One bitter night in the Watertown Public Library, Steven Kropper took a stand. He peered past the grim faces of reason and accidently gave a room full of liberals the show that they wanted to see.

“I guarantee that if we got rid of illegals in this country . . . and I say illegals not undocumenteds because these people are here illegally, let’s be real . . . their jobs would be filled. Look at unemployment in our country right now. Do you think that people would pass up a janitorial job if they could get it?” Mr. Kropper said.

The room erupted with laughter, and a small contingent of Tea Partiers in the front row spun around in their seats to jeer at the crowd.

This painfully polarized moment came near the end of a recent debate over a bill that reappeared in the Massachusetts legislature this January. The Education Parity Act, which passed in 2006 but was vetoed by governor Romney, would give in state tuition to undocumented students who have gone to high school for three years in Massachusetts. Mr. Kropper says the bill is illegal by federal law, and refused to focus on it specifically in the debate. He wanted to talk about stopping immigration in America all together, with his argument based in Lifeboat Ethics.

“It started with the Pilgrims, and I am sure that any Indian worth his Smallpox would agree that it all went downhill from there,” he wrote in an essay that was distributed before the debate. “Closing the gates would give our air, water and land a chance to breathe.”

Well, let’s be real and leave semantics aside. Whatever we call the glut of people working low wage jobs in the US on passports or expired visas, they exist. Some attend UMB. Even if we drop steel curtains along all of our borders, we cannot stop international flights and we should not stop tourism. So how do we deal people that stay past their welcome?

Right now US policy is to ignore them for the most part, or in cases like the one debated in the Watertown Library we have policies that make life complicated and humiliating for them. Supporters of these policies hope to pressure people out of the US when their visas or green cards expire.

“One problem with people who . . . oppose enforcing laws about illegal immigration, there seems to be no limit. If we could agree that laws about immigration should be enforced then this dialogue would be more productive,” Mr. Kropper said in response to a question from the audience, “Do you think that undocumented children should be allowed to go to public schools?”

Stories that illustrate the poverty cycle among undocumented immigrants rarely move people concerned about immigration in the US into anything but anxiety. Statistics don’t seem to help, because people rarely view them in context. Mr. Kropper claimed that immigrants are responsible for overcrowding in Massachusetts, pointing to statistics from the US Census Bureau.

Yes the population in MA is growing, but can we blame immigration any more than fertility? Most people prefer to focus on our huge deficit than on population growth anyway because it’s less bombastic. But the fear implicit in anti-immigration dogma that immigrants are draining public resources like healthcare and welfare, and contributing to the state and federal deficits has no basis in fact.

According to the Cato Institute (cato.org), a think tank that was founded in 1977 with a vision to keep society free from excessive government power, the average immigrant pays more toward social security and local, state and federal income tax than the average native within 15 years of living in the US. This, like any statistic that anyone bleats out, has many nuances. Undocumented immigrants in particular are generally young and healthy, not to mention scared of being deported so they generally don’t use as many government services as native-born people and they don’t collect their tax refunds.

Debate on immigration issues seems to be more about sounding right than about being right.

By charging undocumented students from Massachusetts out of state tuition we’re creating an incentive for them to drop out. Some of these students have lived in Massachusetts as long as they can remember. Their parents brought them here as infants or toddlers. Their friends and families live and work in Massachusetts, and most of them pay taxes because in order to work most low paying jobs in MA you need to have a tax id number.

These students work diligently for years to get their bachelors degrees piecemeal, taking classes at UMB and other state schools as they can afford them. They can’t join the military, and they can’t get federal financial aid or loans because they do not have a birth certificate or a social security number—they are undocumented.

The MA Taxpayers Foundation report from 2006, when the bill was previously proposed, says that the Education Parity Act would increase state revenue because it would fill otherwise empty seats in community colleges. Even if these numbers are out date, yearly about 600 Massachusetts high school graduates are dumped from public schools with no financial recourse for higher education. They don’t have grants, and they generally can’t get loans.

We could talk further about the decent fiscal policy in this specific bill, but people worried about immigration tend to focus on the bigger picture. What kinds of incentives do our immigration policies provide for poor foreigners?

We could talk about the ethics of trying to close metaphorical “gates,” but we cannot control immigration without seriously undermining everyone’s freedom.

We could point to the heady rhetoric from Emma Lazarus’ poem Colossus, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free.” Or we might remember Ayn Rand’s immigration story, which informed her views on the free market system in the US, or acknowledge that one of the founders of the most powerful search engine on earth, Google, immigrated to the US when he was six years old. Success stories resonate with American people. If you glance across the American landscape, they are everywhere.

We’re not in a lifeboat. Let’s stop debating in terms of this fear induced metaphor that places us in the middle of an ocean making dire ethical decisions. Clearly the causes of poverty are more nuanced than the causes of drowning.

Why do we argue over semantics in these cases? Here we have a practical problem with a clear solution.

Our current law excludes a minority of people from public higher education. Let’s fix that and move on.