They called it "Capture the Illegal Immigrant" and decided to make a game of it. Spread throughout campus would be members of the Young Conservatives of Texas wearing bright orange T-shirts that read "Illegal Immigrant" in big black text. YCT officers, in blue T-shirts and stationed at their booth near the Student Union, would call to passing students--with a bullhorn if necessary--telling them they could "help secure the economy" by finding their orange-shirted compatriots. Once captured, the "immigrant" would inform the capturer of President Bush's flawed work program, the one that could allow illegal immigrants to gain a documented "temporary worker status" in the United States. But because we live in a post-September 11 world, the orange-shirted men and women would mention, too, how our porous borders enable terrorists to carry out their plots. Oh, and in exchange for one's efforts, wouldn't it be cool, they thought, if a capturer received a 100 Grand candy bar, which represented the economic drain illegal immigrants bring upon our country?
YCT's done controversial stuff before. The chapter at Southern Methodist University staged an "affirmative action bake sale" last year in which black students could buy a cookie at one-fourth the regular price. At UNT, the group last fall held a Coming Out Conservative event on the same day gays and lesbians across the nation staged their National Coming Out Day. And last Wednesday, the day of "Capture the Illegal Immigrant," the North Texas Daily, the campus newspaper, splashed across its front page a story about YCT releasing a list of UNT professors it thought taught with liberal agendas.
"I joined because these guys do stuff," says Christopher Richey, a sophomore in political science and member of YCT. Richey's all broad shoulders and towering height--an imposing figure, surely, but one who loses his edge when he sits, as he does now, a little past noon, one hour into the event, and smacks his lips together, further infuriating the cold sore spreading across his mustache line.
It's been a quiet morning for Richey and the rest. Yes, there was the woman in the pink top who stopped talking on her cell phone to look at the banner behind the booth--"Capture the Illegal Immigrant," it reads--and scream, "Oh. My. God. What idiots. Ohmygod, that's so offensive." To which Chris Brown, YCT chapter president, a cowboy hat on his head and Bible in his back pocket, yelled back, "You know what's offensive? People coming into my country illegally."
But aside from that, all is quiet till the media appear. First there's Fox 4, with a satellite antenna atop its van and a woman holding a microphone, pacing the sidewalk. Then the guy from the Denton Record-Chronicle starts asking around. Then Michele Connole, the publicity director for YCT, gets a call from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and semi-announces its intended arrival to all within earshot. Next, the Spanish daily Al Dia shows. By the time Telemundo parks its van and unloads the camera, suddenly there's reason to be angry: Hey, we might be on TV!
Connole, Richey, Brown and the two others manning the booth are faced with roughly 30 students, mostly Hispanic, who don't care to hear about YCT's opposition to illegal immigrants from all countries. That banner behind you, yo--that's messed up; that's offensive to Hispanics everywhere.
"They might as well be wearing white hoods," says Ruben Oviedo, a senior in literature and induction officer of Lambda Theta Phi, a Latin fraternity that had roughly 10 members present for most of the protest.
Of course, this is all intended to be controversial. Chris Brown, around 1:30, looks on at the scene below him--no one has left and everyone's face is red and cameras record it all--and a slow smile creeps across his face.
If they were to do this event without the banner, without the orange T-shirts, with only immigration policies on paper, "This," he says, pointing to the crowd, "wouldn't happen."
Which brings us, in retrospect, to the ironies facing all parties involved. First there are the angered students, who in their anger--however justified--failed to see that the event was there only to incite the epithets they cast upon YCT. (Students argued with YCT well beyond 2 p.m., the time the group was to disassemble its booth.)
Then there's the media--including us--which couldn't resist attending an event that was so obviously staged for effect and reported on the controversy rather than the issues it espoused. (For the record, 9-11 hijackers were in violation of immigration law. And Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Board chairman, says illegal immigrants pay $538 million in taxes each year but use $238 million in services.)
