Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee says he won’t back down on his efforts to offer college scholarships to the children of illegal immigrants in Arkansas, even if it costs him the election. It just might.
One of the biggest problems with most liberals is their failure to understand human nature, especially the notion that you get what you reward. Policies that reward illegal immigrants’ children with a low-cost or free American education simply encourage illegal immigration. And when you reward a behavior, you can’t simultaneously eliminate it. It’s a simple concept, and one that Huckabee, a nominal conservative, seems not to have learned.
It was similar judgment, clouded by politically correct sentimentality, that prompted North Carolina’s community college system to open its doors to illegal immigrants. So, when a Mexican (or Ecuadorian, or Dominican, etc.) does a cost-benefit analysis of coming to America, on the one hand he’ll have, at least in some states, two huge benefits (a free elementary-secondary education plus a low-cost post-secondary education) weighed against the scant possibility that anything will be done to keep him from reaping those rewards.
Not a recipe for good public policy.
CORRECTION: Corrected the misspelling of “hand” above.
