DURHAM - Poorly drafted law can give spineless politicians cover to do what they want without taking responsibility. That's the lesson from the recent brouhaha over admitting illegal aliens to community colleges.

Evidently someone really wanted to bar illegal immigrants from going to community colleges. But rather than say, "We just don't want you here," the same someone decided to hide behind a specious interpretation of the federal Welfare Reform Act.

Here's what the law (8 U.S.C. 1621) says, in relevant part: Illegal aliens are barred from "public benefits," defined to include, among other things, post-secondary education, "for which payments or assistance are provided to an individual, household, or family eligibility unit by an agency of a state or local government or by appropriated funds of a State or local government."

That last, long, awkward clause was conveniently absent from the N.C. Attorney General's Office letter interpreting the law. And a simple grammatical reading of the sentence shows what it bars: public money that goes to an illegal immigrant, his household or family from the state or local treasury.

The words, although clumsy, are nonetheless clear. The kind of public benefits barred are transfer payments, not participation in programs broadly available to qualified and fee-paying members of the community.

The community college system and Attorney General's Office either don't know how to read the law or have chosen to ignore its clear language in order to achieve a politically popular result.

No other state in the country interprets federal law as barring a qualified applicant from community college based on that person's immigration status. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has never issued regulations, warnings or other guidance that interprets the law this way.

This section of the law was part of the Welfare Reform Act signed by President Clinton. Congress, in passing this law, expressed the intent to bar unauthorized immigrants from welfare, food stamps, subsidized student loans and other transfer payments -- not from services broadly available to the public, such as school lunches, libraries or public parks.

If North Carolina wants to tell illegal immigrants to stay out of the community college system, it may do so, but let the responsible bureaucrats or the legislature have the courage to admit it is a policy choice, rather than hiding behind the skirts of a law that doesn't even cover the issue.

(Hans Christian Linnartz teaches legal writing and immigration law at Duke Law School.)