But mostly, there's YCT. Why did they do this? Connole says to show the group's opposition to Bush's proposed policy, to show how it will hurt the economy and invite terrorists to our lax borders. But the immigrants in orange T-shirts couldn't adequately express why the group protested. Indeed, once captured--the capturing itself a joke: The orange shirts were always in plain sight of the booth--Kelsey Stokes, a member of YCT, simply recited the U.S. code on illegal immigration and said, "So don't be like me."
Members at the booth weren't much better. Shortly after Richey said he joined YCT because of its activism, because it knew the issues it protested, Albert Martinez approached the booth. Martinez is a senior in social science. It took six years for his family to enter the United States legally. After minutes explaining his family's plight to Richey, how difficult it can be to get papers processed and how much more money can be made for one's family if only one sneaks across the border, Richey had had enough.
"If I was in that position," Richey conceded to Martinez, "I'd probably break the law, too." --Paul Kix
Found Money
There's a lawsuit out right now that claims 44 mutual fund managers could have claimed $2 billion for their investors but chose not to. The law firm that filed the nationwide suit, Baron & Budd, is Dallas-based, and its spokesman, Randall Pulliam, says a win could drastically change the mutual fund industry's accountability.
Here's what the suit alleges: In the 1990s, securities class-action lawsuits against publicly traded companies were filed one after another. (The current suit counts 1,517 federal class-actions brought between 1996 and 2003.) Many of these suits were resolved through settlements, big settlements, intended for investors. Since mutual funds are themselves stockholders in publicly traded companies, they became de facto plaintiffs in the suits, and later, after the settlements, the only entity that could claim the money on behalf of regular investors. But mutual fund managers--including Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo and Janus--failed to file claims, leaving, over the course of many years, some $2 billion on the table, Pulliam says.
Why? One argument, says James Cox, a law professor at Duke University, is that the money manager one institution has in 1999 is often not the same it has in 2005. And the new one may not have the records the old one had when it's time to file claims on behalf of investors.
Jill Fisch, a law professor who specializes in financial law at Fordham University in New York, says it also might cost mutual funds more money to file the claim than their share is worth. "I think the lawsuit, to a certain extent, is advantageous," Fisch says.
"No, I don't believe that to be true," Pulliam says. For one, "A mutual fund doesn't know how much money a claim is worth until it goes through the process [of filing]." --Paul Kix
All-Terrain Skating
East Lawther Drive, the stretch of pavement popular with joggers and bikers that meanders along the eastern shore of White Rock Lake, is a refuge from the traffic and noise of the city--but not from the iron grip of the law. Just ask Mike Harris.
Harris, a founder of the Dallas Flyers, a 25-member in-line skating club, was on a training run in the park in December when he was confronted by one of Dallas' finest. "She pulled her car in front of me at an angle like I was some pervert culprit," Harris recalls. He was violating Dallas' Ordinance 14584, which brands as a culprit (though not a pervert) any person who, "while on roller skates, or riding in or by means of any coaster, toy vehicle, or similar device...goes upon any roadway." The Flyers are well-acquainted with the ordinance: Over more than a decade of practicing at White Rock, officers have often admonished them to stick to the narrow paved jogging path that roughly parallels Lawther.
Trouble is, if they did, they'd kill themselves. Stretches of the trail are buckled and pitted to the point that hiking boots seem more appropriate than skates. "I tell you, somebody's going to get seriously hurt," Harris says. The Flyers use the trail where they can, but for a third of the 6-mile route that they cruise at upward of 20 mph, they use Lawther's smoother surface for sheer self-preservation.
Harris' plea, usually effective with sympathetic cops, fell on deaf ears this time, and in court a few weeks later he forked over $130. The incident prompted the Flyers to ask the White Rock task force last month to look into getting East Lawther excepted from the ordinance. The city's response? No way--the liability if someone were hurt would be too great. The irony of forcing the Flyers to use the more hazardous trail surface is not lost on Harris. "If you let people skate on that trail, you're begging for a lawsuit," he says.
The district park maintenance chief, June Howard, concedes that the trail is in rough shape and says plans are afoot to fix it--sometime in the next decade. "And at that point we'll have to start over where we began," Howard says. --Rick Kennedy
