our group stood at the front of the room as Kate and Elliot gave an introduction, and each approach followed smoothly after with questions for the audience after each approach and an overall discussion at the end. The night previous, I attended a deliberation that was not well moderated or structured which took away from the affect that the event had on the audience. Also, we stayed on the topic of applying our values as Americans as to how to approach immigration rather than trying to find an answer to the problem, something pretty much all of us have an opinion on, but not a real solution.

There were also some aspects of our deliberation that could have gone just a bit better. The size and diversity of our audience definitely seemed to hurt us. In a deliberation, you want a group of people that have ideas from both sides of the spectrum in order for the audience as a whole to experience a well-rounded conversation. This definitely helps to “open minds”, which was our goal. Our audience seemed to be mostly on the same page, which was moderately liberal. This doesn’t mean that a good deliberation didn’t occur, it could have just been a little more exciting.

By the end of the deliberation, the audience had come to a similar conclusion, and this was aided by the process of thinking about each approach: restricted boarders, open boarders, and moderate boarders. When we were discussing restricted boarders, the audience was clearly against the idea of keeping our safe country to ourselves just for the sake of security. Whether an immigrant was to come from Mexico fleeing a desperate economy or fleeing Syria because of war, the group thought that our values direct us to let people in. However, when we came to open boarders, the consensus was that in no way should we actually have lightly regulated system because of the flow of drugs and other dangerous things across the boarder. Moderate boarders was where everything came together and we were able to find a middle ground while being opened to different idea during the discussion.

Overall, our deliberation was a success, and I am proud to have been apart of the undertaking of such a virtuous event for the good of public knowledge.

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