Yale University seems to be the main force behind the New Haven city administration’s program to give municipal identification cards to illegal aliens. Yale Law School is providing counsel both to the city in defense of the program and to people detained as illegal aliens by federal agents in New Haven. And Yale students and faculty have just participated in what they called New Haven Solidarity Week, a campaign urging legal residents to obtain the ID cards and thus diminish the card’s association with illegal aliens.
Like the ID card itself, Yale’s involvement here is portrayed as a matter of humanity. But it also deliberately facilitates illegal immigration. Worse, Yale’s defense of the ID cards is the essence of demagoguery, the refusal to make distinctions, in this case the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. For any opposition to the ID card program is denounced at Yale as prejudice against all immigrants.
The logic of the ID card program is that there should be no limits on entry into the United States. In any case, Yale’s support for the ID card and illegal immigration is hugely ironic. For Yale maintains itself among the most exclusive major institutions of higher education in the country even as the university, defending illegal aliens and assisting the ID card program, now presumes to tell the rest of the country that it should admit foreigners in unlimited numbers in disregard of the law.
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Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
