How California's AB130 and AB131 and the Financial Crisis Will Kill the State

In our society, we tend to want all things given to us by our magical overlords--the Federal Government. They tend to have all of the answers for our problems, but yet they still can't cure my common cold! Such is life that no one can give us all that we need, I mean it's only my "right" to have someone pay me to sit and watch Netflix all day long and do nothing. Nay, nay! Is it anyone's right and privilege to be handed things to them without working for it?

Well, according the State of California, they've added more rights to people not protected under our laws. Why yes, I speak to the California DREAM Act that was recently signed into its magical law. In the words of my dear friend who says things to enunciate the grammatical flaws of our country, "why for?" And it reality I can't really give anyone a reason to why this passed and budget plans continue to fail. In California, even under a Republican, not one time could they solve the budget crisis. So in what good way does it seem to feel that allowing the people of persona non grata by illegal mean to acquire funding from a near bankrupt state to go to college? There isn't one. Clearly it is a standpoint of "we should allow others the same chance as we do" and you are correct--to a degree. Without such limitations, we could all be bankrupt states and default on our payments to ourselves--the taxpayers. We could end up like Greece in such a financial disaster that small "bailouts"--I mean "austerity measures" can't help. In the global financial crisis, California was one of the few states that tight-roped walked the line of pure bankruptcy and living for another two seconds.

The DREAM Act, codified under AB130 and AB131, is a semblance of the national DREAM Act which calls for illegal immigrants to be able to acquire educational funding for school in the United States. While this is so very nice, the direct impact on California and especially in the United States, is the funding of it. Who will pay for it!? With the crisis in California on their budget still raging hard, it would be near impossible to implement such a measure without doing one of the very powerful moves of the Democratic party, tax increases. The secondary problem isn't just taxation, but like most government agencies in financial trouble, they burrow money from the next fiscal years projections of the revenue to make the budget "solvent," when in reality, they are just borrowing money they are fabricating from thin air.

There is another problem with this though, the act requires the applicant to prove that they arrived in the US prior to the age of 16 illegally, which in essence violates the federal laws that prevent anyone from living with in the country and subject to penalties such as fines, imprisonment, and deportation, or a collection of all of these. The Supremacy Act in the United States says that the federal law supercedes any state law that is in violation of the federal law, thus it could be said that the California DREAM Act is in partial violation of federal law, because one an agency acknowledges that a person is in violation of immigration and naturalization laws, they must report it to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Unfortunately, improper funding and a wide estimated number upwards of 20 million illegals live within the country would be impossible to remove or imprison collectively. Alternatives to such a thing are controversial in the United States (and will prove to be a significant factor in the 2012 election).

Moreover, the California law will undoubtedly be more problematic than the original intention. It will be interesting to see in 2014 when the first budget for financial aid to the DREAM Act recipients either comes close to default or doesn't acquire the number of funding for it to continue without drastic cuts to its availability.