In 1982, the Supreme Court decided that K-12 education could not be denied to illegal immigrants. Symbolically speaking, these children have now grown up and, twenty-five years later, the issue is whether illegal immigrants should be denied a college education at public community colleges and universities.
My view is that individuals who live in the United States, even though illegally, should be allowed to attend college if they pay the full cost of their education.
Illegal immigration is an emotionally wrenching issue because most Americans believe two things that currently contradict one another. They believe that our laws should be obeyed. Yet they recognize that today’s tight immigration laws fly in the face of a major reality: millions of people live in nearby countries whose governments have screwed up their economies, making their citizens desperate to leave.
Many Americans sympathize with the flight of immigrants from Mexico or Honduras. They have a gut feeling that they, too, would try to escape if they couldn’t have a decent life where they were. What would they have to lose — years waiting for official permission to enter, which might never come? Furthermore, as the civil rights movement reminded us, not all laws are just. In fact, colonial Americans fought a revolution because they lived under laws they disagreed with.
Whether the immigration laws are just or not is not the main issue, however. Some people will try to better themselves, whatever the cost. They may be violating the borders of the United States but they are responding to a basic desire, the pursuit of happiness, which, we have been told, is an inalienable right.
Recognizing this, Americans have been unwilling to penalize those who have entered the country illegally. Although there is talk about securing our borders, I don’t see any massive uprising to deport those who have entered into American life. At most, some law enforcement officers want to deport those arrested for crimes, a policy that at least theoretically seems justified.
In other words, Americans generally adopt a “live and let live” attitude toward illegal immigrants, especially those who are law-abiding. Whether this stems from a philosophical commitment to more-open borders, a knee-jerk sympathy with immigrants, or self-interest (wanting more gardeners and construction workers), I don’t know. But it seems to be widespread.
If we accept, as most Americans seem to, a de facto right of illegal immigrants to live and work in the United States, it seems counterproductive to shut academically capable individuals off from education, which is presumably good for individuals and for society.
But that doesn’t mean that the state’s taxpayers should subsidize their education.
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Jane Shaw heads the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, N. C. for which this piece was originally written.
