Saturday, I had a post on Big Government in which I argued that Gov. Rick Perry’s continued defense of tuition waivers for illegal immigrants had opened the door for Gov. Palin to enter the race. And facts being facts, he was dominating the field until the most recent GOP debate, where the audience booed him when he said: “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than that they’ve been brought there, through no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart.”
Well, consider me heartless because I still believe it’s wrong in principle and in practice to waive any part of tuition for illegal aliens. (And it seems the Floridians who voted in Saturday’s straw poll agree with me, because they handed Republican Herman Cain a whopping victory over Perry – 37% to 15%.)
As I wrote Saturday, Perry’s stance on this asinine practice is nothing less than an albatross around his neck.
Of course Perry has his supporters here, like the Democrat legislator who sponsored the bill – the Texas Dream Act – that made the tuition reductions for illegal aliens possible to begin with. That legislator, Rick Noriega, believes the bill has been a great success and offers a defense of it that sounds very much like the kind Perry has been making: “The alternative is to slam the door on any hopes and dreams. How are they going to perform in high school if they don’t even have a chance at higher education?”
So if conservatives oppose giving tuition breaks to illegal aliens we either “don’t have a heart” or we’re slamming a door on “hopes and dreams.”
Yet there’s no escaping Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s observation that this kind of legislation is just a “magnet” for illegal aliens (that’s costing someone a pretty penny).
For example, the Dallas Morning News reports that “the number of illegal immigrant college students paying in-state tuition and receiving financial aid at Texas’ public colleges and universities continues to climb.” And between fall 2004 and spring 2008 alone “Texas awarded about $33.6 million in state and institutional financial aid to those students.”
You read it right – the number of illegal immigrant college students getting waivers on their tuition continues to climb so high that “those students” received $33.6 million in state and financial aid.
(Currently, there are approximately 12,138 students taking advantage of these millions of dollars.)
But it gets worse – Perry’s position on this matter is actually defended by some who say the illegal immigrants “are essentially Texans” anyway.
As a door slamming Texan without a heart, I take offense at the suggestion that people who are in the Lone Star State illegally are “essentially Texans” anyway. But for the sake of playing nice, here’s a video of some of the illegal aliens who have tapped into the millions upon millions of dollars available through this Ponzi scheme. (You’ll recognize them as those proudly standing behind signs that say: “undocumented & unafraid.”)
Gov. Perry has got to distance himself from this mess asap, or results like those from the Florida straw poll may soon prove to be the norm rather than an aberration.
Comment count on this article reflects comments made on Breitbart.com and Facebook. Visit Breitbart's Facebook Page.