By Jack Roberts

Rick Perry has revealed some rough edges since joining the race for president, but the issue that has hurt him most is the one for which I like him best; namely, his defense of the law allowing Texas high school graduates to qualify for in-state tuition at Texas colleges and universities even if they are illegal immigrants.

The outcry against this law — passed 10 years ago with just four dissenting votes in the Texas Legislature — reflects how far ideology has become removed from reality. After a decade under this law, a whopping 1 percent of Texas college students in public institutions are illegal immigrants paying in-state tuition. And that’s in a state that not only shares the longest border with Mexico, but where border patrols are less attentive and aggressive than the greeters at Walmart.

The outrage against this law might be more understandable if illegal immigrants didn’t pay state taxes, but, of course, they do. That’s true everywhere (the myth that most illegal immigrants are paid in cash under the table is just that, a myth), but it is particularly true in Texas, which has no state income tax and raises 80 percent of its revenue from a general sales tax and other excise taxes (particularly on gas, tobacco and alcohol). Clearly, this isn’t about the money.

Even more puzzling is Mitt Romney’s position. He says he vetoed a similar law in Massachusetts because he feared in-state tuition might become a “magnet” drawing more illegal immigrants into the state. Let me say this: If there are parents in Mexico so committed to their children’s education they’ll come to the United States illegally so their children can graduate from an American high school with grades good enough to matriculate at a state college or university while paying full in-state tuition, they shouldn’t be punished — they should be cloned. They are exactly the kind of parents the U.S. should be trying to cultivate, not deport.

“What part of illegal don’t you understand?” is the response I often hear. How about the part that ignores proportionality and complicity? As New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a former federal prosecutor, has pointed out, being in the United States without documentation isn’t even a crime — it’s a civil violation, like a traffic ticket. If we truly believed this to be such a heinous act, wouldn’t we have done something to stop it decades ago? Wouldn’t we be trying to do something — really do something — about it now?

This is not a frivolous response. It’s a long established principle of international law that a blockade, to be lawful, must be active and effective. In the Crimean War, the British and French agreed that a lawful blockade must be “maintained by a force sufficient to prevent access to the coast of the enemy.” In other words, you aren’t permitted to sink a ship or impound its cargo for violating a blockade if you’re not making a serious, persistent and effective effort to enforce all the time.

By comparison, have we protected our borders “by a force sufficient to prevent access” to our territory? If not, is it fair to simply blame those who’ve crossed those borders unimpeded for years and been welcomed on the other side with open arms by landlords eager to rent to them and employers eager to hire them? And while we dither on the big questions of securing our boarders and modernizing our immigration system, what do we gain by pretending that the 12 million immigrants who are still here will somehow disappear or that the rest of us wouldn’t be worse off if they did?

It seems we’re turning into a nation that watches “Les Misérables” and roots for Javert. Earlier this year, a bill virtually identical to the Texas law passed the Oregon Senate, only to die in the House of Representatives. Republican Sen. Frank Morse, carrying the bill on the floor, framed the issue this way:

“Have these children broken the law, when many were carried into this country in the arms of their mothers? … If we by policy create a circumstance by which we take a class of young people and deny them opportunity, are we improving Oregon? No, we are not.”

On this issue, it isn’t Rick Perry who’s confused. It’s us.

Jack Roberts is a Eugene businessman and former Oregon labor commissioner.