WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court rejected on Monday a challenge to the education policies in California and 12 other states that permit students who are illegal immigrants to obtain reduced, in-state tuition at its colleges and universities.
To be eligible, the students must attend and graduate from high school in the state.
The justices turned down an appeal from lawyers for a conservative immigration-law group who contended “preferential treatment” for illegal immigrants violated federal immigration law. The group had cited a little-known provision in a 1986 law that barred states from giving “any postsecondary benefit” to an “alien who is not lawfully present in the United States . . . on the basis of residence within a state.”
But last year, in the first ruling of its kind, the California Supreme Court said the state’s policy did not conflict with federal law because the tuition benefit turned on a student’s high school graduation, not his or her residency. The state legislature adopted this policy in 2001.
Overall, the state said about 41,000 students last year took advantage of this special tuition rule, but the vast majority of those were students at community colleges. In 2009, the 10-campus University of California system said 2,019 students paid in-state tuition under the terms of the state law. Of these, about 600 were believed to be illegal immigrants.
The other states with similar laws are Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin.
Another 12 states have explicitly refused to grant in-state tuition to illegal immigrants. For its part, the federal government — through the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations — has taken no steps to enforce the federal provision.
Citing this confusion over the meaning of federal law, the Washington-based Immigration Reform Law Institute had appealed the California case to the Supreme Court.
