1. The Associated Press State & Local Wire (NJ): Undocumented immigrant children seek in-state tuition status
By BONNIE PFISTER
Thursday June 9, 2005

2. Asbury Park Press (NJ): Immigrant children should be treated as in-state students
BY PARTHA BANERJEE
Friday June 10, 2005

3. Lake Norman Living (CO): Losing Ground on Immigration Issue (Opinion)
By JOHN HOOD
Friday June 10, 2005

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1.The Associated Press State & Local Wire (NJ): Undocumented immigrant children seek in-state tuition status
By BONNIE PFISTER
Thursday June 9, 2005

Carlos Avila got his green card just in time.

Avila was 7 years old when his parents brought him and his sister to the United States from the Andean town of Cuenca, Ecuador, where every day he said his schoolteacher father woke up wondering, "How am I going to feed my family today?"

All of them entered the country illegally, settling in central New Jersey. Avila graduated from Trenton Central High School.

His father received his resident alien "green card" - which allowed him to legally live and work in the U.S. - as part of the 1986 amnesty. But it was more than a decade before he realized he could apply for legal residency for his minor children. That process took a year and a half.

"I became a citizen in the nick of time, six months before I was to start college, " Avila said. "If I had turned 18 before I got my residency, there would have been no law to help me."

Becoming a legal U.S. resident allowed Avila, now 22, to take advantage of lower tuition at The College of New Jersey, where he will be a senior this fall. Without that status, his tuition would cost him almost $5,000 a year more than the in-state tuition of $9,100.

Allowing undocumented immigrants who have graduated high school in New Jersey and lived here for at least three years to qualify for in-state tuition is the objective of a bill that has languished in the Legislature.

About 50 students and supporters attended a Senate Education Committee meeting Thursday, approaching chairwoman Shirley Turner afterward about the bill.

Sen. Turner, D-Mercer County, said she supports education opportunities for every child, but worries that the bill could land New Jersey in legal hot water.

"The problem we have is one that was created by the federal government, because they have not provided a mechanism for all people who have been living in this country for so many years to become citizens," she said.

Other states, including Texas and California, do extend those in-state tuition to some undocumented immigrants, but Turner said they could face legal challenges.

The bill's sponsor disagreed.

"I don't quite buy that argument," said Sen. Ronald Rice, D-Essex County. "If that's the case, we should be able to put some legal parameters around the legislation."

Children who had no say in whether they would illegally immigrate should be given the same opportunity as their classmates, he said.

"If a child is in the public school system for years and we know that, why are we treating them differently?" Rice said. "You're here all your life. What are you going to do: Be a bum? Go back to say, Portugal, where you don't know anybody or anything about the place?"

The legislation is Senate Bill 2552 and Assembly Bill 2633.

On the Net:

New Jersey Legislature: www.njleg.state.nj.us/

New Jersey Immigration Policy Network. http://www.njipn.org/

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2.Asbury Park Press (NJ): Immigrant children should be treated as in-state students
BY PARTHA BANERJEE
Friday June 10, 2005

A few hundred college-bound students in New Jersey have been waiting for more than two years to get a bill passed in Trenton. The in-state tuition bill, when passed, would help these children of immigrants receive an affordable college education and avoid the exorbitant "out-of-state" fees imposed on them.

This is not a unique situation in New Jersey. Since 2001, nine states have passed laws permitting certain undocumented students who have attended and graduated from their high schools to pay the same tuition as their classmates at public colleges. It is only reasonable to expect that as the fifth-largest immigrant-population state, New Jersey follow their footsteps and enact the long-pending bill into law.

These Garden State immigrant students - much fewer in number than their counterparts in Texas, California or New York - deserve the in-state tuition fees for a number of reasons:

These children have been here for many years and they look, speak, think and act just like any other American kid. Most of them went to primary, middle or high schools just like other Jersey boys and girls. This is their home: New Jersey's "mainstream" American students have been their friends with whom they have sat in class, played baseball and soccer, and gone to the mall.

Unlike out-of-state "mainstream" students, these kids and their undocumented immigrant parents have always supported New Jersey's colleges and universities with sales, property and income taxes. They have contributed to our state and national economy, too. The New York Times reported that "the estimated 7 million or so illegal immigrant workers in the United States are now providing the system with a subsidy of as much as $7 billion a year." This is because the immigrant parents' employers are always withholding money from their paychecks - money the workers would never see - whether they labor in farms, construction sites, department stores or restaurants.

The "mainstream" out-of-state students could choose to pay less for college and attend schools in their home states, but they consciously decided to pay three or four times as much to attend schools out of state. These immigrant students do not have any such luxury or option. They know their admission into the state's public institutions is not a free ride: They would have to work hard to get in on a competitive basis. They also know they don't qualify for any federal or state loans or grants. In spite of all the obstacles, they want to go to college and get a degree.

Future social and economic benefits brought in by a generation of educated immigrant youth will far exceed the present education expenditure. On the other hand, an uneducated generation of young people with a broken dream would be driven into poverty, despair, loss of health, or even underground activities, with huge economic and political consequences.

