All I want is a straight answer.

On Tuesday, for Intro to Psych (which is essentially half the freshman class), we gathered in the ampitheatre here on campus. The speaker, a sociology professor, had us calculate various social categorizations assigned a point value- add 10 points if you're white, add 10 points if your parents own their home, subtract 10 points if your name sounds ethnic, add 20 points if you went to a private school or were homeschooled, etc. Then, he ranked us according to our final scores. The highest scores sat in the front rows, the middles in the middle, and the lowest in the back. He wanted to show us that criteria we have no control over determines what sorts of obstacles we will face in becoming successful. I was in the highest rank.

We had some audience discussion about how it felt to be thusly categorized, but we mostly left feeling unsatisfied. Or, at least, I did. The professor, Dr. Gates, had e-mailed us links to studies before class. One study sent out similar resumes with white-sounding and black-sounding names, and found that the former, at a rate of 10.06%, got more callbacks than the latter, at 6.70%. Now, I understand statistics. Of course there is a correlation there, but the difference is not insurmountable. Besides, people are not statistics, and the individual, supposedly less-endowed person might well succeed without any more obstacles than someone statistically privileged. However, Dr. Gates did not seem so convinced, telling us that we don't have as much power to "write our own stories" as we think; the book was largely written before we were even born. Of course, he concluded with the obligatory we-need-to-do-all-we-can-even-the-playing-field, but he did not seem wholly confident that this will ever happen.

Last night, Thursday, my friend and I attended "Brewed Awakening," a monthly forum designed to spark discourse about current issues of social import. Dr. Gates once again presided, this time introducing another professor, leader of a Quaker fellowship which supports an "undocumented immigrant," Marco, who also spoke.

Marco told the packed room about coming over from Mexico as a young child and then growing up undocumented, unable to get a driver's license, passed over for scholarships because he lacked a Social Security number, wiggling his way into SDSU and his jobs. He punctuated his story with "I'm not a bad person" and "That little four-year-old didn't know he was breaking the law."

They opened the floor for questions afterward. The Quaker leader and Dr. Gates both insisted the goal of the night was to "put a face on the immigration issue." They deflected pointed inquiries with "We all need to educate ourselves about this issue" and other such commonplaces. I was dying to get a straight answer out of them.

No one ever said illegal immigrants weren't people. But articulate Marco, senior class president, SDSU graphic design student, has as much worth as a person as any stereotypical functionally illiterate gang member on the street. Where do we draw the line? It's one thing to denounce the system as corrupt; it's quite another to advocate a plan to fix it. Marco, or others like him, as his case is pending in court, regularly break laws as they drive their cars, attend school at residents' tuition, and just live here. At what point are we above the law? When we feel like it? Should we ignore laws that we feel aren't just solely because we feel thusly?

I didn't want to come off as the unconvinced conservative that I pretty much am, so I couched my question in as liberal of terms as I could conceive: "So what social ideal should we aim for? Completely open borders? Wh-wh-what (I stutter when I'm nervous) would this look like in a perfect world?"

I can't do them the justice of word-for-word quotation, but their responses were something along the lines of: the country has a right to regulate its borders, but as we have free trade of capital, goods, and labor with Canada and Mexico, we should not neglect the latter. It's a complex issue with a lot of people's lives involved, and we as the church need to be the sanctuary that cares for the orphans, widows, and strangers, especially this last one, in our midst.

And that was it. I nodded resignedly as I realized they had no more direct answers than I did. Dr. Gates closed the session in a benediction to us to "remember our baptism" by acknowledging our allegiance is to our faith before our country or our families. I left with a fair-trade coffee buzz and a lot more I'd like to have asked.