Capitol again punishes students

About 20 states offer undocumented students in-state tuition at state colleges and universities.

That hasn’t stopped opponents of the policy in Tennessee from justifying their mean-spirited position with the dubious claim that it would encourage immigrants to come to the state illegally.

“We will become a magnet in the Southeast if we pass this piece of legislation,” Rep. Dawn White, R-Murfreesboro, argued after voting against a measure sponsored in the House by Rep. Mark White, R-Memphis, that would have offered in-state tuition to undocumented students who reside in Tennessee.

The bill abruptly came to a halt this week in the House Education Administration & Planning Committee with a vote of six for and seven against.

Also among the no votes: Rep. Eddie Smith, R-Knoxville, who had co-sponsored similar legislation in the past.

“After two years of discussion, an election in which I knocked on roughly 31,000 doors in my district, and the election of President Donald Trump I decided to vote against HB0863,” Smith said. “Immigration policy was a major platform of both parties in 2016 and I think we should give the new administration and Congress (time) to fix our broken immigration system before we act as a state on issues related to immigration.”

So Tennessee will turn its back on undocumented college students, the vast majority of whom had little or nothing to say about their families’ decisions to immigrate to the United States, until Congress finally gets around to addressing an issue that it has been playing kick-thecan on for decades.

The proposal, sponsored in the Senate by Chattanooga Republican Todd Gardenhire, would have extended a modest reward to hard-working students who have demonstrated the capacity and the desire to make positive economic and cultural contributions to the state, putting them on an almost equal footing with their properly documented peers.

It would have eliminated the burden of out-of-state rates, which can be two or three times higher than in-state tuition, for a class of students who because of their immigration status are not eligible for federal or state financial aid.

It would have prevented the squandering of state education funds that have financed the education of these students through their high school years.

It would have granted visibility to a group of students whom too many lawmakers cannot seem to see.

The bill has the support of Gov. Bill Haslam, college leaders and fair-minded Tennesseans across the state. It has lingered for five years in the legislature, failing by a single House vote in 2015.

Yet it seems opponents never seem to run out of excuses to justify their hardhearted position.

To his credit, White vowed after the committee vote, as students wept in the capital hallways, to bring the matter up again next year.

“I’ll bring it up as long as it takes to help these children,” he said.

With encouragement from their constituents, perhaps a few more lawmakers eventually will see it that way.