People attending an immigration "reform" meeting last Monday that featured a Minuteman as speaker were riled that Austin mayor Tom Stiehm wasn't in the audience. Perhaps if the organizers had really wanted the mayor to show up, they wouldn't have scheduled their meeting opposite a city council meeting.
On the other hand, they might not have liked what the mayor has to say these days.
According to Mayor Stiehm explains stance on legal, illegal immigration, the mayor has finished a promised investigation of the effects of illegal immigration on Austin, and unlike some of the audience at last Monday's meeting, the former police department employee isn't reaching for bullets:
When asked to reflect on his immigration stance when he first entered office in January, Mayor Tom Stiehm called himself one of the “frustrated ones.”
“I don't know if I had so much an opinion, but I shared their frustrations,” he said, referring to those who believe that Austin's growing Latino illegal immigrant population has adversely affected public safety, resources and quality of life. “I didn't see the economic advantages of it.”“But I didn't come out with the conclusion that I started,” he said.
Though perhaps not a full 180 degree turn, Stiehm's position on the population has hugely shifted as he worked toward fulfilling a campaign promise he said he made last fall: to investigate exactly how illegal immigrants are affecting the city.
At a press conference Friday, he said illegal immigrants will now be welcomed community members, so long as they follow the law and positively contribute, and those who believe otherwise aren't fully inspecting the full picture of their presence here.
“We need to consider the city as a whole,” Stiehm said. “They are embedded in our economy. They are embedded in every aspect of Austin.”
His newfound beliefs may be surprising for some, who contribute his mayoral victory in part to his tougher stance on illegal immigration.
“People said that I said I would get all of them out of here,” Stiehm said. “ I never said that. And I was very careful not to say that I would get rid of them.” . . .
. . .Stiehm, who worked for the Austin Police Department for more than 20 years, said his pledge was to investigate the issue, which came to include tours through Hormel Foods and Quality Pork Processors, community forums with immigration reform and Latino advocates and conversations with mayor and leaders of other communities.
“I came to the conclusion that if people are here in Austin working and not getting into trouble, we're not going to do anything about them,” he said, adding that a mass deportation of illegal immigrants would do more harm than good. . . .
This is a distinctly different response than the one Dick Day has taken on tour in his bid for the GOP endorsement in the First. Unlike Stiehm, Day was at last Monday's "reform" meeting, where he promised to travel to a Minuteman Project in Arizona.
A letter in today's Mankato Free Press scolds the paper for not reporting on Day's immigration views. While we don't find hanging out with Minutemen and the "get some bullets" crowd to be particularly compassionate (the reader rpaises Day's compassion), we do hope that the Free Press, like the Rochester Post Bulletin and the Austin Herald, not only reports on Day's plan, but the company he keeps, his travels, and the like.
Meanwhile, in Day's home town of Owatonna, ethnic dance theatre and a foreign cousin of football are introduced at a local grade school's CultureFest.
UPDATE: KTTC has posted a video segment about the mayor's views.
Later today, we'll post about veterans and children's health insurance issues.
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