sent to the AJC…with little hope of actual publication:
Dear AJC editor,
Thursday’s Pro/Con item [1] should have been headlined “Should states be required to obey federal immigration law?”
The usual hand-wringing and newspeak fact-bending concerning any proposed enforcement of our immigration laws never seems to stop. While it appears to be of little importance to reporters, the fact is that federal laws (8USC 1611& 8USC 1621) clearly define post secondary education as a public benefit, exclude the millions of illegals here from those benefits and make it a federal crime to allow illegal aliens into our university system.
The Supreme Court decision cited by the ACLU salesperson puts in place the requirement that Americans foot the bill to educate illegal aliens K-12. The same system of law forbids the public post secondary education of the illegals. Guess which ones we enforce?
The Georgia Board of Regents has set up policy and procedures which are in clear violation of the federal law as well as the 2006 Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act which uses the same federal laws as state language and definition regulating our shrinking public benefits in Georgia.
As an African-American, I am outraged that any of our limited classroom seats are illegally being given to students who are here illegally while black Americans are among the thousands of young Georgians who are denied entry to our university system each year. Why are we educating illegal aliens when it is illegal to hire them upon graduation?
Our system of justice is supposed to be blind. Our laws are to be equally applied, even for “exemplary” students who happen to be Hispanic and in the USA illegally and for the defiant members of the Board of Regents and college presidents who run our university system.
I anxiously await the AJC opinion page column on whether or not states should enforce the laws that say we must provide taxpayer funded no-cost medical care and translation services to illegally present aliens and for the front page news story that says those laws are ignored.
After that, no one should be surprised if we see a pro-con on whether we should actually have borders and immigration laws at all.
Inger Eberhart
Acworth, GA 30101
Ms. Eberhart is a member of the board of the Georgia based Dustin Inman Society, which is opposed to illegal immigration.