Some states are making it harder for illegal immigrants to attend college by denying in-state tuition benefits or banning undocumented students.
In the past two years, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia and Oklahoma have refused in-state tuition benefits to students who entered the USA illegally with their parents but grew up and went to school in the state. That represents a reversal from earlier this decade, when 10 states passed laws allowing in-state rates for such students.
This summer, South Carolina became the first state to bar undocumented students from all public colleges and universities.
North Carolina’s community colleges in May ordered its 58 campuses to stop enrolling undocumented students after the state attorney general said admitting them may violate federal law.
“The new trend is to kick illegal aliens out of college altogether,” says William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee, which opposes taxpayer subsidies for undocumented immigrants.
Josh Bernstein of the National Immigration Law Center, an illegal-immigrants advocate, says sweeping anti-immigration bills are “a very serious threat” to the overall illegal population.
Georgia, which barred undocumented students from in-state tuition rates in 2006, enacted laws in May preventing them from receiving state scholarships and certain student loans.
This fall, the University of Arkansas will require students to submit Social Security numbers and proof of residency. In May, Arkansas Department of Higher Education Director Jim Purcell warned that students without documentation “will not be considered as legally enrolled students” when determining an institution’s state funding.
Opponents say students shouldn’t be penalized for their parents’ actions. Helping them is “the right thing to do even if it’s unpopular,” says North Carolina state Rep. Pricey Harrison, a Democrat who introduced a bill that would prevent state institutions from asking about students’ immigration status.
Jesse Helms - Enlarge Image No matter how much Republicans try to sanitize Mr. Helms — after his death last week, his legacy will remain that of Racism, Anti-Semitism, Homophobia and Confederate Segregationism.
The former North Carolina Senator was an unyielding champion of the conservative “Bigot” movement.
And he was the only senator to vote against making the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday. His lone dissent came only after he conducted a 16-day filibuster against the King holiday, during which Helms took to the Senate floor to decry the assassinated King, a pacifist and beloved civil rights leader, for his “action-oriented Marxism.”
In an opinion piece, columnist DeWayne Wickham asserts that Helms subtly carried the torch of white supremacy during his lifetime:
“The former North Carolina senator seldom displayed the overt, incendiary racial prejudice that Ben Tillman, the turn-of-the-20th century South Carolina demagogue, often spewed on the floor of the U.S. Senate. But in many ways, Helms accepted the torch that Tillman passed to a new generation of white supremacists — and served the same cause with a tad more subtlety.”
While working as a television editorialist in Raleigh, N.C., in 1960, Helms called the University of North Carolina’s flagship campus the “university of Negroes and Communists.” That snideness echoed the ring of Tillman’s condemnation of education for blacks: “When you educate a negro, you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand,” …wrote Wickham
When President Theodore Roosevelt invited black leader Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House in 1901, Tillman was outraged. “The action … will necessitate our killing a thousand “niggers” in the South before they will learn their place again,” the senator said.
Ninety-four years later, as a guest on Larry King Live, Helms was greeted by a caller who thanked him for helping to “keep down the niggers.”
“Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” said Helms, sounding just a bit embarrassed — and a lot like the linear successor to Tillman.
That was “White-Sheet” Jesse Helms — a bigot whose “nobility” is being shamelessly parroted in the air-waves by right-wingers ….who have eagerly been linking his death to July 4th — Independence day!, to smother the ugliness of Mr. Helms’ White-Supremacist past.
“….don’t let the Independence Day paeans fool you. Jesse Helms was a bigot, a racist, a homophobe — and a media charlatan. America would be a much worse place if he’d had his way on his many signature issues. Our nation’s birthday is brighter for him not in it.” ….Click here for more
In an Aug. 29, 2001 piece, David Broder, a columnist for the Washington Post states:
“What is unique about Helms — and from my viewpoint, unforgivable — is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans.”
“In 1984, when Helms faced his toughest opponent in Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt, the late Bill Peterson, one of the most evenhanded reporters I have ever known, summed up what “some said was the meanest Senate campaign in history,” ….says Broder.
“Racial epithets and standing in school doors are no longer fashionable,” Peterson wrote, “but 1984 proved that the ugly politics of race are alive and well. Helms is their master.”
In 1990, locked in a tight race with an African American Democrat, former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt, Helms aired a final-week TV ad that showed a pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter, while an announcer said, “You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.” Once again, he pulled through.
Jesse Helms’ White Hands AD
That is not a history to be sanitized.
Richard Nixon was one of the first Republicans to recognize Helms’ Racist utility.
The North Carolinian was welcomed into the GOP by then President Nixon and his southern strategists of the late 1960s and early 1970s because they understood that Helms was skilled at working the fault lines that could turn white fears into Republican votes.
