‘Demand something better’ in tuition debate

So, I think the article on the proposed tuition freeze begs the question: Is anyone going to do anything but throw a “”recommendation”” at the Board of Regents that is just going to be put aside? It seems to me that our president, Robert Shelton, already has his mind made up and that’s the way its going to be. It should be you, the students, who run this school. You pay tuition, you are paying the professors’ and staff’s salaries. You all have the right to demand something better. So instead of just the ASA writing a proposal that doesn’t seem to matter, I would urge the student body to make some noise about this. Write letters, make appointments with the president, the provost, the dean of students or anyone who will have any say in this matter. Make it so they will have to listen to what the students have to say.

Mike Moore
electrical engineering senior

Kirchner column not ‘original’

Sarah Devlin’s piece “”All hail the queen”” (Monday) was a sad use of Opinions’ space. Does Devlin think she is the only UA student who reads The Economist? She essentially changed the order of this week’s piece in The Economist on Christina Kirchner, gave it a suspiciously familiar title and called it her own.

Perhaps if Devlin had read some of the previous Economist pieces on Christina Kirchner, she would have included the very minor detail of Christina’s role as a senator before winning presidential office. This overlooked detail is one of the biggest pieces in the comparison between Christina Kirchner and Hillary Clinton that Devlin fumbled in her column – no doubt due to her lack of original research.

The only original opinion in the piece was the last sentence that Devlin used to tie her column to her tired theme of “”I am woman, hear me roar.””

Vanessa Valenzuela

senior majoring in economics and
international studies

Former Wildcat columnist

Letter ‘nativist nonsense’

Monday’s Mailbag letter by Jesse Salazar (“”DREAM Act would help immigrants ‘steal an education’ “”) certainly gave me a good laugh. “”Steal an education,”” that’s a good one. Nativist nonsense such as this is deeply flawed ethically and, worse, is bad for our economy and society. To describe a process by which young adults, who have grown up on our soil and have many of our values, can achieve citizenship through higher education or military service as condoning criminal behavior is simply foolish. These “”criminals”” often have valuable bilingual skills and are the inheritors of a strong work ethic common among immigrants to this country. The same cannot be said of many native-born middle-class Americans whose prosperity and higher education opportunities were inherited and not earned.

As someone who has been a taxpaying adult for 10 years and was a member of the Armed Forces for eight of those years I cannot imagine a better use for my tax dollars than to educate people who WANT to be here and to offer citizenship for military service. Encouraging immigrant children to attend higher education saves us money, as they would then be capable of paying significantly more in taxes along with adding to productivity of American commerce (unless they are political science majors). The reason people come here from around the world, especially Latin America, is that hard work simply pays off more here than in any of the banana republics that our government has spent so much effort over the last century to keep in subservient economic roles. Opportunities, or “”welfare”” if you are nativist and the recipients aren’t white and English-speaking, are what bring Hispanic immigrants to our land, just as they brought my great-great grandfather, William Henry Mills, here from a poverty-stricken part of Ireland. I, for one, cannot imagine an America without an Irish immigrant heritage, and I certainly couldn’t imagine how we are to prosper without actively integrating Latin American immigrants into our society.

Antony Mills
junior majoring in optical science and engineering