As Tracy pointed out, you are very good at stating how inadequate the system is - and providing very good references - but you have not addressed even reasonably, to me anyway, the question of them being here illegally.

>>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.
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>I expected the market to have filled that already, with all the private colleges out there the demand should have been met. I know they are shortstaffed and that the staff is underpaid, from what sample I had, and judging by the number of offers our third daughter (10th grade) is getting, I probably came to the wrong conclusion about which side the imbalance goes.
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>>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.
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>Foreign students pay higher tuition. And the college is not a border post.
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>>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.
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>Did they? Or did their parents do that? Imagine a family of six, who somehow got across the border when the youngest was in the cradle. Now a few years later, they can afford to have the oldest, who was maybe twelve at the time, go to school. What's the kid supposed to do, quit family and go home as soon as he turns 18?
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>I somehow can't envision anyone jumping the fence to fork over the $7K a year just to get a diploma. If they had that kind of money back home, they wouldn't be coming here.
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>> 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?
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>Wrong questions. Replace each "perform" with "perform for that much money" and then read them again. And frankly, I wouldn't know the answers - I'm not an employer, and I'll never have enough money to lobby anyone.
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>Now you'll have a deja vu, but I'll really have to repeat this: when I was learning political economy, free market meant free movement of goods, capital and labor. Goods seem to move quite freely (from China), capital seems to move even more freely (there were companies who'd cycle your money through daylight timezones es early as six years ago, so it wouldn't lose by sitting idle overnight). Somehow, the labor is only free to move in and out of the jobs, but not much otherwise. So business owners can blackmail communities, threatening to leave, but workers cannot parry because their freedom of movement is much more limited.
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>update (haven't seen this part right away):
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>>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?
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>I'm not advocating it - it solves nothing. It's just a part of the equation, i.e. some of these guys have a part of their gross income taken away to pay for something they'll never use. So on the one hand some of them are paying and not receiving, and on the other some are receiving and not paying. Do we ever know which ones are which?
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>>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?
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>None of the above - never needed any of those, so I wouldn't know.
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>>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.
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>I have this habit of finding myself in wrong places... not that I've understood that it's congenital. But it is. On the bright side, this means nobody in their right mind would want to steal MY identity :).