BY CAROLYN SZCZEPANSKI
It has been four years since Kansas lawmakers granted in-state tuition rates at public universities
for undocumented students who had spent at least three years at a Kansas high school. Since that bill passed, University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Professor and Kansas Republican Party Chairman Kris Kobach has been fighting to get the law overturned in the courts, arguing the children of illegal immigrants shouldn’t get a leg up on kids from across state lines.Federal judges at both the district and appeals level have dismissed Kobach’s case, so he petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court. Last week, the highest court in the land weighed in.
The court's reply: it won’t hear the case.
Kobach wasn’t particularly surprised. He admits it was a long shot. The U.S. Supreme Court typically receives 80,000 petitions a year, but only takes about 80 of them. “Your garden-variety case faces 99-to-1 odds against getting Supreme Court review,” Kobach says.
But that doesn’t mean he’s conceding the fight. By declining the case, the Supreme Court didn’t close the door to a future hearing, the law professor says. None of the three strikes against the case hit on the real issue, he adds. “No court has addressed the merit of the case — whether or not Kansas’ provision violates federal law and the Equal Protection Clause,” he says. Instead, they’ve ruled that the students Kobach represents — all from other states — don’t have legal standing to sue.
So what’s an anti-illegal-immigration activist to do? Well, find a different set of pissed-off students. Kobach says he continues to get calls from college kids who want to join the case. "So there is a large pool of potential plaintiffs," he says.
At this point, Kobach and his counterparts at the Immigration Reform Law Institute in Washington, D.C., are considering their next move — either waging the case on a state level or taking another crack at the federal courts with a different set of clients.
“No decision has been made at this point,” Kobach says.
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jeez, i can't decide whether to sign up with the Red or the Infidel. inspiring names, guys. At least that fool trevor's not in here!
and is kobach right on 99 to 1 odds when as he puts it there's thousands and thousands of cases? sounds like 99999 to 1 instead, but me and math have a don't ask don't tell thing.
What many don't understand is that there are a finite number of slots available in the colleges. For every illegal alien enrolled, another slot has been taken away from a local US citizen. You might not think that's very important until it's your kid that's turned away.
Why would taxpayers have to ante up anything? The article isn't about subsidizing illegals, it's about allowing them to pay in state tuition. This isn't the first time immigrants have gotten around the system. Lots of Indians (Asian) get around in-state tuition all the time by claiming they live with a roommate before they even get to the country. Maybe you should fix the already broken system.
We need to keep up this fight.
Thanks for all the good work, Kris.
Get involved and make sure your rep. signs THE SAVE ACT discharge petition. It has 190 now and we need 218.
Red you are asking that the state taxpayers to ante up $10,000 to $15,000 per year for illegals to get the in-state tuition. Sounds like theft to me. Thank god I live in a state that does not waste money on subsidizing illegals.
Federal law prohibits states from granting illegal alien residents discount in-state tuition if an American citizen, whatever his state of residence, is denied such in-state rate.
Now, several state legislatures learned how to circumvent this law by pretending that in-state tuition for illegal alien residents is based on their attending high school in that state for some number of years. It's like denying service in a restaurant to anyone who attended a HBCU (Historically Black College or University) and claiming that it's not racism because the customer's race was not a factor while denying of service.
What's really odd here is that the same bleeding-heart do-goodders who cry "the illegals deserve college education, too" have cold heart for all those poor American citizens who have to pay full tuition just because they were forced by circumstances to move to another state. According to these bleeding-heart do-gooders, these Americans do not deserve collegae education.
If this is not a hypocrisy then nothing is.
Honestly, if they're willing to pay for it themselves, why not let immigrants go to public college? As long as they don't take public funds from legal hispanic citizens, let them pay for it. At the end of their college studies, they're still illegal immigrants who won't be able to find a job in the US. In a way, this fosters the American "Pull Yourself Up by Your Bootstrap" policy. Who knows, with a solid education in tow, they might be inclined to move back to Mexico and make a difference. I mean given the choice to live in Kansas or Mexico, what would you choose?
In a way, it's like having the "system" that conservatives say that illegals are draining work for Americans. For all of the marginal amounts of social security and medicaid that illegals draw, Americans can recapture that back tenfold by enrolling illegal immigrants into our wildly overpriced (and ever increaseing) higher education system. I say bring illegals to Kansas colleges, take their $30,000 and send them on their way. Let illegal immigrants buy $300 books only to have to keep buying the newer version every year.
BTW, the whole illegal immigrant student argument is pretty moot considering college is essentially free in Mexico.
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