Punishing the Innocent

Regardless of one’s stance on the rights of illegal immigrants, it’s more than a little harsh to discriminate against their children. The parents may have made a decision to cross the border illegally; the kids had no choice but to go along for the ride. Yet they are often condemned to permanent second-class status.

Every year, about 65,000 talented immigrant students who have grown up in the United States, graduated from high school and want to go to college find themselves barred from accessing state and federal financial assistance and in-state tuition rates available to their classmates. There’s a solution, but it has been allowed to languish in Congress.

The Dream Act, which counts Republican Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah among its sponsors, would repeal Section 505 of the 1996 Immigration Act, which requires any state that provides in-state tuition to undocumented immigrant students to provide the same tuition rate to out-of-state residents. In 2001, California, setting an example that should now expand nationwide, exempted undocumented students from paying out-of-state tuition if they had attended three years of high school in the state and were admitted to college.

The Dream Act would allow conditional U.S. residence to students who came to this country before age 16, had been accepted into a two- or four-year college, resided in the U.S. when the law was enacted and had lived here for at least five years.

This is a narrowly tailored measure that addresses one of the more unfortunate symptoms of the nation’s dysfunctional approach to immigration matters. In a year when President Bush promised a sweeping overhaul of immigration laws, it is somewhat pathetic that he can’t seem to get his troops on Capitol Hill to pass this bill before going home.