With about 190 participants and 16 speakers, the conference was the second in a two-part symposium initiated last year to engage the local and regional community in dialog about what it means to be a Westerner. Ds to fill a university. Speaker Vicki Ruiz, chair of Chicano Studies at Arizona State University, set a sobering tone early Friday morning with a poem. It's called breeding Welfare pay for baby feeding. The barrage of statistics Ruiz unleashed, augmented by on-screen, projected computer analysis, was daunting.
Most undocumented immigrants are visa overstays.
According to Ruiz's figures, the total number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. each year is 400,000, which amounts to a total of three to five million, or less than two percent of the total U.S. population. The Institute of Women's Policy Research found that only five percent of aid to families with dependent children recipients were foreign-born. A group of four panelists, echoed Ruiz's theme and expanded on it. And to hear the talk this morning, a lot of those attitudes are still with us. It seems we really haven't learned.