Advocates blast Trump campaign against in-state tuition for immigrants • Oregon Capital Chronicle:
“When access to in-state tuition is taken away, many undocumented students cannot bridge the gap between in-state and out-of-state rates,” Feldblum added.
Don’t threaten me with a good time.
Why should taxpayers be subsidizing tuition for those in the United States illegally?
In six of the lawsuits the DOJ filed — targeting Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas — courts have already struck down the laws.
But in a blow to the administration’s efforts against Virginia’s in-state tuition policies, a federal judge earlier this week scrapped the DOJ’s challenge, upholding the Virginia law.
Lawsuits are also pending in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont and Washington state.
It sounds like Virginia may be an outlier, because the law seems fairly clear to me:
The DOJ’s challenges center on the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which bars a state from offering in-state tuition benefits to people not lawfully present in the country if that same benefit is not granted to U.S. citizens from another state.
Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate of the DOJ’s Civil Division has noted that “colleges cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens” and that the agency “will not tolerate American students being treated like second-class citizens in their own country.”
…Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of MALDEF]…pointed out that all of the state tuition-equity policies across the country were enacted after the 1996 law was enacted.
This is a good example of how far left the Democrat Party has moved. The federal law was passed under the Clinton administration with bipartisan support, 333-87 in the House and 97-3 in the Senate.