EDITORIAL: Time for lawmakers to right the wrong college tuition rate for illegal immigrants

At long last, common sense, compassion and reality seem to be enveloping the state Capitol this year, and the General Assembly is poised to right a host of past wrongs.

One of those issues about to be corrected soon has to do with illegal immigrants who’ve spent much or most of their lives here and want to go to college. Democrats, who control both the House and Senate, are pushing through a measure granting in-state tuition for some illegal immigrants.

This issue isn’t about whether you think Mexicans sneaking across the border are to blame for some or all of this country’s woes. What’s behind a wrongly controversial bill to allow some illegal immigrants to get in-state college rates is about 500 people a year very much like Aurora’s Juan Carlos Baños.

Baños was a senior at Smoky Hill High School we wrote about last year. He’s an immigrant from El Salvador, a talented artist, an International Baccalaureate scholar and faces deportation if the government doesn’t allow him political asylum. And he wanted to go to college. If he attends a state college, he has to pay as much as much as five times what other Colorado residents do, because even though he’s lived here for much of his life, and even though he and his family have been an economic part of this community the whole time, even paying taxes, he doesn’t have the immigration credentials he needs to get in-state college tuition.

If he or the hundreds of other kids like him wanting to go to college had grown up in Texas or a growing number of states like Texas, this wouldn’t be an issue. There, illegal immigrants in similar situations qualify for in-state college tuition rates because lawmakers there realized everyone wins under such a system.

Not here, where too few state House Republicans were willing to cross party political lines and do the right thing. For seven years, legislation trying to rectify the situation and get kids like Baños to college died.

Such laws are popular even in conservative states because they make fiscal sense, and they make common sense.

The message to critics of this proposal needs to be clear: These are not illegal immigrants. These are children of illegal immigrants. They are the victims of their parents’ transgressions, not the perpetrators. Many of these children have lived almost their entire lives in Colorado or another state. Punishing them by withholding their only opportunity for higher education does not get them out of Colorado, nor does it punish their parents.

Many of these children grow up in local public schools, graduate and have the opportunity to make huge strides in their own lives, the lives of their families and their communities if they go to college.

Critics of the proposal say it rewards and encourages illegal immigration, and it’s unfair because legal immigrants don’t get the in-state discount. Those are the same sham arguments that kept the federal DREAM Act from passing, ignoring the practical side of educating people who will in all likelihood spend most or all of the rest of their lives in the United States.

Critics of this measure live in denial of the world around them. We cannot wish illegal immigrants out of the country any more than we can wish things were different in the Middle East.

Those voting against this bill punish innocent children whose lives could change drastically for the good by Colorado showing some real fairness, logic and compassion.