[UPDATE: The insidevc.com article is moved or missing. A cached version is here.]

This article "Colleges reach out to immigrant students" inspired me to write the following letter:

Your article [] reads more like a Maldef flyer than a real newspaper article.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that "Alondra" is going to college. Perhaps, as part of her intellectual development she should strive to be intellectually honest and say something like "I know it's crazy that I as an illegal immigrant should pay less tuition than a U.S. citizen, but that's the law. Go figure!"

If I had Alondra's email address, I'd suggest she might want to take "Introduction to Ethics" or "Introduction to Logic". Or, perhaps some pre-law classes, or, best of all, Introduction to Civics.

How absolutely, positively heartless of me. To suggest that poor "Alondra" is taking advantage of the system! What would you have her do, work at BurgerKing?

Well, I agree it's better that Alondra should go to college than BK, but, that still ignores the manifest unfairness of this new law. What about, for instance, all those poor little Alondras and other Students of Color who are U.S. citizens, but residents of another state? Alondra is being subsidized at the expense of a state with a $21 billion deficit. Couldn't the money Alondra is taking from the rest of us be spent on providing services to actual citizens?

Oh god, here they come again. They're trotting out Alondra. "Look at poor little Alondra, she needs and education!"

Yes, but, what's she doing here in the first place? OK, I know her parents brought her here, so in that respect she's somewhat blameless. She's also of legal age and a citizen of another country. Perhaps she should, gasp!, go home? Perhaps her parents should have never brought her here?

Perhaps laws like these just incentivize more illegal immigration. Perhaps we should try to create a few laws here and there that actually disincentivize illegal immigration.

One way to look at this law is as a form of foreign aid. When we send money to, for instance, Egypt, that money is spent in Egypt on Egyptian citizens, almost all of whom are living within Egypt's borders. The only way this law is different is that the recipients of this foreign aid are living within our borders.

On a different note, this article about Cesar Chavez is pretty interesting.