Owens on immigration: Services should go to legally qualified

By John Fryar, Longmont Times-Call

December 7, 2005

http://www.longmontfyi.com/region-story.asp?ID=5025

Colorado should make sure that foreign nationals who get state government services are legally eligible to get them, Gov. Bill Owens said Monday.

The federal government requires that some services, such as emergency medical care, be provided to illegal immigrants.

Outside of such mandates, however, “we need to make sure that we do everything we can to make sure that state services are given to those who legally qualify for them.”

But Owens said he’d prefer to see such a measure emerge from the Legislature rather than petitioned onto a state ballot as a citizen-initiated law....

The governor said he’d oppose any legislation that would grant driver’s licenses or other state identification documents to illegal immigrants.

“But if you had a legal guest-worker program with an identification card, that could change that,” Owens said.

Owens said he would also oppose allowing youths who are here illegally to pay in-state tuition at Colorado’s colleges and universities....

Nationally, Owens said, “we need to secure the border.

“And that’s because in order to have legal ways to come across, you need to make sure that people can’t come across illegally,” Owens said, adding that “today, unfortunately it is too easy to come across the border.”...

Earlier this fall, Owens angered a number of anti-illegal-immigration activists when he refused to declare a state of emergency over the issue.

Owens last week attended a Republican Governors Association meeting in Carlsbad, Calif., where, according to The Washington Post, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman warned the GOP governors against embracing anti-immigrant [CAIR correction: immigration reduction] sentiments in the debates over border security and illegal immigration.

Read the complete article.