Just how disgusting are these people?
The red and white placards outside the Motor Vehicle Administration office strike some as an invitation: "Sign petition here. No in-state tuition for illegal immigrants."
Two sisters in their 60s practically skip to the table, one of them whistling. "Just tell me where to sign," Pat Baumgardner said. "I got better things to use my tax money for."
The Republican-led effort will come to a head next week. If the petitioners can collect 55,736 valid signatures by June 30, implementation of the law would be suspended and the measure would be put on the 2012 ballot.
To qualify for the tuition break, an illegal immigrant would have to attend high school in Maryland for three years and show that his or her family had filed state tax returns. The student could then attend a community college at the in-state rate. After completing 60 credits, he or she could transfer to a four-year college, again at the residential discount.
After all what could be more important than making higher-education cost prohibitive to the children who are brought here by parents not lucky enough to be of the fraction of a percent of applicants selected for legal residential status/naturalization? Never mind the parents would have had to pay their state taxes which will now be used to subsidize the tuition of other students lucky enough to be born in a certain geographic area. While this neo-
Southern Strategy of the Republican party may turn out the rubes and win elections and primaries in the short term, their reliance on the hateful resentment instinct of the ignorant will lose them the votes of a quickly growing demographic and the rest of us who see through their hateful scapegoating.