Help Texas fight illegal immigration instead of Rick Perry

Texans spend nearly a billion dollars a year on illegal residents’ K-12 education, under the force of YOUR Federal government. If you are offended by our Governor Rick Perry’s support of our policy on in state tuition, I’d think you would spend at least the same amount of Tweets, CAPS, Exclamation Points! and Italics on that atrocity. What have you done in your State to give us relief?

Here in Texas, we live with the fact that the Federal government is ignoring all the families who put their kids  in our schools in grades K-12. It’s not hard to determine who these families are: the children are the ones without Social Security numbers or Medicaid coverage, yet qualify for free lunches.Your Federal government must be aware of these children, yet forces us to pay for their schooling and absorb their medical costs.

We passed laws to keep them out of our schools, and were knocked down by the Feds, even though we fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court. Did your State pass similar laws, or join us in Plyler v. Doe</U>?

We continue to petition the Feds to increase the security of our National borders, as required by the Constitution. We spend hundreds of millions of our own Texas tax dollars to supplement your National border.  Has your State joined us in asking for more border patrol agents, or are you happy with us getting a quarter of the agents to cover 2/3 of the border?

After a while, it became obvious to us in Texas that we couldn’t get the illegal alien – either the students or their parents – deported. We saw that there is a small number of students who excel and wish to go to college. We decided that the ambitious and achievers would be allowed to go to our State colleges, paying in state tuition under very strict guidelines.

There are qualifications for these exceptions to the in state tuition. One of them is specifically for a narrow set of applicants and requires 3 years in Texas high schools and graduation from one of our schools. In contrast, we have much easier qualifications for legal residents in the US. If you live in a county that borders Texas, in New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, or Louisiana, your children don’t have to establish residency in Texas in order to pay in state tuition rates. If you live outside Texas, your children may become residents in one year or if you are stationed in our State while in the military or qualify as a Texas veteran. We don’t care where they went to high school or where they graduated.

If you only became aware of our border problems because Governor Rick Perry is running for the Republican Party’s nomination President, then he’s done a service for Texas. If you are outraged by the idea of in state tuition for the children of illegal aliens, then I hope you will help us secure our border and demand that the Federal authorities deport all illegal aliens