Emotional pleas, but no vote on in-state tuition bill for immigrants
\n 4:20 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2015 |
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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.<\/p>\n
Senate Bill 44, sponsored by Sen. Nan Orrock, D-Atlanta, applies to immigrants accepted into the Obama administration\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Currently, DACA recipients must pay more expensive out-of-state tuition rates to attend schools in Georgia\u2019s University System. The high costs have prevented many of them from attending colleges to which they were accepted, the students said.<\/p>\n
Emotional pleas, but no vote on in-state tuition bill for immigrants photo
\nDec. 5, 2013 – Decatur – Lucino Gopar (left) and members of the Georgia Undocumented Youth Alliance (GUYA) hold a press conference outside the Dekalb County Superior Court prior to the first court hearing for the In-state Tuition lawsuit against the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. BOB ANDRES \/ BANDRES@AJC.COM
\n\u201cThere is really no difference between us and students here who are citizens because both of us didn\u2019t have a say in the country we were born in,\u201d Orlando Rodriquez, 18, testified Tuesday. Rodriquez, a graduate of Sprayberry High School in Cobb County, was accepted into Georgia Gwinnett College, but won\u2019t be attending because he can\u2019t afford the out-of-state tuition, he said.<\/p>\n
In June, a Fulton County Superior Court judge dismissed a lawsuit seeking to reverse the University System\u2019s policy. The case is being appealed to the Georgia Court of Appeals.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody\u2019s telling them they can\u2019t go to school,\u201d said D.A. King, a well-known illegal immigration activist, and one of the few opponents of the bill to testify Tuesday. \u201cWhat (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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is not, and should not be regarded as some kind of mean-spirited prejudice or persecution,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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. Emotional pleas, but no vote on in-state tuition bill for immigrants 4:20 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2015 | \ufeff 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4662"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4662\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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