Texas Gov. Rick Perry defended his support of giving in-state tuition rates to the children of illegal immigrants at the Fox News-Google Republican presidential debate on Thursday.
“If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart,” Perry said of the 2001 state legislation he signed into law.
Perry noted that only four of 181 Texas legislators dissented from the bill and said that the children could become “drag on our society” if they weren’t educated. “This was a state issue,” Perry said. “Texans voted on it. And I still support it greatly.
Michele Bachmann kicked off the immigration discussion when she advocated for a fence “on every mile, on every yard, on every foot, on every inch of the southern border.”
“Not only build it, but then have sufficient border security and enforce the laws that are on the books, with the ICE agents, with our border security, and here’s the other thing I would do: I would not allow taxpayer funded benefits for illegal aliens or for their children, that’s a magnet,” Bachmann said. “End the magnets or illegal aliens to come into the United States of America.”
