<p>Because we decided we wanted to support Americans, duh.</p>
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<p>Then let’s focus on actually getting the “best, brightest, and most productive people.” Let’s get the best graduates from UNAM and ITAM, for example, and not people who manage to cross a “porous” border and escape ICE raids for eighteen years.</p>
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<p>Well, I don’t know that it’s any more of a ‘waste’ then the current practice of bringing legal immigrants on student visas for US graduate school - including plenty of PhD students in science and engineering at Berkeley and UCLA - only to promptly expel them upon completion, as holding a student visa by no means guarantees a work visa upon graduation. I can think of plenty of newly minted foreign national Berkeley engineering PhD students who went home afterwards because they couldn’t find an employer to sponsor them.</p>
<p>sakky, That is exactly my point… undocumented resident kids have been given the EXACT SAME GIFT AS MY USA BORN CHILD: the gift of free and equal education from kindergarten through 12th grade! And what a wonderful gift it is. So don’t just poo poo it. Every single child living in the United States, without need for legal residence documentation…every kid with proof that he/she lives in the district, EVERYONE, can show up at their local public school and get services. It is a HUGE gift.</p>
<p>Foreign nationals on student visas pay full tuition. That’s the HUGE difference. </p>
<p>The bottom line is that with all the cuts that are being made in California from services for the disabled, elderly, mentally handicapped, etc. to closing parks, to cutting court days, and on and on, the absolute LAST people in line for any sort of government handout should be illegal aliens.</p>
<p>Let me tell you something here. I worked as a TA in Illinois and in my university the undocumented immigrants have been getting full fellowships for years. They are the minorities and until recently the law did not allow for any univ representative to ask for SS. They got big tax money to pay for their education.</p>
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<p>Uh, what huge difference? In fact, what difference at all? I was talking specifically about PhD students at the top UC’s which - whether foreign or domestic - rarely if ever pay even so much as a dime, as their entire tuition, along with their living costs, is covered by their stipend. Now, granted, many PhD students only receive their stipends by virtue of teaching or research requirements, but the fact remains that very few foreign PhD students at the top UC’s are truly paying for tuition out of their own pocket. </p>
<p>Now, it should be noted that this is a common practice amongst almost all respectable PhD programs. If you’re good enough to get into a PhD program at Berkeley, then you’re surely good enough to get into numerous other top PhD programs at other schools, and if Berkeley refuses to offer foreign students stipends, they will all head to HYPSMC or some other school which surely will. If Berkeley wants to be competitive for the top PhD students around the world and thereby continue to run some of the best PhD programs in the world, they have to offer competitive stipends. </p>
<p>Yet the fact remains that many foreign Berkeley PhD grads encounter great difficulty in finding an American employer who will sponsor them for a work visa, and hence have been forced to return home and utilize their talents there. Heck, I can think of several who have gone back to Asia and are working for technology firms or universities there, despite having preferred to staying in the US. Couldn’t that be considered a “waste” - we taxpayers spent significant funding on their stipends and their training, only to have them develop the technology and science bases of their home countries? </p>
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<p>Really? I can name a group of people who truly should be last in line for any sort of government handout …namely career felons (whether citizens or illegals). At least (most) illegal immigrants contribute to society by working and hence expanding the economy. Career felons, on the other hand, not only do not contribute to society, if anything, they subtract from society. </p>
<p>For those who disagree, allow me to ask you - why should the children of illegal immigrants be cut off from government benefits, but the children of robbers, rapists, drug dealers and murderers (but who are citizens) continue to be allowed to enjoy those benefits? After all, who’s worse, the illegal immigrants, or the felons? The state pays over $40k a year per inmate to keep these felons imprisoned, not to mention the untold damage they’ve inflicted on their victim’s lives. </p>
<p>Would anybody like to try to make the case that American murderers, drug dealers, and rapists are more deserving of taxpayer funding than are the illegal immigrants?</p>
<p>I offered before, and I’ll offer again: let’s make a trade. Instead of deporting all of the illegal immigrants, how about we instead deport all of the gangbangers and career felons?.</p>
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<p>We agree completely. Every child in this country - whether legal or not - enjoys a tremendous educational gift that they, frankly, did nothing to ‘deserve’ over any other child in the world. {Our ancestors might have worked very hard to develop this nation, but let’s face it, you and I personally contributed nothing while we were children.} </p>
