Sunday, April 04, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: A 'social obligation' to give our money to criminals?
So, is it still against the law in America to, you know ... break the law?
The answer appears to be: Only for us, not for them.
I've never been charged with doing anyone harm, but you can bet if I got caught hoarding pain-killers I'd acquired without a proper prescription; or doing some target shooting out in the desert with a Sturmgewehr-58 NATO rifle built up on an Austrian receiver instead of a Brazilian receiver (ask the BATF; I don't make this stuff up); or travelling around in my car without a license plate or registration, trying to explain to the curious officer that it was the courts, not me, who defined "driving" as a commercial activity so they could claim we still have the right to "travel" without a government license or permit ... I'd quickly be explaining my actions in front of a pretty skeptical judge.
Dontcha think?
So you and I go about dutifully trying to obey all these laws -- endless reams of laws, old laws and new laws, sensible laws and cloud-cuckoo laws -- while folks paid two or three times what we make, out of taxes which we have to pay (because it's the law) ... don't.
On March 2, The Associated Press issued a story headlined, "Virginia ruling could spur Nevada debate."
"RENO -- A federal court ruling in Virginia that allows colleges to deny admission to illegal immigrants could spur public debate over the issue in Nevada, a university official said.
"University system Chancellor Jane Nichols told the Reno Gazette-Journal a February ruling by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria, Va., broaches a matter which is `... certainly an issue in Nevada, where we have many children who were brought to this country by their parents when they were minors and for whom this is the only country they have ever known.
" `We've even had valedictorians from our high schools who are not legal citizens, so we have worked hard to provide access to college for those young students,' Ms. Nichols said."
Nevada higher education institutions do not require proof of legal residency status or proof of citizenship from students who are recent Nevada high school graduates, Ms. Nichols told the newspaper.
"Nichols could not estimate how many of those graduates have been illegal immigrants," The Associated Press reported, "but she said children of illegal immigrants shouldn't be punished because their parents broke the law by entering the country illegally."
Children of illegal immigrants also can qualify to receive a $10,000 scholarship under a state program that went into effect in 2000, Ms. Nichols said.
" 'This is a debate that surfaced a few years ago, but there is nothing in the law that created the Millennium Scholarship that requires U.S. citizenship to qualify,' she said. ...
"Debbie Feemster, the Washoe County School District's director of equity and diversity, said it would be unfair to deny children of illegal residents a higher education," according to The AP.
" 'I have always told my students that if you work hard, ... get good grades and good SAT scores, the school will help you get into a university,' said Ms. Feemster, a former middle and high school principal.
" 'I'm sure some of those students were illegal immigrants. ... but ... we all suffer when quality students in our community are prevented from going on to higher education and realizing their potential,' Ms. Feemster added."
No we don't. The notion that the government is doing us a favor by looting as much as they deem necessary from our paychecks to feed, clothe and school the children of the drunken, the dissolute, the shiftless, the illegitimate and the criminal -- spreading the wealth of the nation as evenly as possible, like spreading manure on a field -- has a name. It's called "socialism." Or, in less euphemistic parlance, "communism."
It doesn't work, as the nations of Eastern Europe spent three full generations proving. What it does, instead, is destroy the incentive for the productive class to work hard, save and invest in order to get ahead. Everyone who doesn't flee ends up in grinding poverty, with rates of alcoholism, hopelessness and suicide never before known to man.
But beyond that, look at the sophisticated euphemisms at work here.
"Children of illegal immigrants shouldn't be punished because their parents broke the law by entering the country illegally," Ms. Nichols says. Absolutely true -- for young U.S. citizens born in this country. But some "children of illegal immigrants" are in fact ... illegal immigrants. And there's no exemption from the immigration laws for people under 21 or under 12 ... I checked.
"There is nothing in the law that created the Millennium Scholarship that requires U.S. citizenship to qualify," Ms. Nichols says. True enough, and I'm certainly glad legal residents with green cards aren't discriminated against in this regard.
But handing a Millennium Scholarship to an illegal immigrant makes the bureaucrat an accessory after the crime, according to any standard of jurisprudence I ever learned.
So I called Criminal Investigations Division Interim Resident Agent Steve Usiak, of the Las Vegas office of the outfit which now bills itself as the "Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Within the Department of Homeland Security." I asked him if these government officials, who presumably swear some kind of oath to uphold the law and protect and defend the Constitution, aren't themselves breaking the law when they hand our tax money to liars and cheats and criminals who broke the law to get here, while far more deserving souls who could go right to work as doctors and nurses and engineers cool their heels waiting out the "immigration quotas" from places such as Romania and Sri Lanka and the Czech Republic.
Next week: The federals reply.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega." His Web site is www.privacyalert.us.
