BY CAROLYN SZCZEPANSKI
It has been four years since Kansas lawmakers granted in-state tuition rates at public universities 
for undocumented students who had spent at least three years at a Kansas high school. Since that bill passed, University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Professor and Kansas Republican Party Chairman Kris Kobach has been fighting to get the law overturned in the courts, arguing the children of illegal immigrants shouldn’t get a leg up on kids from across state lines.
Federal judges at both the district and appeals level have dismissed Kobach’s case, so he petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court. Last week, the highest court in the land weighed in.
The court's reply: it won’t hear the case.
Kobach wasn’t particularly surprised. He admits it was a long shot. The U.S. Supreme Court typically receives 80,000 petitions a year, but only takes about 80 of them. “Your garden-variety case faces 99-to-1 odds against getting Supreme Court review,” Kobach says.
But that doesn’t mean he’s conceding the fight. By declining the case, the Supreme Court didn’t close the door to a future hearing, the law professor says. None of the three strikes against the case hit on the real issue, he adds. “No court has addressed the merit of the case — whether or not Kansas’ provision violates federal law and the Equal Protection Clause,” he says. Instead, they’ve ruled that the students Kobach represents — all from other states — don’t have legal standing to sue.
So what’s an anti-illegal-immigration activist to do? Well, find a different set of pissed-off students. Kobach says he continues to get calls from college kids who want to join the case. "So there is a large pool of potential plaintiffs," he says.
At this point, Kobach and his counterparts at the Immigration Reform Law Institute in Washington, D.C., are considering their next move — either waging the case on a state level or taking another crack at the federal courts with a different set of clients.
“No decision has been made at this point,” Kobach says.
Honestly, if they're willing to pay for it themselves, why not let immigrants go to public college? As long as they don't take public funds from legal hispanic citizens, let them pay for it. At the end of their college studies, they're still illegal immigrants who won't be able to find a job in the US. In a way, this fosters the American "Pull Yourself Up by Your Bootstrap" policy. Who knows, with a solid education in tow, they might be inclined to move back to Mexico and make a difference. I mean given the choice to live in Kansas or Mexico, what would you choose?
In a way, it's like having the "system" that conservatives say that illegals are draining work for Americans. For all of the marginal amounts of social security and medicaid that illegals draw, Americans can recapture that back tenfold by enrolling illegal immigrants into our wildly overpriced (and ever increaseing) higher education system. I say bring illegals to Kansas colleges, take their $30,000 and send them on their way. Let illegal immigrants buy $300 books only to have to keep buying the newer version every year.
BTW, the whole illegal immigrant student argument is pretty moot considering college is essentially free in Mexico.
Posted at: July 1, 2008 2:11 PM