NJ To Allow In-State College Tuition For Undocumented Immigrants

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie signed into law on Friday a bill which would extend the right to in-state college tuition to undocumented immigrants who attended high school in the state for at least three years. The New York Times notes that with the passage of the Tuition Equality Act, the state becomes one of 17 across the United States which makes certain undocumented students eligible for the same cheaper in-state tuition rates as those with legal status, though unlike in California, New Mexico and Texas, the new law does not permit them to receive state financial aid.

That detail comes after the Democratic lawmakers in the state Senate and Assembly, who had pushed to include eligibility for state financial aid, and the Republican governor, who opposed the idea, brokered a compromise: Democrats would drop the financial aid provision and Christie would drop his demand for a “cutoff date” for eligibility by which only those immigrants who arrived in the state by 2012 could receive the benefit. Battles between the two sides erupted after Christie, who had come out in support of tuition equality for undocumented students just before the gubernatorial elections, said he would veto the Democrat-written bill unless a series of changes were made to it. Democrats refused, accusing the governor of having pandered to shore up the Latino vote.

About 88,000 of New Jersey’s 909,000 noncitizens – a group which includes noncitizens with legal status of various sorts along with undocumented immigrants – are between 18 and 24, according to census data. The Associated Press notes that a 2011 Pew Hispanic Center report found that about 6 percent of the state’s population, or 550,000, are in the United States illegally. At Rutgers, the largest public university in the state, in-state tuition was $10,718 in 2013-2014, compared to $24,742 for out-of-state students.