Texas, in fact, was the first state to explicitly approve the tuition break for illegal immigrants back in 2001. In-state tuition at the University of Texas in Austin runs about $3,000 this spring semester, while the rate for out-of-staters is more than $6,000. That's a pretty large subsidy for students who are living in the U.S. illegally. If this doesn't sound like the sort of policy that would come out of a state with a Republican governor and a GOP-controlled Senate (the House has since gone Republican, too), consider this: It passed with only one dissenting vote.
Since then, the Texas law has become a model for other states. Six more have passed the Texas tuition plan, including conservative strongholds such as Utah and Oklahoma. Republican Governor George Pataki signed the legislation in New York, and the president's brother Jeb has supported it in Florida. Nearly everywhere the idea of cutting illegal immigrants a break on higher ed has taken hold, Republicans, it seems, are among the strongest, if unlikeliest, supporters.
The issue of aliens on campus has quickly become a microcosm of the larger national debate on immigration policy. It's too early to tell how President Bush's proposal will fare in Washington. But in the states, it's clear that the tuition question is exposing rifts between Republicans who think it's wrong to provide illegal immigrants with public benefits, and those who wish to win votes from legal immigrants who have earned U.S. citizenship. "It's a difficult path to seek Hispanic votes on the one hand, while on the other hand differentiating between ones that are here illegally and citizens," says Republican state Representative Will Hartnett, the lone Texas lawmaker to oppose the tuition break.
Already some Republican legislators who support the tuition discount are seeing signs of a backlash. Conservative politicians and talk- radio broadcasters are especially livid about what they see as a taxpayer giveaway. "I have been skewered by folks, conservatives, who believe this is a line-in-the-sand issue," says Oregon state Representative Billy Dalto, who unsuccessfully pushed the proposal last year. Dalto, the first Hispanic Republican to ever serve in the Oregon legislature, has been receiving vicious letters from a group calling itself "The Committee to Deport Billy Dalto." He shrugs it off. "That's funny because I'm from New York."
OUT FROM THE SHADOWS
The arguments on both sides of the tuition-break debate are a bit murky, in part because little is officially known about a population that lives quietly in the shadows. Demographers guess that somewhere between 8 million and 12 million illegal aliens are currently living in the United States.In fact, colleges and universities do not even know how many undocumented students are attending their schools already. For example, the University of Virginia has a policy of not accepting illegal immigrants at any tuition rate. Yet officials note that undocumented students could simply lie about their residency status, and because the school accepts thousands of students each year the university would never know the difference. "We have no way of checking every student," says John Blackburn, the university's dean of admissions.
Immigration supporters, both Republicans and Democrats, want to stop this sort of winking on campus and simply legitimize admissions of undocumented foreigners. And since illegal immigrants pay sales taxes, and in some cases income and payroll taxes as well, supporters think they should pay tuition at in-state rates just as other residents do. Supporters such as Wisconsin state Representative Pedro Colon, a Democrat, also see a moral dimension to their argument: American industry is reaping millions of dollars in profits from cheap immigrant labor, and Colon says those workers should receive some public benefits in exchange. "The Wisconsin economy relies more and more on migrants to do the work," says Colon, pointing to one home state industry--meatpacking. "Immigrants are doing all that packing because non-immigrants don't want to do it."
Opponents of the tuition break disagree. As they see it, offering in- state rates to illegal immigrants is fundamentally unfair to some U.S. citizens. Why should natives of other countries get a higher ed discount when the natives of a bordering state don't? What's more, opponents worry that states offering tuition breaks tacitly acknowledge that U.S. immigration laws are unenforceable--and encourage more foreigners to illegally cross the border. Former state Representative Matt Throckmorton of Utah thinks his state has seen an increase in illegal immigration as a result of the tuition breaks. "Utah is rapidly becoming the gateway state for the nation," he says.
Throckmorton's assertion is hard to prove, however, precisely because data for aliens on campus are so sketchy (schools are also reluctant to disclose information that, at least in theory, could cause some of their students to be deported). The best guesses indicate that the number of people affected by the tuition break is fairly small. The Urban Institute estimates that only about 65,000 undocumented students who are longtime residents graduate from American high schools each year. In 2002, the City University of New York put the number of undocumented immigrants enrolled in its schools at 2,100. That's a significant number, but still only 1 percent of the total student body--in a city whose population is 40 percent foreign-born.
Since these numbers are a bit fuzzy, it's difficult to say how much the tuition breaks cost. That doesn't stop people on both sides of the debate from arguing over the fiscal impact. The rhetoric has only gotten louder since state budget woes peaked last year. Opponents say that because in-state tuition is subsidized by tax dollars, states that offer the break lose money on each illegal immigrant who attends their schools. Colon disagrees. He argues that two-year colleges in particular have plenty of open slots, meaning that every new student who enrolls earns the state more revenue. Supporters also say that investing in talented students, whether they live here legally or not, benefits the local economy by turning out more productive workers who fill state coffers with more tax revenue.
ELECTORAL MATH
So far, proponents of the tuition break are making the most headway in states with sizable immigrant populations, especially those with large concentrations of Hispanics. Of the seven states that have passed the legislation--Texas, Utah, California, New York, Illinois, Washington and Oklahoma--Hispanics make up more than 6 percent of the population in all but Oklahoma, according to the 2000 census. Democrats supported tuition breaks in all of those states, but it was often Republicans, hoping to expand their political base, who gave the decisive push. In Illinois, only one GOP senator and three Republican representatives voted against the tuition break. "As the Hispanic population increases in an area, its clout increases as well," says state Representative Kevin Calvey, the Republican who sponsored the bill in Oklahoma. "It's just simple math."In most states, the legislation passed with caveats which were included to help win Republican support and to assuage the concerns of conservative critics. Most of the state laws, for example, require illegal aliens to have lived in the state for three years and to have graduated from an in-state high school in order to be eligible for in- state tuition. They also must vow to legalize their status as soon as possible. Those conditions haven't won over Republican support everywhere, however. When Maryland's Democratic-controlled legislature passed the in-state break last year, Republican Governor Bob Ehrlich vetoed it.
Some state lawmakers see a middle ground in what Virginia Governor Mark Warner, a Democrat, proposed last year. To the list of stipulations for in-state eligibility, Warner would add another: that undocumented students, or their parents, have paid income taxes in Virginia for at least three years. Republicans in the legislature weren't interested in that compromise, however. They rejected Warner's idea and instead pushed a bill that explicitly said illegal immigrants should pay out-of-state rates. Warner vetoed it.
There is only one point the two sides in this debate agree upon: that the federal government has badly mismanaged immigration policy, putting states in a difficult position. States are stuck developing policies for a group of people whose numbers they don't know, with no means of deporting them on the one hand or easily integrating them on the other. It's still unclear whether President Bush's temporary- worker proposal would improve this situation for states--or only make it worse. "Our federal policy on immigration is a disaster," says Herbert McMillan, a Republican delegate in Maryland. "A lot of these issues should be dealt with on the federal level."
