RALEIGH – Sounds like a tragedy. Here it is, ending its young life without ever going through the arc of experiences that others of its kind might claim. On the other hand, its end was predicable and deserved.

I refer, of course, to the controversial bill introduced in the General Assembly a few weeks ago to give in-state tuition to illegal immigrants. It started out with a loud fanfare, a seemingly endless parade of lawmakers and muckety-mucks touting it, and the de facto endorsement of the political and media establishment in Raleigh.

Then it made the radio waves, and the melody of the fanfare give way to the unmistakable sound of a raspberry. Local talk-show hosts in Asheville, Charlotte, Raleigh, and elsewhere brought up the bill, said a few words of explanation, and then let the angry calls start trickling in.

I’m sorry, wrong choice of terms. They poured in. They streamed in. It was the 100-year-flood of talk-show animus. Virtually every caller, spanning the spectrum from immigration restrictionists and nativists to moderates and even a few dismayed liberals, savaged the bill. Some of the arguments were flimsy – such as rehearsing old stand-bys about “them” taking “our” jobs and the like – while others were, well, fatal.

“What part of “illegal” do you not understand?”

I used this phrase recently in a debate about a related subject, offering driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, only to find out later that it appears to be a popular retort among restrictionists, a group to which I do not belong. The fact is, no matter how many economic or cultural benefits one can cite from strong levels of in-migration, if current immigrants are breaking the law to be in this country, that’s a problem. You can’t just pretend they are “undocumented,” or that the law doesn’t exist. You can’t just legalize everyone who broke the law, who jumped in line in front of law-abiding would-be Americans. And the state of North Carolina can’t pretend to make up its own, more-welcoming immigration policies – even if, as I believe, they would be advisable – just because Congress won’t adopt them.

That’s what the in-state tuition bill consists of. It offers up the fiction that you can be a legal resident of North Carolina, for the purpose of getting North Carolinians to pay most of your tuition bill, and yet not be a legal resident of the United States. Sorry, Charlie, but the Old North State tried divorcing itself from the U.S. Didn’t work out. And as both Gov. Mike Easley and legislative staffers now point out, there is no clever, lawyerly trick available to break out of this box. According to federal law, you can’t distinguish, for the purposes of government subsidy, between different groups of non-legal residents. If an English person in North Carolina illegally can get in-state tuition, then so can legal residents of New England.

The real tragedy here is that immigration supporters made a serious strategic error. If you favor higher levels of legal immigration into the U.S., as I do, you have to convince skeptical taxpayers that the policy will offer net benefits, not net costs. You don’t do that by proposing to increase government subsidies. Fortunately for the cause of true immigration reform, this bill is dead-on-arrival – or “third-reading-challenged,” for those who prefer euphemisms.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.