In-state tuition for illegals? Blame George W.
Posted by Paul Mulshine March 31, 2009 12:05PM


When I read that report to Gov. Corzine the other day urging in-state college tuition for illegals, it brought me back to the bad old days when the spoiled preppy cheerleader was wrecking the Republican Party.

Yes, that spoiled preppy cheerleader. I was on to George W. Bush from the beginning ("Time to Give Bush a Shove" November 1999) and was never taken in by him. As you can see from this 2002 column I've reposted below, Bush was pushing amnesty for illegals right after 9/11. Not only that, but his incompetents at INS had sent visa renewals to two of the 9/11 hijackers.

Read it and weep:

Date: 2002/03/26

Student visas? Why even bother?


The nation is in an uproar over the way the Immigration and Naturalization Service issued posthumous student visas to those two airplane hijackers. The whole affair seems nutty.


But people are missing the nuttiest aspect of all: At least those guys applied for student visas. Thousands of immigrants enrolled in American colleges don't even bother. No one at the INS knows how many there are or what they're studying.


It gets even nuttier: Though they shouldn't even be in the country in the first place, these illegal students complain that tuition is too high.


I'm not making this up. I became aware of it when I read an article in a New York paper about Mayor Michael Bloomberg's encounter with some student protesters Friday. The students from the City University of New York had the usual litany of complaints. But one amazed me. They were upset that illegal immigrants in the CUNY system are being charged out-of-state tuition.


Any sane person would ask why the university admits illegal immigrants at all. Illegal immigrants are, as the name suggests, illegal. It is against the law for them to be here. Therefore, one would think, it would also be against the law for them to go to college here. To do so, they would require student visas.


The INS monitors these visas. That monitoring is a bit loose, as we have seen, but the INS is tightening it in response to that embarrassing incident in which the two 9/11 hijackers got visas six months after their deaths.


But even if the monitoring of student visas were perfect, there is at the moment no requirement that illegal immigrants apply for such visas before entering college in the United States. There are perhaps hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants attending college in the United States at the moment. Exactly how many? I put that question to INS spokesman Russ Bergeron.


"There's no way of knowing," Bergeron said. "Even the schools wouldn't know."


Not only is there no way of knowing, but there is not even a plan to ask. The INS is monitoring foreigners who enter the country legally to see what they are studying. As for those who entered illegally, no one even asks. "So if an illegal immigrant is studying aviation, no one would know?" I asked Bergeron.


"That's correct," he said. "Or molecular biology or nuclear physics."


Bergeron does not defend this state of affairs. He points out that the official INS position is that no one should be in the country illegally in the first place. But politicians all over the country have different ideas. The lawmakers continually vote to endorse the breaking of laws. Texas and California passed laws that permit undocumented immigrants to attend state colleges at in-state tuition rates. They did so in direct defiance of a 1996 U.S. immigration law that says illegal immigrants cannot be eligible for "any postsecondary benefit unless a citizen or national of the United States is eligible for such a benefit."


CUNY is observing that law. That sparked student protests and a lawsuit by immigration activists, which was thrown out by a judge last month. So at the moment, the approximately 2,500 illegal immigrants in the CUNY system are legally required to pay out-of-state tuition.


This is good as far as it goes. But the obvious question is why illegal immigrants are not required to become legal. For most, that would mean leaving the country and applying for student visas just like all of those other foreign citizens who wish to study in the United States.


The answer to this sort of question is obvious to ordinary people, but politicians have a hard time with it. First they pass laws setting the rules for entry to the United States. Then they pass laws rewarding those who ignore the rules. The Clinton administration did nothing to address this issue. But that was before 9/11, so the Clinton people at least had the excuse of not knowing the extent of the problem.


But what's President Bush's excuse? The Bush people have reacted to 9/11 by trying to push through yet another amnesty for illegal immigrants - "what amounts to an amnesty for hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, many of whom have not undergone any background or security check."


That quote is from U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who has promised to block that amnesty in the Senate. He may be a Democrat, but he knows how his constituents feel about the idea of rewarding illegal behavior. Republicans like it even less. Bush is getting bad advice on this.


Here's some good advice: Reform the immigration system so that everyone who is in the United States is here legally. Do this right away.

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