Illegal Education

Last week, the Connecticut Senate passed a bill that, if signed by the governor, will allow residents who are the children of illegal immigrants to attend the state’s public universities at the same tuition rates as in-state citizens.\nScore one for rewarding illegal activity! Next thing you know, they’ll be repealing prohibition.\nThen again, maybe the reasoning for this bill is sounder than it initially appears.\nCritics of this bill say it’s unfair that U.S. residents who legally dwell in other states must pay twice the tuition of students who aren’t even legally supposed to be in the country. But stripped of its comfy morphological parallelism, this argument is problematic: It ignores both the bill’s economic fairness and its economic advantages.\nFirst, illegal immigrants are equally as compelled to pay the state taxes that contribute to state college funding as legal residents. \nCritics counter this argument by saying that, while this is true, they aren’t contributing as much as legal residents. Illegals drain $10.4 billion more per year in expenses from the federal government than they pay in taxes, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.\nThe same study from which this data came, however, acknowledged that this problem is a result of the fact that first-generation immigrants are overwhelmingly lower-class and therefore pay less tax money, not because they’re freeloading. Illegals are actually less likely than lower-class legal immigrants and citizens to take advantage of government resources because they don’t want to be discovered.\nMany groups pay less in taxes than they use in government resources – not only lower-class residents but members of the middle and upper classes who take advantage of tax exemptions and loopholes. Illegals are not unique in taking more out of the system than they put into it and indeed might be doing it to a lesser extent than a lot of legal residents.\nOf course, having a large population of lower-class residents hanging around, perpetually using more than they’re investing, isn’t a problem that’s in the government’s best interest to leave alone.\nGovernments, especially those in non-border states like Connecticut, might have few ways of curbing their flow of lower-class first-generation illegal immigrants. But they have more leeway in seeing to it that the children of those immigrants don’t pose the same financial problems.\nNot only are illegals at a financial disadvantage when it comes to higher education because they are lower-class, they often cannot receive federal aid. Therefore, many don’t go to college and remain in the same position as their parents.\nBy making it easier for these children to go to college, Connecticut is improving its entire state’s future economy.\nIllegal immigration won’t stop – it may not even slow down – regardless of how many walls we build, how much border security we tighten and how many individuals we manage to deport. But we can follow Connecticut’s example of giving illegals’ children a better chance at a better life and in turn giving ourselves a better economy. \nHere’s to Indiana following suit.