No Reason Why Texas Can’t Do Right
May 17th, 2007 at 10:18 am
Last week, an one of our posts asked some questions about how immigration law is interpreted. Under consideration was a bill that would have denied in-state tuition for illegal immigrants (even if they met beefed-up residency standards), and we wanted to know if violating immigration law constituted an offense that allowed states to strip other rights and privileges, such as residency status, from offenders.
After poking around, the answer on the larger question seems to be: it’s complicated. Different states have different interpretations of what legal rights undocumented immigrants can receive, and, of course, everyone’s waiting for the feds to get their act together and clarify all this.
But on the specific question of in-state tuition for higher education, the answer seems more clear cut: the states can do what they want.
The source for this, as well as comprehensive background on the issue, comes from a 2004 paper by Michael A. Olivas, a law professor at the University of Houston who specializes in immigration and higher education law.
At the bottom of p. 18 of the report (pdf) Olivas analyzes a confusing piece of federal legislation and concludes “that [it] points toward only one reasonable conclusion: that IRRIRA (the federal bill), however badly written, allows states to confer (or not confer) a residency benefit upon the undocumented in their public postsecondary institutions.”
Or, in short, “in-state residency is entirely a state-determined benefit or status.”
The debate on the House floor last week often seemed almost philosophical. Either the “illegal aliens” were law-breakers, plain and simple, and shouldn’t get in-state tuition. Or the “undocumented immigrants” were residents just like any other kid who wanted to go to college. But given the state’s discretion on the issue, and given the prohibitive expense of out-of-state tuition, maybe the question should be more practical: Do we want deserving, hard-working students to go to college? It’s hard to see why the answer would be no.
