Education Quote by Elton Gallegly

“Grossly unfair” is doing the heavy lifting here, a moral cudgel aimed less at policy detail than at the listener’s gut. Gallegly’s intent is to reframe in-state tuition for undocumented students not as an education question but as a breach of the social contract. The move is classic political persuasion: pick a sympathetic “deserving” character (the legal student who briefly leaves), then set them up as the injured party in a system supposedly rigged for outsiders.

The subtext is an argument about belonging, dressed up as bureaucratic fairness. By choosing the term “illegal immigrants” rather than “undocumented students,” the quote smuggles criminality into what is, functionally, a residency-and-eligibility debate. That rhetorical choice narrows the audience’s moral imagination: you’re not weighing costs and benefits of educating young residents; you’re asked to resent a lawbreaker receiving a perk. “Only 10 states” adds a whiff of aberration, suggesting California is an outlier gone rogue, which primes voters to see reversal as restoration.

The context matters: California’s in-state tuition rules (and later, broader “Dreamer” policies) emerged from a reality in which many undocumented students were raised and educated in the state’s public schools. Gallegly sidesteps that long-rooted presence by spotlighting a technicality about a legal student’s temporary move. It’s a carefully engineered contrast: one group’s “paper” legality versus another’s lived residency, with the emotional verdict preloaded.