WVC hosts Immigration Forum April 1

Wenatchee Valley College will host a Community Conversation on Immigration, a public forum with presentations from local and national scholars, on Friday, April 1, from 6 to 9 p.m. in Van Tassell Center on the Wenatchee campus. The forum is free and open to the public.

Regional issues on topics of migration and immigration will be offered by WVC faculty members Leo Garcia and Joara Minharo. Garcia, who teaches in the Hispanic Orchard Employees Education Program, will speak on the “Immigration Perspective in Agriculture.” Minharo, a political science instructor, will present “The Human Cost and Parallel Lives of Immigrants.”

Two visiting scholars from North Carolina, Dr. David Griffith and Dr. Ricardo Contreras, will talk about immigration issues framed within broader patters of human migration.

The forum will include a question-and-answer session at the end of the presentations.

Griffith is a senior scientist and professor of anthropology at the Institute for Coastal Science and Policy and the Department of Anthropology at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. He is the author of six books and more than a hundred other shorter publications and the former editor of Human Organization, the journal of the Society for Applied Anthropology. His topic is “Community Management of Immigration.”

Contreras is an assistant professor of anthropology at East Carolina University and founder and director of the Nuevo South Research Collaborative, an organization dedicated to creating research and advocacy partnerships between Latino organization and university personnel across North Carolina. He is the author of several publications and the recent recipient of a research award by the North Carolina Humanities Council to document the Latino presence in North Carolina through Latino oral histories. Contreras will address “Immigrant Management of Communities.”

Dr. Julie Tate-Libby, a WVC anthropology instructor, will serve as moderator and facilitator at the forum.

The forum is sponsored by the Society for Applied Anthropology and Wenatchee Valley College.

Parking will be free.