Aram Ghoogasian: Judicial Watch lawsuit lacks legal, moral basis

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” – unless they don’t have the proper paperwork and want to go to college.

Undocumented students don’t need extra help to make their lives more difficult, but a conservative watchdog group is trying to make that happen.

Judicial Watch recently filed a lawsuit against the University of California Board of Regents to stop the UC from granting in-state tuition and financial aid to undocumented students, claiming that doing so is a violation of federal law.

The suit rests on shaky legal ground, attempting to cancel out a 2010 decision by the California Supreme Court that said the UC is within its legal right to give in-state tuition to undocumented students. But it’s not just the legal reasoning that makes this new case troublesome – it could have negative effects on California taxpayers that far outweigh the costs of supporting undocumented youth through college.

First, the legal arguments: According to experts in immigration law, the lawsuit simply does not hold ground. Hiroshi Motomura, a professor at the UCLA School of Law who specializes in immigration law, said that the lawsuit is ultimately “based on wishful thinking, not a sound legal argument.”

In the previous case, Martinez et al v. Regents of the UC, the plaintiffs claimed Assembly Bill 540, which made undocumented students eligible for in-state tuition, violates the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which requires states to provide in-state tuition benefits to all U.S. citizens if such benefits are given to people who entered the country illegally.

The California Supreme Court’s decision favored the UC, ruling that AB 540 can provide in-state tuition to undocumented students as well as nonresident citizens, since it grants in-state tuition to anyone who attended a California high school for three or more years regardless of where they were born. Additionally, AB 131, which passed in 2011, makes undocumented students eligible to receive financial aid.

This new lawsuit seems like it’s headed to the same destination as its predecessor.

It argues that the Martinez case doesn’t apply to the UC system because the UC is not governed directly by statute, Motomura said. But AB 540, AB 130 and AB 131 all take precedence over the 1996 federal law, he added.

But even with a weak legal argument, Judicial Watch’s intent is troubling. Without access to higher education, these students, most of whom already deal with major economic hardship, are condemned to lower-paying jobs or unemployment in a weak job market. This makes it difficult for them to pay for their future children’s education, increasing the number of uneducated youth and kick-starting a cycle of poverty and unemployment that transcends generations.

Statistics show that the fewer people in schools, the faster our crime rates and prison populations increase, both of which will cost taxpayers money in a state that already spends six times as much on prison inmates as it does on college students.

Abandoning undocumented students instead of providing them with an education would only leave this specific population with increased chances of incarceration, a problem many undocumented individuals already face. This is not to say, of course, that undocumented individuals without an education are bound to run into trouble with the law. But it is to say that the poor, especially poor people of color, are at a higher risk of finding themselves in prisons than the rest of the population.

Forcing students who struggle financially to pay egregiously high out-of-state tuition prices while denying them financial aid all but ensures their exclusion from UC schools. Coupled with the fact that only 5 to 10 percent of undocumented high school graduates are eligible to attend college, this model is discriminatory no matter how you look at it.

Judicial Watch has managed to make itself look desperate by pursuing a result that seems unachievable, given the court’s most recent ruling on the matter. The case against undocumented students is reminiscent of the other tired arguments about immigration and doesn’t add any new or useful information to the conversation.

If the United States is to live up to its “land of opportunity” moniker, tuition equality is essential. Raising tuition rates for undocumented students won’t solve the immigration crisis, but it will leave more youth on the streets in poor living conditions on a fast track to a prison cell and poverty, a reality that California can’t afford now, or ever.