Intolerance and fear

If, as criminal lawyers say, everything goes to motive, we're mystified at the motive behind Rep. Stephen Urquhart, Sen. Margaret Dayton and other legislators who sing a Johnny-one-note tune about immigration. The song amounts to "throw the bums out." The fuming legislators are now saying Utah spent $85.4 million to educate undocumented children, and they want the federal government to give the money back.

Needless to say, the legislators made no mention of recent studies in Texas and other Southwest states that show undocumented workers actually bring in more money than they require in services. Nor was there any mention of the sales tax, property tax, gas tax and other fees and taxes paid by the parents of these children.

Dayton said, "Undocumented workers do not pay income tax unless they have a Social Security number that doesn't belong to them." All she had to do was spend 20 seconds on the Internet to learn — as letter writer Celina Su did — that the Internal Revenue Service routinely gives non-Social Security taxpayer identification numbers to students and others without green cards or citizenship papers, and that in 2005, holders of those ITINs paid $5 billion into tax coffers. Also, listing the cost of educating children without fully looking at the benefits the state receives from that education is dishonest. Imagine if lawmakers had listed the cost of educating the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth child of large families, just to make a case against having babies. Utahns would be outraged.

But then this argument isn't about taxes or education. The motives behind the hostility against school children, in fact, feel more angry and emotional than fact-based.

Utahns are the ones who should be angry. No one should want to deprive children of an education and offer no solution to the ensuing woes, which would include increased crime and societal costs that result from a permanent class of uneducated people.