Paying to Educate Illegal Kids, Part 2

From Investor's Business Daily:

The Editorial Board of IBD has written up a nice article about the DREAM Act now being pushed by Senator Dick Durbin. The DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) is... well.. let me paste what they have written:

"is actually a recurring nightmare, a bad idea..."

Well, the DREAM Act is not necessarily being pushed at this time. That Act was killed last year when the American people put up such a fuss against the President and Congress that they had to kill it. What is up on the table now is a bill by Dick Durbin:

It gives aliens who entered this country before the age of 16, and who have successfully evaded the law for five years, conditional green-card status that can later be converted to a regular green card. Then it can be used to seek green cards for the parents who brought their child here illegally.

That this amounts to back-door amnesty is borne out by the legislation's lack of an upper age limit for an illegal alien to apply. Any alien of any age can simply queue up at the nearest Customs and Immigration office and declare that he or she was here illegally before reaching 16. No documentation or proof is required.

It also allows illegal aliens to receive in-state tuition rates at public universities, discriminating against legal foreign students and children of U.S. citizens from other states.

This is wholly unconstitutional, unfair, unjust, unAmerican, and illegal. To give a class of people who are not citizens of the state a different fee structure - to the point of not being charged - for the same services given to citizens is "revolt"ingly wrong.

Why should we give kids who were brought here illegally free education and a free and easy one-step path to citizenship? Just because they are kids? NO!! We need to send them back to their countries and have them work for their citizenship like ALL the other legalized citizens have done.

More from IBD:

When she supported similar legislation as part of the failed comprehensive immigration reform package, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: "Our country does not benefit by depriving young people of an education." Does that include the children of U.S. citizens?

True, children of illegal aliens didn't get a vote when their parents chose to enter the U.S. illegally. But our country does not benefit when its laws are ignored or its citizens are denied the same benefits available to those who have sneaked past the Border Patrol.

Durbin's legislation repeals a 1996 law that bars any state from offering in-state tuition rates to illegal aliens who have gotten by a Border Patrol agent unless the children of that agent are also offered the same opportunity. After all, should illegal aliens in a state get preference over, say, the children of 9/11 victims?

Title 8, Chapter 14, Sec. 1623 clearly states that "an alien who is not lawfully present in the United States shall not be eligible on the basis of residence within a state . . . for any post-secondary education benefit unless a citizen or national is eligible for such a benefit." Durbin's legislation speaks only of benefiting "alien minors."

Ten states (California, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Utah, Texas and Washington) have their own versions of DREAM. The financial benefits of these programs to illegal aliens are as great as the penalty imposed on U.S. citizens.

As a citizen who was born in Oklahoma, past resident, and now once again a resident of Oklahoma, I must say that my university is operating against the law. When I moved back to Oklahoma to attend my university, I was labeled as an non-resident and charged a non-resident tuition. After 2 years, I am still being charged non-resident tuition rates. Wouldn't it be logical, that if these states followed the law, that they would not even have a non-resident tuition rate on their books? As who could they charge? If they offered in-state tuition to illegal non-citizens, then they should not be legally charging non-resident citizen rates to US citizens. You follow me?

IBD sums up this article really nicely.

As Kris Kobach, visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, points out, a student from Missouri attending the University of Kansas with not so much as a parking ticket is charged three times the tuition as an illegal alien whose very presence is a violation of federal criminal law. Durbin wants to extend this justice nationwide.

Break this nation's laws, don't get caught, and U.S. taxpayers struggling to send their own kids to college, many taking out loans, will subsidize your kid's education as he takes up the spot that might have gone to the child of a veteran from, say, Operation Iraqi Freedom, who can't afford it because he or she was born in, say, Illinois.

Americans are beginning to wonder what benefits accrue to being a U.S. citizen when illegal aliens and their offspring are treated better than law-abiding citizens. So are we.

I don't really have much to say, except I post this as a reminder...

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men and Women were created equal, that they are naturally endowed with certain unalienable rights, rights which have been deliberately and repeatedly ignored, eroded, even destroyed. To re-secure these rights that our forefathers toiled so hard to create and support, we again state that governments are created for the people and solely by the consent of the people so governed. Whenever, such as now, a form of government has become destructive to these ends, it is OUR RIGHT as citizens, to alter and/or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on the original ideals and ideas from whence this country was first imagined, then created through sweat, education, imagination, experience, tears, and toil. Likewise, it becomes our duty as citizens to strive to improve upon that foundation, eradicating the biases based on differences of sex, culture, religion, skin color, nationality, and other individual and groups traits that make individuals who and what they are.