Despite advance notice that no vote would be taken Tuesday, a full contingent of immigrant students and supporters turned out at a Senate committee, urging lawmakers to pass legislation granting in-state tuition for certain immigrants without legal status.
Senate Bill 44, sponsored by Sen. Nan Orrock, D-Atlanta, applies to immigrants accepted into the Obama administration's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. That program grants temporary deportation deferrals and work permits to immigrants who were illegally brought to the U.S. as children.
Currently, DACA recipients must pay more expensive out-of-state tuition rates to attend schools in Georgia’s University System. The high costs have prevented many of them from attending colleges to which they were accepted, the students said.
“There is really no difference between us and students here who are citizens because both of us didn’t have a say in the country we were born in,” Orlando Rodriquez, 18, testified Tuesday. Rodriquez, a graduate of Sprayberry High School in Cobb County, was accepted into Georgia Gwinnett College, but won’t be attending because he can’t afford the out-of-state tuition, he said.
In June, a Fulton County Superior Court judge dismissed a lawsuit seeking to reverse the University System’s policy. The case is being appealed to the Georgia Court of Appeals.
“Nobody’s telling them they can’t go to school,” said D.A. King, a well-known illegal immigration activist, and one of the few opponents of the bill to testify Tuesday. “What (the currently policy) is saying is, if you go to school you simply have to pay the same rate of an American kid or a legal immigrant who might live 25 feet over the Georgia border.
“That is not, and should not be regarded as some kind of mean-spirited prejudice or persecution,” he said.
Last week, Sen. Fran Millar, R-Dunwoody, chairman of the Senate Higher Education Committee, cited the pending lawsuit as a reason for not taking a committee vote. As proposed, the bill would not pass out of committee without some revisions, including requirements for those students to become eligible for the lower-cost tuition rate, Millar said.
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