State colleges can ban illegals, McDaniel says
Posted on Friday, September 12, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/237097/
A legislator said Thursday that he hopes higher education officials will take it upon themselves to ban illegal aliens as students even though the attorney general says the law does not require them to.
Attorney General Dustin Mc-Daniel issued an opinion late Wednesday. He answered questions posed by Rep. Rick Green of Van Buren. The opinion said Arkansas colleges and universities have no duty to ban illegal aliens as students.
“The U. S. Department of Homeland Security has expressed the view that it is left for states to decide whether or not to enroll out-of-status or undocumented individuals in public institutions of higher education,” McDaniel wrote. “Undocumented individuals may enroll in Arkansas’s public colleges and universities and that such schools are not obliged to verify citizenship as a condition of enrollment.”
But the opinion said nothing prohibits colleges and universities from setting up their own regulations barring illegal aliens.
“Each board of trustees of each educational institution of higher learning supported, in whole or in part, by the state of Arkansas, shall have the right to adopt rules and regulations for the admission and enrollment of students in the respective institutions of higher learning under the control of such board of trustees, expressly including the right to refuse admission and enrollment to any person who comes to the state of Arkansas solely for the purpose of securing admission, enrollment, and educational advantages at the expense of the state of Arkansas,” the opinion said.
The opinion was prepared for McDaniel by assistant attorney general Elisabeth Walker. Attorney general opinions are not binding but generally are given weight by government officials.
Green, a Republican who has been a leader in efforts to bar illegal aliens from state services, said he couldn’t remember why he asked for the opinion.
“I think I was just curious, seeing what we could and what we couldn’t do as a state,” he said. “I asked for it a few months ago and had forgotten about it. It’s not high on my list.”
He said illegal aliens shouldn’t attend public colleges and universities in Arkansas but he wasn’t sure whether he would support possible efforts in the 2009 General Assembly to ban them as students.
“I don’t think we need a law for everything,” Green said. “What I would like the higher education institutions to do, what the right thing is to do, is to consider the opinion of the people of Arkansas, which is not to provide benefits to illegals.”
As a basis of his opinion, Mc-Daniel cited a July 9 letter from Jim Pendergraph, executive director of Homeland Security’s office of state and local coordination, to Thomas J. Ziko at the North Carolina Department of Justice. The letter said “admission to public post-secondary educational institutions is not one of the benefits regulated by Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.
Gov. Mike Beebe, as attorney general in 2005, cited this federal law as a reason that Gov. Mike Huckabee’s plan to allow illegal aliens to pay in-state tuition rates and to obtain state-funded college scholarships was likely illegal. He said the law bars illegal aliens from receiving any benefit not allowed citizens.
Earlier this year Beebe directed the Department of Higher Education to check Social Security numbers of students to make sure no illegal aliens were receiving in-state tuition rates, which are lower than rates charged outof-state students.
A computer run in July found that about 1 percent of students had problems with their Social Security numbers, but department officials expected that far fewer were illegal aliens. They said some of the problems might have resulted from data entry errors or from students not giving their Social Security numbers or from international students with visas.
Beebe spokesman Matt De-Cample said the governor was fine with the opinion because the “ primary concern we’ve had,” making sure illegal aliens don’t get in-state tuition, “is not discussed in that opinion.”
He said the governor wouldn’t support an “all-out ban” on illegal aliens because that would force college administrators to “establish the citizenship of every person who applies” and that would take away resources from educating students. He said the federal government should deal with the matter.
Higher Education Department spokesman Dale Ellis said the department is working on compiling a report on how many students at Arkansas colleges with invalid Social Security numbers were determined to possibly be illegal aliens.
He said students aren’t required to give colleges their Social Security numbers, according to a 1975 federal privacy act.
Ellis said the Social Security number check was only to determine if illegal aliens were receiving in-state tuition. He said he didn’t know if any were determined to have received that benefit.
He said the department doesn’t know what colleges are doing, if anything, after finding suspected illegal aliens listed as students.