V.P. calls immigration rally well organized
By Katrina Garcia
The Collegian
Enthusiastic, constructive and well-organized are words students typically only hear in the classroom. That wasn’t the case for students who participated in Monday’s rally for immigration rights.
Those words were used by Vice President for Student Affairs Paul Oliaro to describe Monday’s protest.
“I think there aren’t too many topics that have generated this much coverage,” Oliaro said of Monday’s rally for immigration rights in the Peace Garden. “It was good to see students learning about an issue that’s a national issue and not just campus-wide.”
While some people may think today’s students are less concerned about worldwide and nationwide problems, Oliaro said the topic of immigration rights hits home for many people living in the San Joaquin Valley.
“There’s a lot of claims that students are much more apathetic now than 10 or 15 years ago,” Oliaro said.
But he credits the university’s location in an agricultural area as well as the substantial number of students who have ties to farmers and migrant families as to what made so many people attend Monday’s rally.
Although the number of protesters can be counted, the number of Fresno State faculty and staff members who failed to come to work because of the protest is unclear.
Oliaro said it is difficult to determine on any given day how many university employees fail to come to work because of illness or other reasons, so it is not known how many did not show up to work Monday because of the rally.
“I think it’s fair to say there were a number of faculty and staff who supported it in a variety of ways,” Oliaro said, citing participation of both the Fresno State and downtown rallies and boycotting of stores as examples.
Judith Rosenthal, a Fresno State English professor, is on early retirement and lives in San Miguel, Mexico during her six-month break from teaching. She said Monday the protests going on both on campus and nationwide would be “very effective,” but that any attempts by the United States to put up a fence or wall to keep illegal immigrants out of the country would fail.
“I don’t think undocumented workers should be treated as felons, and I think we need a guest-worker program,” Rosenthal said. “These people are doing work that Americans don’t want to do. Americans owe a huge gratitude to the huge number of undocumented workers.”
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