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Aid for Californians or Criminals?

Con: California Can’t Afford More Subsidies for Illegals

By Hanna Camp
Senior Staff Writer

It never seems fair for the government to deny a student financial assistance for college. We could all use a little more ready cash, even if our parents are well off enough to pay tuition with only a little strain. In the competition between things that “aren’t fair,” illegal immigrants are, as always, ahead of the game without even trying. But what is or isn’t fair has no bearing on what the government can reasonably deliver.

It’s not fair that illegal immigrant students, who had no control over where their parents moved, have a harder time getting a good education than most students their age. It’s not fair that the circumstances of their entry into the United States make it unlikely for them to call upon any outside resources to help.

“These students, among the best and the brightest young minds in our state, should not be punished for their parents’ pursuit of greater opportunities,” said bill author State Sen. Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles) to the San Jose Mercury News.

But are those students actually punished? They were educated at a high school level using money from a tax pool their parents do not contribute to. California essentially agreed to finance a large portion of their education based on a simple recognition of how detrimental to society large numbers of uneducated young adults tend to be. State law even grants them the right to file for in-state tuition benefits in college, avoiding the immense out-of-state costs that non-Californian citizens have to pay. These children were not punished, but given a high school diploma by a nation that does not even claim them as citizens.

California cannot finance their higher education as well. A generation of primary and secondary school students, including the illegal immigrants among them, are already being poorly served by a public school system that used to be among the best. It is now plagued by waste, inefficiency and a war of analysts who cannot decide whether we’re over- or underfunding. Education interest groups like the Education Coalition assert that California is in debt to its schools as a result of past years of budget cuts. The California Legislative Analyst’s Office, by contrast, believe that the proposed 2006-07 budget earmarked too much money for education, with the overfunding only contributing to the state’s finance problems.

Politicians are masters of misdirection, as always, when asked to really address deeply complicated issues. Their highly public gestures at improving education — more targeted financial aid, a boosted budget for schools that test well — do nothing to reform the wasteful systems that squander the money in the first place. And with SB 160, they have again missed the mark. Difficulties in paying for college are not what punish students in this state, illegal or not. Students in this state are punished by the substandard high schools, junior high schools and elementary schools that they must attend *— and which have yet to show significant improvement, no matter how much political effort has been devoted to them.

That is what prevents children from obtaining the level of education they’ll need to continue on in life. If California’s budget deficit is allowed to grow, the state’s children will inherit a crippled or even failing economy. Those should be our politicians’ priorities. But we are being successfully misdirected, once again, into spending money on nonessential services.

Some supporters argue that the bill would not directly give illegal immigrants aid, only allow them to apply for it. But of course this issue would not be on the Senate’s radar, nor would it cost the state university system an estimated $7.3 million per year, if a significant number of illegal immigrant students were not known to be in the income range that almost guarantees they will qualify. Changing the application rules to include people who almost certainly qualify for aid is not significantly different from giving aid to them.

Illegal immigrant students who get into a state college have (presumably) worked hard to be accepted. But the pool of available funds is not so plentiful that public universities can afford to expand their financial aid budgets by the millions in order to accommodate noncitizens. The money — and the energy — is needed for other priorities.