In June 2012, when President Obama issued the executive order known as DACA—“deferred action on childhood arrivals”—he had a good moral case but a bad legal one. The order allowed illegal immigrants who had entered the country as minors—people who hadn’t come to America of their own will—to apply for a work permit and a renewable two-year exemption from deportation. Public opinion is broadly sympathetic to the plight of these youngsters, and rightly so: Many of them have little or no memory of their “home” countries. “Put yourself in their shoes,” the president said when he announced DACA. “Imagine you’ve done everything right your entire life—studied hard, worked hard, maybe even graduated at the top of your class—only to suddenly face the threat of deportation to a country that you know nothing about.”
The problem, as many Republicans pointed out then and since, is that Obama had no authority to write immigration law—as indeed he implicitly admitted by issuing the executive order only after he couldn’t get Congress to pass the DREAM Act. (The children of illegals, or “Dreamers,” get their sobriquet from the failed Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act.) President Trump has now ordered a six-month phase-out of DACA, and the 800,000 or so beneficiaries of the program—people who’ve volunteered their names and addresses to the federal government—are again in limbo.
Congress’s failure to resolve or even address the problem of illegal residents has prompted states to impose their own restrictions. These laws are defensible from a certain viewpoint: They’re intended to prevent scarce public resources from being spent on people who, though they pay sales taxes and otherwise abide by the law, don’t pay income or property taxes and are, in fact, in violation of the law. But states are ill-equipped to impose their own immigration laws—Americans aren’t required to show papers when traveling from state to state—and when states and municipalities take up this burden, the consequences are messy.
Consider the case of Javier, a longtime resident of South Carolina.
Javier (not his real name) came to America from Venezuela in 1989. He was 7 months old and has never returned. He attended public schools and after high school worked a series of jobs that didn’t require a Social Security number or a driver’s license. He repaired cars and worked in a hamburger joint and then a restaurant owned by a friend of a friend. In 2012, DACA allowed him to get a job with a nonprofit organization, where he has applied himself and been promoted to a managerial position.
Talking with Javier, you assume he’s an average young American: He has no accent and shows no sign of unfamiliarity with American life. He also speaks in complete, literate sentences, so I ask if he ever attended college. “I got into USC,” he says. (USC is what South Carolinians call the state’s flagship university in Columbia.) “I started on a degree in computer engineering. But I had to withdraw.”
He doesn’t want to tell me the details of his withdrawal, but I press. “So this was before DACA, in 2007,” Javier says, “before I was legally allowed to enroll.” All his undocumented friends told him “just to check the box that says you’re a U.S. citizen because the university wouldn’t do anything to verify it.”
Everything went well. He couldn’t get a student ID or participate in anything that required an ID, but he didn’t mind “since I was basically there to learn, not socialize.” That lasted a year and a half. “But then in January of 2009 some law had passed—I don’t remember what it was—and all of a sudden everybody had to provide documents that proved their citizenship. I couldn’t, so I had to withdraw.”
Starting in 2012, thanks to DACA, Javier could return to the university legally, student ID and all. There was just one problem: South Carolina state schools won’t grant DACA students in-state tuition. For Javier to attend USC he would have to pay $32,200 in out-of-state tuition costs, as against $14,700 for in-staters. (The difference is similar at other state schools. Clemson, for instance, charges in-state students $12,200 per year; out-of-staters pay $33,300.) That’s well out of reach for someone like Javier who’s ineligible for state-administered scholarships. “I’d like to go back,” he says, “but it just doesn’t make economic sense to go so far into debt.” Around 20 states do offer people in his position an opportunity to attend a public university at in-state tuition costs, but moving to one of those states wouldn’t do him any good—the criteria for attaining in-state status are strict.
All this comes at a time when USC, like other public universities in the South, has been sharply criticized for granting tuition abatements to large numbers of out-of-state students. At USC, 42 percent of the students come from out of state, and this year the school will give away nearly a hundred-million dollars in abatements. In general, the reason is budgetary: Adding students from the academically more impressive Northeast and Midwest is an easy way to add students—and thus money—without lowering test scores.
Although Javier has lived in South Carolina for nearly his whole life and contributed to the state’s revenue base while taking no welfare, he is in effect denied admittance to a state university system that welcomes kids from New Jersey and Pennsylvania as if they were home-grown.
Such tales are familiar to Donald Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post, who started a scholarship fund for the children of illegals. “The situation of the Dreamers in many states is almost like that of black students in 1954,” Graham explains. “John Lewis grew up in Troy, Alabama, but could not even apply to Troy State. A Dreamer can be the valedictorian of a high school class, but be banned from admission to a state college.”
Which brings me back to the law that forced Javier to leave college in 2009. He doesn’t remember what the law was, but I do. House Bill 4400 passed into state law in June 2008. I worked for the governor who signed it. The bill’s chief aim was to require employers to verify their workers’ immigration status and so stop some industries from relying on cheap labor. But tucked away in the details was a provision banning “undocumented aliens” from enrolling in state universities.
I remember because I wrote the governor’s talking points. “This puts South Carolina in the forefront of where other states are on immigration reform,” he said at the signing ceremony. Which, unfortunately, is still true.
Barton Swaim is the opinion editor of The Weekly Standard.
