Ex-Harvard senior charged with fabricating life history, stealing grant money

Granted, it also has value as a secret handshake to get into a club of people who are over payed for what they do. Just like doctors or union workers when you restrict supply you can extract more value.

2) Moreover, illegal immigrants are disproportionately Hispanic. Their children are automatic US citizens by birthright citizenship and thus qualify for affirmative action. This is another nontrivial preference when you look at empirical differentials in objectively measurable quantities -- like SAT scores, which have their flaws, but are no doubt among the things this Harvard senior falsified.

Now...

3) Just to consider the other side of the coin, someone below said "If all that matters is that I 'came to work,' then what's the point of any rules and regulations.".

Yet many of us here at Hacker News know that the rules and regulations are often simply set up to favor the incumbents, and that many influential web phenomena (e.g. Youtube, Bit Torrent, Napster, Google, Facebook, etc.) were built on just being ballsy enough to play a game of brinkmanship with the law.

Sure, those are laws that many of us have disrespect for -- in large part because the guys that we're "stealing" from are the MPAA and RIAA, who have deep pockets.

Similarly many who "don't care" about illegal immigration aren't big fans of the USA. They argue that "the border crossed Mexico", after all, and ancestors of (some of) today's Americans killed ancestors of (some of) today's Mexicans and took their territory, so revanchist sentiment is justified.

But doesn't Harvard have deep pockets? Aren't its privileged graduates going to be wealthy and successful even if there is a fake or two among their ranks? Hasn't it been the training ground for most of the capitalist and political oppressor class?

Why then the outrage over devaluing and diluting the Harvard credential? Perhaps because many of us (including myself) have paid good money for one of these Ivy degrees, and so now it is our ox getting gored rather than some remote abstraction.

Let's be clear that widespread 'undocumented' immigration is not a problem for the Harvard-educated software engineers working at Facebook. But the widespread presence of undocumented Harvard graduates? That's another story altogether.