Unpleasant Decision: State's School Slots Shouldn't Go to Illegal Aliens
Monday, November 25, 2002
By: Dan Stein

Richmond Times-Dispatch

Public policy is about setting priorities and allocating limited public resources. Virginia Attorney General Jerry W. Kilgore has made the decision that one of the Commonwealth’s most precious resources, seats in its public universities, should be restricted to people who are legally present in the United States.

To most Americans this seems like not only good public policy, but plain common sense. A college education is an indispensable asset for getting ahead in today’s economy. With the cost of an education at a private institution beyond the reach of most middle class families, public universities are often the only avenue to achieving the American Dream for many kids. Because of these financial realities, the demand for admission to state universities exceeds the space available, even for highly qualified students.

Many objective and subjective criteria are applied to deciding who is admitted to public and private universities, and who gets financial aid to attend. It is perfectly reasonable to consider whether an applicant has a legal right to be in the country before granting a student admission, much less thousands of dollars in financial assistance.

For every illegal alien admitted to one of the schools in the University of Virginia system, some other student is turned away. There are a finite number of places available each year at schools like UVA, William and Mary, George Mason and James Madison, and each one that is filled by someone who is in the country illegally means that some other student, who has violated no laws, cannot attend. We may not know exactly who these students are, but they are real people with real hopes and aspirations.

It is true that most illegal aliens seeking admission to public universities in Virginia and other states are not directly responsible for having violated the law, and it is not hard to sympathize with them. But it is also true that the citizens and legal residents that are displaced when illegal aliens are admitted to state universities have also done nothing wrong, and it is even harder to justify punishing them.

While the illegal alien students may not be personally to blame, their parents are. They understood that they were breaking the law, and are responsible for any hardship their acts might have on their children. It is unfair to ask other people’s kids to bear the consequences of an illegal alien’s decision to violate our laws.

The situation that Kilgore is dealing with is the product of years of deliberate neglect by the federal government and buck-passing by state and local governments. Washington has done almost nothing to prevent an estimated 9 to 11 million people from settling here illegally, while state and local governments have bent over backwards to accommodate illegal immigrants, for fear that doing otherwise would generate complaints from ethnic interest groups and cheap labor employers.

What Kilgore is doing in Virginia’s university system is the key to controlling illegal immigration that is not only a heavy financial burden on state and local governments, but a threat to our national security. Virginia and the other 49 states may not be able to prevent people from coming to the U.S. illegally, but they can certainly adopt policies that will encourage people to return home.

States and local communities can play an important role in controlling illegal immigration by refusing to accommodate and shelter people who break the law. In addition to making it clear that their kids won’t get into public universities, state governments can deny illegal aliens driver’s licenses or other state IDs, without which they will not have access to any non-emergency benefits or programs. Instead of turning a blind eye to someone’s illegal presence, police and other public servants can share information with federal immigration authorities and demand that they act on it.

If the federal government had been doing its job, and state and local governments had not been so accepting of large numbers of illegal immigrants, whether to admit illegal aliens to state universities wouldn’t be an issue. Because our political leaders, at all levels of government, have refused to deal with illegal immigration, our choices have become much harder.

The options facing Virginia’s attorney general are all unpleasant, but he is clearly making the right decision.