While you did an adequate job of explaining why the system is the way it is, you don't justify why anyone here illegally should be allowed to attend college at any fee. Our colleges are overcrowded and not everyone who wants to attend can. Still, I can agree to the business side of the equation and say those with the best grades and can pay get in period. As long as they are attending legally and in this country legally. I don't think anyone should be rewarded for breaking the law and the fact that they are here illegally is proof they already broke the law. The other side is that the major justification in the argument to allow illegal immigrants to stay here is that they are needed to perform those jobs that supposedly Americans are no longer willing to perform. Once they get their college education then what job do you suppose they will perform? Certainly not those that supposedly Americans are not willing to perform but then we can always just let in more illegals I guess?

More: I've always agreed that we need to change the system. We need a controlled guest worker program to start. Still, I don't support allowing everyone here illegally to stay here and get free medical care, attend college, or use someone else's social security number to work. I really cannot believe you advocate illegals using other's social security numbers since the money goes into the system and never goes out? There is more to it than that. That makes it ok? When the last time you tried to schedule turtoring for your child or a meeting with the teacher and couldn't because their time was completely taken up working as a translator for the illegal immigrants in the schools? When the last time you paid for vaccines for your child and paid for a copy of their birth certificate so they could attend school and watched as illegal immigrants got their vaccines for free and didn't have to produce any documentation to attend school? When the last time you had your identity stolen by an illegal immigrant? Mine was less than a year ago. It is a nightmare. You cannot even imagine Dragan. Oh and just to let you know, there are a lot of scholarship programs for immigrants (illegal or legal - there is no distinction) from one country. You just came here from the wrong country Dragan.

>>Do they get grants? Tuition reimbursement? Loans?
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>These are extremely, or nearly impossible to get even when you're a LEGAL, tax-paying alien. Believe me, I've done my homework on that one. These are pretty much out of reach for non-Americans.
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>>How can they even fill out the paperwork? Why is INS not right there after they are unable to provide documentation?
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>You mean like in other organized countries, where one branch of government actually knows what the other is doing, and there are the Looming Horrors of Centralized Databases and Big Brother is watching over everybody?
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>I'd be far happier if INS was anywhere near sufficiently efficient. Having too much experience with them, I know that they don't even have one centralized database of their own (just try being an alien and changing your address - it takes almost a year for the change to spread through their system and they'll still send your important paperwork to the wrong one). And with the current admin, their process cycle went from a couple of weeks to several months, for the types of visas I (or my attorney) had knowledge of. And yet these guys have the audacity to charge everybody $10 for a phone call to schedule an appointment in a consular office, and $100 for just processing your paperwork (regardless of the outcome). Multiply that with any estimated number of people who want to be legally here - the time, the money.
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>Would you really want INS to be everywhere? Careful with what you wish for.
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>I'd rather have them really be where they are supposed to be, and to do their job efficiently, not to drag their feet as they do.
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>>Forget the incidental costs associated with it. Why are they allowed to even matriculate?
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>Because the system allowed them to?
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>You seem to live in the illusion that the whole mess is caused by these people themselves. It is not - they are the necessary, but not sufficient ingredient. With their countries' development stymied by a few centuries of United Fruit Company colonialism, US - propped dictators, direct or indirect military engagement, dictatorships by West Point graduates... all the way to the IMF's and World Bank's "we'll force you to screw up again and you'll be in debt forever", of course they want to make a living there where the money went. Everybody goes where the money is. If it wasn't the current crop of South Americans, it'd be the Africans, the Asians, whoever can.
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>It's the employers, and the eternal excuse "everybody else does it" paired with "if it wasn't me, it'd be someone else". It's the market where it's a matter of making it or breaking it if your costs aren't reduced. And the government's policy was to look the other way if the solution with illegals was used. They must have developed quite a blind spot over the years.
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>>Taking up a space that someone who is legal could fill. If you read the article, you saw that the colleges are crowded. If you are illegal, you should not be allowed to be here. Period.
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>If you're charging more, you're actually financing others who otherwise couldn't enroll. I think the state universities are forced into such money-making because they are in a financial crunch, because they are probably getting less money from the state, which does that because it's getting less of its taxes back from the feds, which are making less tax money because of the tax cuts, and who need more money for really important things, like to fund all those private contractors, private insurances, and those counterproductive wars, and the trillions of debt. So they had to find a scapegoat. Smokers? Nah, nobody would believe, and we've already used that to raise tobacco tax for education or whatever. Ah, yes, illegals! Much easier to blame them for everything. Let them fight it out with their slightly different neighbors, so they won't disturb us while we throw a few more billion to our preferred contractors in Iraq.
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>>>Or the part that I did not understand is that you think there should be two kinds of customers, in a setting which would be completely different from the separate-but-equal.
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>>No idea what that means.
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>Apartheid. Will you ask ID of everyone at every gate, to check whether they are entitled to use the public parks and pools (they tried that in Manassas, I think).
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>>>[update] If you think I didn't see "How are they allowed to fill out paperwork if they are undocumented?" - the answer is simple: every college can accept foreign students as foreign students. It's been done since forever. You don't have to be a citizen of anything to enroll. You do have to prove some things if you want in-state tuition, but that's a different matter.
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>>Yeah, and they are here LEGALLY. How is that not an issue? That's what we are really talking about. Address that.
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>Address on the envelope should be INS, not University. University is trying to make some money (see above). INS was told to look the other way for decades. Now you want University to fix what feds have screwed up? What's next, a security officer at the library door, checking everyone for eligibility? Would you forbid these guys to buy any service that any foreign tourist is entitled to, unless they carry an ID? How do you know who's alien if nobody is required to have an ID?
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>Update: if it's not too late, I'd like to retract one piece of data from the above, because I'm not sure anymore. The charge for talking to an embassy clerk to schedule an appointment may not be $10 per talk. IIRC, it's more likely to have been $20 per person, so when I was scheduling the appointments for the three of us, it cost $60, plus the $300 (or more, forgot) for the actual paperwork.