The Republicans are still working those fault-lines. Indeed, some of the people who worked most closely with Helms as he transformed what began as an anti-slavery party into a comfortable retreat for white-backlash voters are now key players in the campaign of John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president.
“Let us remember a life dedicated to serving this nation,” McCain declared in a statement on the death of Helms, to whom he was compared favorably by former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole earlier this year. (Actually, Dole suggested that McCain was somewhat more conservative than Helms.)
In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, Richard Nixon touched the essence of the southern strategy:
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
Republicans have used this Racist strategy ever since — very effectively. Read more about The Southern Strategy.
Jesse Helms — May You Rot In Peace!
OVERHEARD AT THE BIGOTS’S FUNERAL ON TEUSDAY:
“We need more men like Jesse Helms,” Holloway said. “He’s an icon - a Southern gentlemen. He’ll be remembered for integrity and truth.”
“Jesse Helms always stood his ground,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, said from the pulpit. “He put duty above all else — duty to God, to country, to family … the simple duty of treating other people well.”
Racist Incidents Give Some Obama Campaigners Pause — Especially in Indiana and Pennsylvania, states which harbor numerous hate groups, and have beenKu Klux Klanstrongholds for many years.
For all the hope and excitement Obama’s candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed — and unreported — this election season.
Doors have been slammed in their faces. They’ve been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they’ve endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can’t fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.
The contrast between the large, adoring crowds Obama draws at public events and the gritty street-level work to win votes is stark. The candidate is largely insulated from the mean-spiritedness that some of his foot soldiers deal with away from the media spotlight.
Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: “It wasn’t pretty.” She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn’t possibly vote for Obama and concluded: “Hang that darky from a tree!“…..[more]
In desperation, Hillary Clinton is now explicitly referring to her appeal to “Hard-Working Americans, White Americans,” adding that she appeals to a wider coalition of voters — including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests.
“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”
“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.
Clinton’s blunt remarks about race came a day after primaries in Indiana and North Carolina dealt symbolic and mathematical blows to her White House ambitions.
Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, notes quite correctly that at the end of the day her primary support doesn’t prove she’s more electable. Either Democrat will get “the vast majority” of the other’s primary election votes in a general election, he said, adding that Clinton’s comment was a “poorly worded” variation on the way analysts have been “slicing and dicing the vote in racial terms.” …..[more]
I construe Hillary’s comments as a suggestion that “blacks are lazy,”….a racial stereotype I expect to come from a ReTHUGlican and not a Democrat.
“Her statement seems to exclude African-Americans from being hard-working,” said Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist and CNN contributor, aligned to the Obama campaign, who is black. “Also, there are a lot of white Americans for Barack Obama. So it’s misleading and it’s not true,” said Mr. Simmons.
Mr. Simmons added:
“There is a very particular feeling that this couple(Bill and Hillary Clinton), that African-Americans had such regard for and trust in, has been at best dismissive towards Barack Obama and in many ways has used race and differentness as a weapon against him.”
Senator Diane Feinstein, a Clinton backer, has also indicated she wanted to hear “what Clinton’s strategy is,” adding: “The race is reaching a point now where there are negative dividends from it in terms of strife within the party.”
“Duck Hunting” Ma. Clinton however, appears unmoved by the “sniper-fire,” telling cheering supporters yesterday, in Charleston, West Virginia that the state’s primary next Tuesday, which she is expected to win, was “a test for me and a test for Senator Obama.”
I also find it odd that Latino voters who have been supporting her in large numbers are not included in the “Hard Working White” coalition….and what about blacks? Won’t she need the most consistently loyal Democratic party voting block, if she becomes the nominee?
The “Bitch of Chappaqua, New York” is in full Kamikaze (suicide) Mode….The “Hill” has become so selfish she doesn’t mind destroying the Democratic Party,…. and the “bitching and moaning” does not bode well for future female candidates.
LOL!
This woman is running amok, and if the DNC does not quickly “reject and denounce,” her — she will drive such a monumental wedge between the voters so much so that it will be next to impossible to unite the party for the general election.
Al Gore, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi and other big-wigs of the Democratic party need to step in and get this witch out of the race, before her “toxic waste” does extreme damage to the party…..and to Bill’s already “Lewinsky-Stained” legacy.
On the other hand, if she decides to ’surrender’ within the next week or two, it will a ‘joy’ to watch Hillary stumping enthusiastically for Obama in the general election — essentially denying her current charge(s); that Obama is elitist and out of touch with middle-America.
Some states are making it harder for illegal immigrants to attend college by denying in-state tuition benefits or banning undocumented students.
