U. Mass. Tuition for Illegal Immigrants?

When it isn't wrangling about healthcare, the state legislature has lately been wrangling about whether or not to let illegal immigrants who attend high school in Massachusetts pay in-state tuition at U. Mass. Other people have analyzed this matter more thoroughly and interestingly than Bostonist cares to, but Adrian Walker's column in today's Globe made Bostonist notice just how weird this country's relationship with illegal immigration is: On the one hand, plenty of people are unabashedly opposed to letting illegal immigrants pay in-state rates. But the folks who are campaigning for the bill that would allow the lower rates are illegal immigrants, and Bostonist finds something singularly odd about the whole thing: Clean-cut, culurally American teenagers are going around the state, aggressively campaigning for a proposed bill, but they're only using their first names because they're technically illegal and subject to seizure and deportation by the INS at any time. Of course, that doesn't happen, and none of the opponents of the bill, who rail unrelentingly against illegal immigration, are dropping dimes on these kids either (unlike our friendly live-free-or-die neighbors to the north, who tried unsuccessfully to arrest illegal immigrants in public places, on the theory that they were trespassing on America). Color Bostonist cynical and overly analytical, but this seems to us like a tacit acceptance of the economic benefits of having a permanent underclass: "Feel free to stick around, but no education for you!." Is Bostonist's bleeding-heart liberalism (and the fact that we are married to an immigrant who, despite being legal, has had her share of idiotic bureaucratic difficulties with INS) clouding our ability to understand the grave danger that well-educated young people pose to our nation? Dear readers, please set us straight.