The chair of the Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities raised objection Thursday to a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee conference on immigration.
Rep. Stephen Nass, R-Whitewater, sent a letter to University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly saying the conference fails to take a balanced approach, calling it a "blatant" one-sided event that appears to be sympathetic toward lawbreakers.
The conference, titled "Immigration: Many Faces; Many Facets" — sponsored by the UW System Institute on Race and Ethnicity and the UW-Milwaukee School of Continuing Education — is scheduled to take place April 26-27.
"This conference has 60 presenters and four keynote speakers, and not even one is an expert on illegal immigration and the need to secure our border," Nass said in a release. "However, the UW System staff organizing the conference found keynote speakers from the Anti-Deportation Movement and another that equates illegal immigrants as the new civil rights movement."
UW System spokesperson David Giroux said the academic conference is a conference on the topic of immigration, not illegal immigration — which is only one aspect of the discussion.
"We are not going to second-guess every lecture, class and conference around all 26 campuses," Giroux said. "Over time the university, by its very nature, presents multiple views on any given topic."
Giroux said any groups were allowed to present at this conference if their topic was relevant to the theme of immigration.
"The university invites critique and review," Giroux said. "It invites people to bring opinions supported by data. This is the very nature of scholarship."
In addition, Nass said in the letter he was troubled by the response of administrators at the UW System Institute on Race and Ethnicity after he requested financial data outlaying the cost of the conference.
"The public has the right to know if taxpayer dollars have been used to subsidize this farce of an academic conference," Nass said in a release. "Refusing to provide this information is a horrible mistake at a time when the legislature is handling the biennial state budget."
However, Giroux said the UW System was asked to provide the financial information yesterday afternoon and has since sent the data to Nass' office. Currently, the projected cost by the UW System for the conference is $3,232 from public funds.
The data, Giroux said, finds 62 percent of the anticipated costs of the conference will be covered by registration fees from the 166 people who are registered for the conference, but added the gross product revenue needed to fund the conference will likely decline as more people attend.
In his letter, Nass said that despite his objections to the balance and finances of the conference, immigration is a national policy issue that should be discussed.
Reilly will likely respond to Nass' disapproval of the conference next week in a letter, according to Giroux.
