A conservative student group at the University of Texas at Austin will host an event called “Catch an Illegal Immigrant” on Wednesday.
The group, Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT), plans to give $25 Visa gift cards to students who successfully capture volunteers ambling around campus with “illegal immigrant” labels affixed to their clothing, reports The Daily Texan, UT Austin’s student newspaper.
Actual illegal immigrants will apparently be safe from the faux sting operation.
Members of YCT say they want to spark a debate.
“The purpose of this event is to spark a campus-wide discussion about the issue of illegal immigration, and how it affects our everyday lives,” the group explains on its Facebook page.
As of late Monday night, about 500 Facebook users have indicated plans to take part in the stunt.
Lorenzo Garcia, chairman of the YCT chapter at UT, said the group’s position is that organizing a garden-variety discussion on illegal immigration would likely fizzle.
“If we held a forum or a public debate no one would show up,” Garcia told the Houston Chronicle. “But if we have an event like this it gets people talking about and if it gets people talking about it, then we’ve succeeded.”
He added that YCT is “not afraid to be politically incorrect” and disagrees “that politics is immune to offending someone.”
The event has definitely offended a number of UT students.
“It shouldn’t be tolerated because we are here as a UT community,” offended engineering major Juan Belman told the Texan. “We’re supposed to learn together; we’re supposed to work with each other, and they’re not trying to work with us. They’re just showing hatred language towards students who are here to get an education and help out the community.”
Another student, Ethan Jin, told Austin CBS affiliate KEYE that he is setting up a counter-event on Wednesday in the hopes of sowing chaos.
“At first I thought it was a joke,” Jin told the station. “I’m going to print a whole bunch of labels that says illegal immigrant.”
Various other petitions and protests are in the works as well.
Bigwigs in the UT administration have also expressed offense and frustration about the mock illegal-immigrant busting.
“If the members of YCT carry out their plan for ‘Catch an Illegal Immigrant,’ they are willfully ignoring the honor code and contributing to the degradation of our campus culture,” the school declared in a statement obtained by the Chronicle. “And once again, they will have resorted to exercising one of the university’s core values to the detriment of others.”
The president UT Austin, William Powers, Jr., noted that the public school cannot prevent members of YCT from exercising their free speech rights on campus.
As KEYE notes, Wednesday’s event is not YCT’s first rodeo when it comes to offending orthodoxy on campus. Just last month, the group held a standard-issue affirmative action bake sale, charging different prices based on skin color and, of course, offending a bunch of people greatly.
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