<p>We were provided with a free gift, so let’s just count our blessings. But none of us should ever begin to arrogantly believe that we somehow “deserved” that gift, while other children in the world did not.</p>
<p>I support the federal version of the Dream Act, which offers a PATHWAY TO LEGAL RESIDENCY to illegal immigrants brought to the country as children who go to college or serve in the military. </p>
<p>But the version of it in both my state and in California just offers in-state tuition breaks to illegal immigrants. In my state, the Dream Act was suspended before it could go into effect after 74,000 signatures were gathered to force the issue onto the 2012 ballot for a referendum.</p>
<p>In my state, the Dream Act was projected to cost taxpayers $3.5 million per year by 2016. I’m sure the cost to California taxpayers is much, much higher.</p>
<p>If you and your family were to travel to any other country and decide to live there without following that country’s immigration policy, how freely would an k-12 education be given? A college education? Would you be deported if caught?</p>
<p>How easy would it be to work? How easy would it to get counterfeit work papers (it’s extraordinarily easy in the US. If you are in Los Angeles in the heart of downtown, there is a street corner which is notorious for advertising these services.)</p>
<p>Could you live in Mexico or France or Brazil without a work or student visa, and establish residency? Could you expect to live and work under the radar? </p>
<p>It’s an honest question. I know what Mexico’s policy is, and they enforce it without compassion - it’s deportation of those without visas.</p>
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<p>This is indeed the original topic, and it is why I have repeatedly said that any state, not just California, that passes such legislation deserves comeuppance in the form of budget problems…</p>
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<p>…but unfortunately, the residents of those states with common sense suffer from the actions of the “compassionate.”</p>
<p>Can’t they just raise some taxes? Seems pretty harsh to make students pay that much?</p>
<p>gold3n, too much emotionalism…the thought behind in-state tuition is that the parents of the kids who live in that state pay taxes( which fund the public colleges) as opposed to out-of-state kids/parents who dont pay the taxes…we shouldn’t turn this into an immigration debate</p>
<p>^^ it already WAS turned into an immigration debate, which was NOT my intent when I originally posted this thread!![ I’m the OP, by the way]</p>
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<p>I didn’t think that was your intent, but the timing of the post coincided with news about AB 131 passing in the Senate, so I think people were especially sensitive and frustrated and looking for answers for the increase in tuition and cuts in funding. Adding another $20-30 million expense to fund the educations of undocumented students is certainly not a solution to the problem of rising tuition rates.</p>
<p>This is what fries my bacon. The Regents of the UC system raised tuition 18% from fall 2010 to fall 2011. They are cutting services. BUT SOMEHOW the UCs are now supposed to use monies that should fund scholarships for citizens for those who are here illegally and CAN NEVER GET A COLLEGE DEGREE TYPE JOB, absent some sort of federal legislation which isn’t likely to happen.</p>
<p>Well, California you guys have an interesting dilemma with your public universities in the future. However, they most likely will be cut a lot in the next couple of years. To give a comparison, in my state of Michigan most universities are around 75/25 with tuition and state aid, and my alma mater Grand Valley State University is roughly 83/17 with tuition and state aid. University of Michigan I think is around 90/10 tuition compared to state aid. There has been talk of privatizing with some state universities, but they really are privatized already. </p>
<p>If I had to guess, if California universities get that much state aid now, it will probably be cut even more in the future. Then, the schools will even raise their tuition even more than other states and it will make an interesting problem in Cali.</p>
<p>Yes, you are correct. Some of the public schools in other states are essentially private schools.</p>
<p>Will UC head down that road at some point in the distant or not-too-distant future?</p>
<p>hmm, let’s see, it was posted that illegals (or their parents) who work in California have been paying income taxes for years - thus justifying instate tuition rates and/or financial aid for illegal alien kids.
BUT, doesn’t that mean they have a falsified social security number or taxpayer identification number?! - People with false legal documents are NOT ok in my book.</p>
<p>If all a student has to do is CLAIM their parents brought them in to the States when they were little, or unaware, how on earth would someone even check this out? The whole thing is preposterous and is a not-so-thinly-veiled move to BUY votes. Politicians in favor of this nonsense should be recalled.</p>
<p>“If all a student has to do is CLAIM their parents brought them in to the States when they were little, or unaware, how on earth would someone even check this out?”</p>
<p>The student must have attended the last three years of HS in California to qualify; the school records will show this.</p>