We all know college education is expensive and American citizens have reason to be frustrated. We need to ask, however, is it the fault of the undocumented immigrants and their college-age children that America can't keep its education tab down? In other market-driven countries such as England or Australia, governments have taken long-term, pragmatic measures to prevent higher education costs from spiraling out of control. We haven't. It is those misplaced priorities that are responsible for our frustrations.

Unfortunately, anti-immigrant organizations and individuals are not shy about exploiting these misgivings. Since the tragedies of 9/11, it's been easy to scapegoat and penalize hard-working immigrants and their aspiring children who have nothing to do with terrorism. The addition of a few hundred resident students to our public colleges is not going to crash our markets. The anti-immigrant rhetoric that attempts to rob the immigrant children of their dream of college education is politically motivated. We should not be fooled by it.

New Jersey's lawmakers - traditionally known for their pro-people, equal-opportunity, affirmative-action stances - should pass the instate tuition bill on a fast track. This state should side with its American children of immigrant parents. We must give these innocent children a chance to succeed.

In a country that has championed its progress on human rights, civil rights and liberties, we can't afford to turn our backs on history and create a new era of bigotry and discrimination.

Partha Banerjee is executive director of the New Jersey Immigration Policy Network and a participant of the Anti-Poverty Network of New Jersey.

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3.Lake Norman Living (CO): Losing Ground on Immigration Issue (Opinion)
By JOHN HOOD
Friday June 10, 2005

OCEAN ISLE BEACH - When a bill offer in-state tuition to illegal immigrants died a couple of weeks ago in the North Carolina General Assembly, advocates vowed to continue the fight another day. Being mostly leftist in political ideology, they seem to have inherited the old notion, originated by German philosophers and expropriated by Marx, that historical forces are inexorably advancing their cause. Legislative setbacks are only potholes on the road to utopia, according to their view, so eventually illegal immigrants will win amnesty, voting rights, and government benefits.

I think they are fooling themselves. Big time.

During my travels in Southeastern North Carolina this week - notice how I avoid the distasteful term "vacation" - I've seen and read plenty of evidence to suggest that public sentiment is turning against, not
towards, the cause of liberalizing immigration laws. In line at a local
bank, I saw several uncomprehending Hispanic workers attempt to cash
their paychecks, be turned away by tellers explaining the bank's
check-cashing policies, and then become the subject of angry
denunciations by staff and patrons.
I saw a group of teenagers laughing at a mostly Hispanic road crew. I
overheard a racial slur at a local restaurant. I read furious letters to
the editor in local newspapers blaming crime, welfare, school
overcrowding, tax increases, and other social ills on illegal aliens. I
heard callers to local talk shows fulminate about lax drivers-license
laws, bilingual education, and affirmative action.

Don't worry: I'm not just being fooled by unrepresentative anecdotes. I
also read some recent polling as well, both in North Carolina and
nationwide, and the sentiment is strongly against illegal immigration -
increasingly so. But wait, say immigration activists: a recent Elon
University Poll found that supporters outnumbered opponents of the bill
to let young illegals attend the University of North Carolina mostly on
the taxpayers' dime. Doesn't that show that the opponents were the ones out of step?

Not at all. I'm a big fan of the Elon Poll, but in this case the
question was worded too artfully to get a useful answer. It specified
that in order to quality for the subsidy, students would have to have
lived in North Carolina for four years and applied for legal status. OK,
but what if a respondent didn't believe that these rules would really be
enforced? And what if he heard "legal status" and thought students would get in-tuition only after becoming legalized? Based on other polling, it is far more likely that opposition was the popular view - a prospect that most state legislators undoubtedly understood and took to heart.

I make these observations not with glee but with dismay. I am an
immigration advocate, not an opponent. I think that many more people
should be able to come legally to the United States to work, go to
school, or otherwise pursue the American Dream, which is really a
universal aspiration for freedom and economic opportunity. But this
cause is losing ground, in part precisely because of foolish statements
and counterproductive policies pushed by self-appointed advocates for
immigrants.

To the extent that North Carolinians believe immigration will cost them,
they will oppose it. If immigration activists continue to demand more
public services, delivered at great expense in multiple languages, while
seeming to spurn old-style efforts at assimilation and Americanization
in favor of multicultural mumbo-jumbo, they will harm the very cause
they hope to advance.

Immigration foes deserve condemnation, too. Their rhetoric is often
thoughtless, and occasionally drips of bigotry. Their economic analysis
is embarrassingly silly. And their political priorities are
out-of-whack. By arguing that "of course" public assistance should be
limited to the native-born, they unintentionally perpetuate the
pernicious notion that Americans of any nativity have a "right" to live
at someone else's expense.

It would be better to argue that immigration is fine as long as it is
legal and results in assimilation, that Americans have a right to insist
that their borders be secured against criminals or terrorists, and that
all would-be immigrants should be checked for criminal records,
diseases, and work prospects to reduce the odds that they will become a burden rather than a boon.

It's not too late for a sensible approach to the issue to gain ground.
But if immigration activists continue to fight for government giveaways,
and against the enforcement of existing immigration laws on issues such as drivers' licenses, then good sense will become impossible for
politicians to espouse and a major political backlash will ensue.

The results won't be pretty - most especially not for immigrants, legal
or illegal.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation, publisher of Carolina Journal.com, and host of the statewide program "Carolina Journal Radio."