In our group’s discussion on deliberation, we opened the floor to hear community members’ perspectives on the issue of illegal immigration, particularly at the southern border. Out of our three pre-established approaches, none came out as a clear winner, however the deliberation was still very successful in sharing ideas and experiences and broadening participants’ knowledge of the issue.  

One aspect of the deliberation that contributed to our success was creating a solid information base. Our introduction video included factual information introducing our three approaches, and we (accidentally) went around to every participant to get each of their personal stakes. Although many participants did not really have a stake in the issue, quite a few had loose personal interests such as friends being immigrants, and still others spoke about the issues faced by their legal and/or illegal immigrant relatives.  

From this information base, we identified a range of solutions. These entailed increasing border security, streamlining legal immigration, or opening the borders. However, I think one of the drawbacks to this selection of approaches was that they were all different, so it was hard to compare all of them equally and select one best solution. Although I know this wasn’t the point of the deliberation, it still felt like we were singularly evaluating each solution and not evaluating comparatively. With the other deliberations I attended – student debt, third spaces, college admissions – this played out similarly, where limited time was spent considering which solution or combination of solutions would be the best overall.  

However, in the deliberation we moderated and the ones we attended, questions were appropriately established to weigh the pros, cons, and tradeoffs within each solution. For our deliberation, we would typically only ask 1-2 deep questions for each approach, such as “how to we balance the negatives of migrant deaths from increased border security against the deaths from drugs imported with decreased border security,” and the participants were able to debate among themselves the pros and cons to the issue.  

In that sense, speaking opportunities were adequately distributed; many people were able to give input on the issue. However, I do think that since the members of my group had done background research and had a larger information base, we took a larger percentage of the talking time, but I think it was necessary to grow to group information base. With other groups, I did not see the moderators taking extra time, but I also sometimes felt in those discussions that it would be helpful to hear from more researched sources.  

Still, in each deliberation the moderators were able to ensure mutual comprehension. Whether it was just from the moderators talking a lot, like in our deliberation, or from the moderators being able to clarify questions and background information, like in the rest of the deliberations, information was understandable by the general participants.  

Finally, each deliberation group and group of participants did a great job at considering other ideas and experiences. A lot of times in our deliberation, we would ask a question such as, “is it a human right to be able to go anywhere in the world,” and the participants in our group would respond with ideas that were beyond what we were expecting, leading to ideas about our general society beyond just immigration.