Conversing on immigration

She added that Valdez had invited her to participate in next Saturday's meeting after Sears contacted the mayor's office to complain. She also charged that "half of this 'citizens' council' is not citizens. ... They are taking people who are not citizens to work out solutions that citizens will have to live by." She said that in her group, all members are either U.S. citizens or are working toward becoming citizens.

Saturday's meeting included Guadalupe Reta, a mother of two from Mexico; Veronica Flores VanLeeuwen, local honorary consulate of El Salvador; Ingrid Quiroz, editor and publisher of the newspaper La Prensa Times; Gabriel and Carmen, who asked that their last names not be used; and Sharif Kaharaba of Somali Community Development of Utah. Ashley Sanders, a former student of Nielsen's, also participated. Members of other Salt Lake City immigrant and refugee communities, including Pacific Islander and Bosnian, were also invited, Valdez said, but did not show up.

Nielsen's approach is to teach the values of democracy, which he says is based on a basic principle: "We each possess an equal privilege and liberty to speak, and we each share an equal and reciprocal obligation to listen."

There are seven types of listening, he said: pretend listening, selective listening, rehearsing listening, hostile listening, autobiographical listening (filtering what the other person says through your own point of view) and sincere listening. He introduced participants to common logical fallacies and noted that it's often easy to see how a person with a different opinion uses fallacies but that we're sometimes blind to our own.

Armed with communication skills, Nielson hopes, the two sides of the immigration debate will have an easier time having a conversation when they meet Aug. 18. He urged the group to approach the discussion with mutual respect and a search for shared values.

"Take amnesty," Nielsen said. "People might get stuck in their positions on that issue. But what are the underlying values of both sides?"

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Contributing: Deborah Bulkeley

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E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com