When doing right is also smart
One thing that has long puzzled me about the debate over immigration reform is how the desire for an orderly, enforceable set of regulations somehow became synonymous with “anti-immigrant.” Few people seem to understand that it’s possible to simultaneously believe (1) that immigration is good for the country, and (2) that control of our borders and careful scrutiny of those who seek to cross them are vitally important.
Pencil me in as somebody who believes both. I’ll confess to having a profound unhappiness to the idea that illegal immigrants could get amnesty and be allowed to stay in the U.S. That would make a mockery of the people who did the hard work of getting here lawfully, and worse yet, it would reward criminal behavior. But with that said, I think Mike Huckabee and Martin Lancaster have it right in one regard.
Huckabee, of course, is the former Arkansas governor who, at the GOP debate last week, defended his decision to make college scholarships available to the children of illegal immigrants:
“We’re not going to punish a child because the parent committed a crime. That’s not what we typically do in this country. … We’re a better country than that.”
Lancaster, president of North Carolina’s Community College System, two days ago declared that illegal immigrants (or in Lancaster’s more delicate phrase, “undocumented immigrants”) will continue to be admitted to the state’s 58 junior colleges. After pointing out that those students pay more in tuition than it costs the state to educate them — meaning there is no taxpayer subsidy involved — Lancaster went on to say:
“Many European countries are now experiencing more significant violent, destructive and terrorist activity by immigrants than we are experiencing in this country. For years these countries have denied immigrants basic rights and services, creating a permanent, disenfranchised, and angry underclass. By refusing to educate and make productive members of our society the children of undocumented aliens, North Carolina and the United States face that same eventuality.”
It’s an argument every immigration hard-liner should ponder. It persuaded me. I’m still a fervent believer in (2) above, but turning marginalized high-schoolers into well-educated college students seems like good public policy. Otherwise, we might as well get used to this.