Husband and wife alumni of University of California, Berkeley have established a scholarship to support illegal aliens. The couple, José Luis Bedolla and Lisa García Bedolla, aim to provide Berkeley students who fall under the classification of illegal alien, most notably those who qualifications reflect the DREAM Act of 2001, with funding to attend a state funded university.
The scholarship is named the Miguel and Elvira Bedolla Scholarship, and is to honor José Luis Bedolla’s parents, who supported him while he was an undocumented student at UC Berkeley.
Recipients of the Miguel and Elvira Bedolla Scholarship are also eligible to receive government aid in the form of student housing, food, and of discounted course tuition rates.
A column published this week by the student-run, independent newspaper of the University of California, Berkeley, The Daily Californian, details the program at length.
The current tuition rates for in-state and out-of-state students who attend the University of California, Berkeley are $34,972 and $61,654 respectively. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, the Golden State was estimated to be “home to more than two million undocumented immigrants.” According to the UC Berkeley donation site for the Miguel and Elvira Bedolla Scholarship, the qualifications state that “Eligible students shall be in good academic standing, have demonstrated financial need, of a Latin American origin from the greater Los Angeles County area; if no applicants fit this criteria, then the Fund will be made available to all Latino students within the state of California.”
Jose and Lisa should be aware that when you force taxpayers to subsidize illegal aliens for state-funded benefits initially intended for legal residents of that state, tuition does not decrease, it escalates.
Anyone who cares about easing the burden of education should be applauded, but unbeknownst to the scholarship creators, this program will only do damage in the long run.
Tuition prices will rise, admission standards will sink, and the scholarship will provide one more incentive for illegal border crossing which burdens taxpayers.
Only one student has been awarded the scholarship since its inception. According to The Daily Californian, Lisa Bedolla has refrained from disclosing the name of this particular student “in order to protect their undocumented status.”
“While the endowment principal is a relatively small amount of money, Bedolla sees the endowment as a symbolic action that shows that undocumented students are valued and belong in this campus community, according to a Berkeley Philanthropy press newsletter. Bedolla stated in the newsletter that there are ‘roadblocks for students, particularly Dreamers’ and that these roadblocks are ‘much greater than they were before’ when he attended UC Berkeley in the late ’80s,” the Daily Californian reports.
According to the Pew Research Center, there are an estimated 11.1 million illegal immigrants currently in the United States.
