The problem is that I don't agree that it is irrelevant. Because if it is, then I would like to officially change my status to illegal immigrant. Because I'd truly love to not have to pay my big tax bill this year. Or to pay for my own health care. After all, society benefits if I am healthy, right?

Look, I know you think my heart may be two sizes too small on this issue, but the truth is that I agree that we are better off if all the people who live in our country are well fed, well educated, and healthy. But when we legitimize illegal immigration by paying their bills and not requiring them to follow the same rules as citizens, we just encourage more people to come here illegally. I don't believe the answer is to continue to pay for illegal immigration. I believe the answer is to overhaul the legal immigration system while we make it unattractive to come here illegally.

Well, I would think that the marginal cost of educating and providing health care to the children of illegal immigrants would pretty much be covered by the benefits gained from it. I'd actually take it a step farther and go for the Candian system, eh.

But even if we just limit it to kids, it's still a good idea.

If little Spock gets a fever and doesn't go to the doctor, then the results fall into two broad categories. Spock shares his sickness with the whole family, but everyone gets better on their own. Lots of school and/or work gets missed. Or Spock gets even sicker until Sarek beams them down to the ER, where they will get free treatment, but it's much more expensive now that Spock is so sick, and Spock's also taking up time that belongs to the ER staff when they could be treating someone with a real emergency.

Either way, the higher cost is paid by the family and their employers by missing work. Or society pays out the wazoo for the emergency treatment, when really it was five minutes of a doctor's time and a bottle of antibiotics had they gone to the doctor last week.

The tax code applies to all income earners, not just legal immigrants and citizens. Anyone can be a tax cheat, immigration status is irrelevant.

Society benefits if you do not spread Typhoid Fever, yes. If you can pay for it, you should, because health care you pay for is better and cheaper than emergency only healthcare that you don't. It would be more cost effective for us to provide better quality health care at low cost (and subsidized for people who can't afford it) than it is to pay for emergency-only care, where the costs are sky-high. Also, generally healthy people in, for instance, the food service industry is a public good.

There's no way to overhaul the immigration system to make it unattractive to come here illegally. No law will ever make it unattractive when even poor people here live so much better than poor people in parts of the world with a long land border with the US. So sayeth Immigration Lass.

Also, you need to more precisely define "adequate" with respect to health care. In my opinion, a major problem with reforming health care is that, no, everyone can't have Bill Gates level coverage since the costs for such do have to get paid in some manner. But telling someone "No, we can't do very expensive medical procedure X on your loved one because economically it doesn't make sense" is not considered acceptable in our society either. So what expense level is considered "adequate"?

At first when I read the post title, I felt certain that this was going to be an essay describing your recommended policies regarding broads. I'm all ears, President Sinatra!

I am probably saying something reductively identical to what Michael and Ginger said, but I think questions of prosecuting illegal immigration and providing education for everybody in America should be orthogonal to each other. We should enforce our own laws and policies regarding immigration to the best of our ability. We should take steps to ensure that everybody in America receives the minimum required doses of education and healthcare for a functional society, immigration status notwithstanding. There is nothing about these two things that mutually excludes or defeats the other.

Tom: "Adequate" is a policy detail :-)

Angelo: I'm with the rest of the class. In particular, you don't stop illegal immigration by penalizing illegal kids (and, as noted, the rest of society); nobody is sneaking into this country so that their kids can go to US schools and get US health care.

I think we're healthier as a society when we cherish and protect kids--even strangers' kids, even the kids of illegals--than if we scrutinize and suspect kids and, especially, penalize them for their parents' crimes.

We can't be naïve, of course. But the default setting for our cheating detectors should be low. In other words, I would trade some abuse for universal coverage instead of trading imperfect coverage for zero abuse. In fact, at this point in my ethical evolution, I would characterize imperfect coverage as abuse in itself.

I realize that conversations like this are what make me feel like a conservative (I'm not, I just fele that way compared to my friends). And I knew going into it that I would be alone in my opinions. And so honestly I had intended to just state my first opinion and let it go at that. But when I read Greg's last comment, I just had to reply.

Greg, do you really believe that "nobody is sneaking into this country so that their kids can go to US schools and get US health care"? Because I firmly disagree with you if you do. Maybe living in Texas this long has tainted my thinking, but I have little doubt in my mind that better education and health care for their children is not just a goal of illegal immigrants, it's a primary goal in many cases.

Again, I know I sound like a broken recording of the Grinch here, but to use Rick's analogy, if little Spock gets sick and Sarek finds out he can beam over to use the wonderful facilities on the enterprise, don't you think he's going to mention it to T'Pring, and T'pol, and T'otherone, etc.? That's my issue. I agree that not treating sick people in our country is not a good idea. It's bad public health policy, and it's cruel to boot. But I also don't like the idea of running an international free clinic.

Here's an idea. Why not agree to treat everyone who shows up at the clinic/ER/etc., but require them to show some kind of proof of residency, whatever country that may be. And then we keep a tally of those expenses, and bill the respective countries at the end of each month. Naive? Sure, but then at least we'd have some kind of idea how much this is actually costing us, instead of just guessing that it is or is not insignificant.

Hmm. Ang, I'm not seeing anything that's either conservative or liberal in my post. In fact, I consider your post about tax cheating to be roughly equivalent to the Bill O'Reilly side of the recent Bill-Geraldo dustup.

If by conservative, you mean "batshit obsessed with something that isn't based on facts but rather gut feelings", then I still don't think you're conservative, just right of center.

It should be pretty easy to find out why people are sneaking into this country and I expect that we'll find that the answer is overwhelmingly "economic opportunity", not "healthcare" or "education". There's a pretty clear correlation between economic prosperity in Ireland and illegal immigration to the US, to move the question to a smaller, better studied population.

America has a duty to make sure every child is educated...

...except that insofar as "America" means the Federal Government, no, it doesn't. There isn't a word written in the Constitution about schooling or education (not the same things, IMNSHO). The cases that extend access to taxpayer-funded government schools to the children of those who have entered the country without the government's permission placed that burden on the several states. It is the states who have included education as a constitutionally protected government benefit, not the Feds.

The children of immigrants without permission come in two types, actually. Some are born here, and are citizens by birthright. In that case, the Federal constitution would cover them not only on equal protection grounds, but a fair case could be made for seeing state-subsidized schooling as one of the "privileges" of citizens protected by the 14th. Other children in these immigrant families were not born here, and are not citizens. Should a family like that ever run afoul of the Feds, the whole lot of them could be deported. These minors have committed no crime in obeying their parents, but until their status is regularized they are vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the law. Even so, the Supreme Court has ordered that if the states provide tax-supported education to all children who are citizens or authorized immigrants, it has to provide it to those outside those categories. This is a puzzlement. There are some rights we recognize for any person, be he citizen or not, legal resident or not, or just here on a tourist visa. There are others we reserve for citizens. Deciding to require state-paid education for non-citizen children who came here irregularly may or may not be good public policy, but that policy should have been determined by legislation or court cases in the several states.

There is also the planted assumption that education by the state is a net good. I have my doubts about that, as I'd privatize the whole stinking K-Phd mess. I wouldn't stop any charity from raising tuition for poor kids whose Daddies and Mommies snuck into the USA, though.