Illegal Immigration: How Cities Are Coping with Danbury Mayor Mark D. Boughton, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano and Tamar Jacoby of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Courant columnist Tom Condon moderates the discussion.
Cities are dealing with their illegal immigrants in very different ways, some working with federal agents to arrest the undocumented, others barring police from even asking about citizenship status, and others in the muddled middle- World Affairs Council of Connecticut
Bio
Mark Boughton
Born February 20, 1964 in Danbury, Mark D. Boughton graduated from Danbury High School in 1982 and went on to attend Central Connecticut State University where he received a Bachelor of Science and Education Degree in American History. He went on to receive a Master’s Degree in Educational Psychology from Western Connecticut State University where he now serves on the Alumni Board of Directors.
Mark served in the United States Army Reserve from 1983 to 1989 where he achieved the rank of Sergeant. He returned to Danbury High School in 1987 to teach Social Studies, and served as a Member of the Danbury Planning Commission from 1995 to 1998.
Mark was elected State Representative for the 138th District of Connecticut in 1998, and was re-elected in 2000. He achieved a perfect voting record in the General Assembly, and served as a member of the Education Committee and ranking member of the Environment Committee. Mark was elected Mayor for the City of Danbury, Connecticut in November 2001, and re-elected in 2003 and 2005.
Tom Condon
Tom Condon is a columnist, editorial writer and editor of Place, a Sunday Commentary section of The Hartford Courant. Place focuses on architecture, planning, transportation and other aspects of the built and natural environment.
Tom is a native of New London, a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the University of Connecticut School of Law, and a member of the Connecticut Bar. He is also a Vietnam veteran, having served with U.S. Army Intelligence in the Mekong Delta in 1969-70.
Since joining The Courant in 1971, he has served in a variety of reporting and editing positions, ranging from general assignment reporter to New Haven bureau chief to special projects editor. He was a news columnist for 18 years, and is a longtime student of Hartford past and present.
Condon has won more than 30 journalism and community awards, including the New England Society of Newspaper Editors Master Reporter Award. Tom is also the co-author of “School Rights,” a book about parent activism in schools.
He and his wife, Anne, are the authors of Legal Lunacy, a book of funny laws. Tom’s work has appeared in Northeast Magazine, Family Life, The Harvard Business Review, The International Herald Tribune and other publications.
John DeStefano
Mayor John DeStefano was sworn in as New Haven's 49th Mayor on January 1, 1994, and was recently reelected to his seventh term in office. Since his inauguration, Mayor DeStefano has cut crime in half, launched one of the nation’s largest school construction programs and revitalized its downtown.
Mayor DeStefano is the past president of the National League of Cities - the nation's oldest and largest organization representing some 18,000 American cities and towns - and is a past president of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities.
Felicity Harley
Felicity Harley is the executive director of the World Affairs Council of Connecticut.
Felicity Harley has an extensive professional background that combines 30 years of national and international experience as a senior manager and Chief Executive Officer in nonprofit institutions, and is currently the Executive Director of the World Affairs Council of Connecticut. Felicity Harley was educated in Great Britain and the United States. She is a published writer and poet.
Tamar Jacoby
Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes extensively on immigration and citizenship. She is a leading conservative voice in the media and elsewhere in favor of immigration reform, and works to organize the center-right behind reform proposals taking shape in Washington.
Her 1998 book, Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration (Basic Books), tells the story of race relations in three American cities—New York, Detroit and Atlanta. The Economist magazine called it "arguably the most important study of race relations in America since Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma was published in 1944."
A more recent book, Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American, was published by Basic Books in February 2004. A collection of essays by a diverse group of authors—academics, journalists and fiction-writers on both the right and the left—it argues that we as a nation need to find new ways to talk about and encourage immigrant absorption in American society.
In addition to her published writings and media commentary, in the past few years she has been working behind the scenes in Washington to help develop immigration policy, writing policy papers, testifying in Congress and working with a range of congressional offices.
Before joining the Manhattan Institute, from 1987 to 1989, she was a senior writer and justice editor for Newsweek, where she wrote weekly articles on criminal justice, the Supreme Court and other law-related topics. Between 1981 and 1987, she was the deputy editor of The New York Times op-ed page. Before that, she was assistant to the editor of The New York Review of Books.
In 2004, she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
A graduate of Yale University, she has taught at Yale, Cooper Union and the New School University. She lives in Washington, DC.
I wonder why Im the first when this discussion was held in couple of years ago. I observed that none of the speakers were ever immigrants, One white gay mayor, whos hands look like they have done no physical labor. Labor understands immigration. Then you have a short haired Jewish girl dressed boyish, haircut not feminine maybe also gay, then the boy in the middle, white-pink american never really experienced illegal immigration or any immigration. Lou Dobbs is right what about the social repercussiond when no male role in mexico families and they get recruited by the Zetas which nsupply the father role supply and demad 20,000 deaths are related to immigration because of the decay of Mexican family.. stupid comparision scar face a cuban not mexican, Cubans get the fast track on immigratio. The gay mayor sounded very bad, shameful example perpetual complainer from nowhere. No wonder Im the only comment, comparing Movies to reality is waste of time all three. no experience all talk here is here say, no direct experiense, focus groups retinal consciousnees.
member. 
