President Obama recently claimed that “we can be a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.” Apparently his buddies in the globalist Silicon Valley billionaires circle missed the memo – the part where the law is addressed. They just want their foreign workers, the hell with the law. Their plan is to encourage illegal immigration with special scholarships just – and only — for law breakers.
This sounds like a felony to me.
Axiom: Anything that encourages illegal immigration tends to produce more illegal immigration. That’s why Congress criminalized such behavior under the term “harboring.” People go to jail for harboring illegal aliens.
The United States Code provides that any person who “encourages or induces an alien to … reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such … residence is or will be in violation of the law” OR “aids or abets the commission” of such acts, is guilty of a felony, punishable by up to five years. (8. U.S.C. 1324; INA Sec. 274) . There it is. Plain as can be. The only exception to harboring is “mere employment”; anything else, like providing transportation, housing, shelter or doing anything that helps the illegal alien remain is harboring.
This sounds like the world’s most elite alien harboring conspiracy.
In what most would consider an appalling lack of judgment, billionaires from Silicon Valley are – in the name of philanthropy – funding scholarships at colleges and universities for illegal aliens – knowing they are illegal aliens. According to the Wall Street Journal, the list of donors (either individually or through family foundations) includes Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot; Andrew Grove, co-founder of Intel Corp.; Mark Leslie, founder of the former Veritas Software Corp.; and Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs.
Beyond the obvious criminal implications, this push to help illegal alien students is misguided on so many levels. On an individual level, while these donors may feel they are generously helping an illegal alien, they are also hurting countless other legal residents and U.S. citizens who desperately want to go to college and are finding it harder and harder to get one of those coveted admissions slots.
On a policy level, one may argue that giving scholarships to illegal aliens students gives them a leg up and does not reward criminal behavior because the student was brought to the U.S. when very young. Many of these students are in their twenties, so who knows when they came. But even if it were, the parents here illegally are absolutely rewarded for coming here illegally – their kids got an education at everyone’s expense – first via a public K-12 education, and then through these scholarships and other similar programs.
If U.S. born students had all the educational support, financing and opportunity they needed, and if this weren’t a patent violation of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, perhaps – just perhaps – the policy argument makes sense. But where you stand depends on where you sit. I can tell you where a lot of U.S. citizens students won’t be sitting: in college classrooms.