States make their own tuition rules for undocumented students

This is yet another reason why there is a sense of urgency to fix our immigration concerns. We cannot have states making up their own laws on this issue. Something as critical as this, needs the insight of those in DC to help guide this process.

Reporting from Washington— Anngie Gutierrez was a child when she arrived in the United States as an illegal immigrant 10 years ago. There's still no path to legal status for her, but in Maryland and a handful of other states, there is a more affordable road to college.

Gutierrez, a high school junior in Hyattsville, Md., will benefit from a new state law that allows illegal immigrants who reside there to pay in-state tuition rates at Maryland's public colleges. If she lived in Virginia, about 15 miles to the west, she would find that many public colleges require undocumented students to pay out-of-state tuition.

Some Virginia legislators want to go further: In February, the House of Delegates passed legislation that would prohibit the state's public universities from admitting illegal immigrants. The proposal has not passed the state Senate.

The states' radically different approaches illustrate the polarization of Americans over what to do about the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S., and the heated nature of a debate that extends far from border states such as Arizona and California.

The tuition battle has grown, in part, because of a lack of action by Congress. The federal government holds jurisdiction over immigration law, and a 1982 Supreme Court ruling mandated that states provide illegal immigrants with access to K-12 education in public schools. But the absence of a comprehensive federal immigration plan has given states relatively free rein to impose their own rules on issues such as who can attend public colleges, and at what rates.

"If you don't have a coherent immigration policy, then you end up with 50 different rules about what kinds of authority police have to stop people, what kinds of documents you have to carry around and so on," said Angela Kelley, vice president for immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a think tank in Washington. "You can have two states right next to each other, identical profiles of the foreign-born … and yet you get this incredible difference in outcome and treatment toward newcomers."

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