My Letter to the Senators: An Exercise in Futility

Below is my letter to Oklahoma's U.S. Senators Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe. In it, I try to lay out a conservative argument in favor of the DREAM Act. I probably should have made the word "taxpayers" bold and capitalized.

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Dear Senator (Coburn / Inhofe),

I am writing you today to please consider voting in favor of the DREAM Act. You may have heard many arguments both for and against the proposed bill, as have I, but one argument that has not been given a lot of play is this one:

We taxpayers have been subsidizing the education of immigrants without status for years in the public education system. The whole point of public financing of education is that we all share a common belief that an educated population is an economically productive population; it is worth taxpayer funding for the betterment of the common good. And we hear stories all the time about the many immigrants without status in our society who are honor students destined for success in college and beyond.

But our current immigration policy mandates that we deport these students right at the time in their lives when our nation would start to be able to reap the benefits of the education we taxpayers have financed for so long.

How can it make sense to give away to some other country the future economic power generated by these individuals? Why would we want to prevent graduates of our colleges and universities from using their knowledge to form a better society right here in the United States?

Please don’t let trillions of dollars of taxable income go to waste. Please don’t exacerbate “brain drain” by forcing new graduates and young professionals to leave the country.

Please vote in favor of the DREAM Act.