Illegal Immigrant Pupils Gain a Perk

The dysfunctional California Fun House just got more bizarre. Governor Jerry Brown recently signed a bill providing the state's illegal immigrant students with taxpayer-funded grants and fee waivers at the state's four-year universities and junior colleges beginning in 2013. They also are allowed in-state tuition, heavily subsized by taxpayers, if they attended a California high school. U.S. citizens who live outside the state don't get that benefit. As for the grants and fee waivers, those monies come from a finite budget item. In other words, cash doled out to illegals, no matter how emotional and moving their personal stories may be, is money that some worthy pupils who are in California legally will be denied. There is only so much dough to go around. It's not a bottomless trough. This is happening when the state's middle class, the legal middle class, is hurting badly. It's a terribly unfair slap in the face of families which have paid their taxes for decades and now have to watch in frustration and shock as young people in the state illegally (for whatever reason) get treated as though they were legal residents. One estimate indicates that up to 40,000 illegal students may apply for grants and fee waivers. The projected cost ranges from $14.5 million to $40 million at a time when California's fiscal condition is grim at best. Can you say "utterly outrageous?"