Trump's attack on in-state tuition for Dreamers is bad law — and worse policy
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Among the targets of the administration's hostility, none elicits more sympathy from the public than the so‑called Dreamers — young people brought here unlawfully as children, who have grown up as Americans in everything but paperwork. (According to Gallup,
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In lawsuits filed this spring against Texas, Minnesota, and Kentucky, the Justice Department maintains that offering in‑state tuition to students without legal immigration status — even if they were brought here as small children and essentially grew up American — violates federal law. In reality, it is the administration's assault that distorts federal law. It is also a brazen power grab that tramples states' rights, to say nothing of basic decency.
Beginning in 2001, Democratic and Republican legislatures decided that if young people grow up in a state, are educated in its schools, and want to pursue higher education within its borders, it makes no sense to penalize them financially merely because of their immigration status. If there are good reasons to give a break on tuition to local students who want to go to a local college, what difference does it make whether they have a passport, a green card, or neither?
Yet on April 28, President Trump
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But that isn't true. Federal law does
not
say that undocumented immigrants must be excluded from any in-state tuition benefit. It
Accordingly, the states that offer reduced tuition to undocumented immigrants condition the offer on criteria other than residency.
States that offer in‑state tuition to undocumented students are acting not just humanely but rationally. Such policies reflect the common-sense principle that justifies giving a tuition break to any local student: It is in every state's interest to help its homegrown young people be as successful and well educated as possible.
Lower tuition makes higher education more affordable, which in turn boosts the number of local families that can send their kids to college, which in turn expands the state's population of educated adults. A more educated population strengthens the state's economy, since college graduates are more likely to be employed and to earn higher incomes. For states like Massachusetts, which suffers from high outmigration, a particularly strong argument for the in-state tuition break is that graduates of public institutions are more likely to
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None of these arguments has any logical connection to immigration or citizenship. They apply with equal force to those born abroad and to those born locally. And it is irrelevant whether those born abroad were brought to America by parents who had immigration visas or by parents who didn't.
Dreamers aren't freeloaders. Like their families, they pay taxes — property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, and even the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare benefits, for which they are ineligible. (In 2022, according to the latest estimate from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants
Aside from the Trumpian hard core, most Americans sympathize with the plight of undocumented immigrants who grew up in this country and have known no other home. That explains why (as Gallup reports) 85 percent of them would like Congress to make it possible for them to acquire citizenship. It also explains why in-state tuition for Dreamers has bipartisan support: The states that have enacted such policies include Oklahoma, Kentucky, California, and New York.
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The Trump administration's lawsuits deserve to be dismissed on their legal merits, but they also deserve to be reviled as one more example of MAGA malevolence, which is grounded in nothing except a desire to hurt immigrants —
Few Americans have any desire to punish young people who have done nothing wrong. The cruelty at the heart of Trump's immigration policy may thrill his base, but it repels a far larger America unwilling to abandon its values.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at
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The US certainly has more cards, but Canada isn't playing with an empty hand. The country has felt emboldened to strengthen trade relations with other partners, to revive its own manufacturing base, and to separate itself economically, culturally, and otherwise from the US. Kelly, from CFIB, compares Canada's retaliatory tariffs to economic chemotherapy — "you take the poison in order to try to fight the larger battle" — and adds that it says something that the country is so willing to dig in. "There is fairly significant resolve among Canadian businesses to press back," he says. To be sure, Trump's trade war is doing real damage to Canada — and, it should be said, to the US. Continuing the tit-for-tat won't mean mutually assured destruction for the neighboring countries, but it is one that will harm both, even if to different degrees. Canada's 40 million population can't replace the US's 340 million in terms of a consumer market. It will continue to depend on the US and, increasingly, others for commerce and trade. And the idea of a complete decoupling is quite unfathomable, unless Americans want to spend a ton more on energy and the entire North American auto sector is overhauled. At the moment, Canadians are fired up and holding their own. They don't appear to be poised to back down anytime soon — or to forget what's happening now. "Our elites need to wake up to the full nightmare of what Donald Trump's administration means in terms of trade," Karaguesian says. Much of the Canadian population already has — and years down the line, it could very well be to their country's benefit.
