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A group of undocumented student supporters continues its push for affordable education for students who qualify under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals memorandum.
Last Wednesday, the UNM Dream Team created an online petition addressed to UNM President Robert Frank, asking him “to use his power to provide in-state tuition to undocumented immigrant students who attended high school out-of-state” but qualify under DACA and have lived for at least one year in New Mexico, fulfilling state residency requirements. The petition was filed on Change.org.
Christopher Ramirez, a student organizer with the Dream Team, said enacting this policy would not require any legal alteration.
“No laws need to be changed at the university, state or federal level,” he said. “It’s just that the president needs to say, ‘Make it happen.’ That’s now a possibility. These students have a Social Security number, they have lawful presence and they should be eligible for in-state tuition.”
The petition has 120 signatures as of press time.
As it stands now, undocumented students from out of state who qualify for DACA still cannot get in-state tuition despite living in New Mexico for one year.
Ramirez said that because DACA provides undocumented students “lawful presence” in the country for two years, it permits them to qualify for New Mexico residency and, consequently, in-state tuition.
In addition, Ramirez said that some students are already getting this kind of benefit from the University. International graduate students who take fewer than six hours qualify for in-state tuition, he said. He said graduate assistants as well as recipients of merit-based scholarships also pay in-state rates.
“There are already groups of students who qualify for in-state tuition but shouldn’t,” he said. “So that’s why we’re saying that the president has the ability to do that.”
Some out-of-state undocumented students also already qualify for in-state tuition, Ramirez said. He said that by enacting the rule they’re pushing for in their petition, the University would have more concrete and regular tuition policies.
“If you go to the registrar, you can plead your case,” he said.
“We had one of our students who shared his story, and the registrar said, ‘You should have told me. I could have done something for you’ … They’re already doing that for case-by-case operations, and we want to have a very transparent process, so … we should just do it.”
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Frank said that although he supports providing in-state tuition to DACA qualified students in general, he is “not quite as sympathetic” about those from out of state. He said some students who are U.S. citizens from out of state do not automatically qualify for in-state tuition.
Nonetheless, he said his office has already contacted UNM Enrollment Management Division about the petition “to better understand what they’re saying to us and to better understand how we’re handling it.” He said they expect to reach a conclusion in a few weeks.
“They’re saying that I have the authority to do something,” he said. “That’s what I need to understand … We’re not about putting hurdles in front of everybody. We just need to analyze all this information.”
Frank said this is a very important matter that the University would address carefully.
“My heart is certainly with this issue,” he said. “We want to be consistent as a University. We want to make sure that we follow the law. We want to make sure that we are as successful as we can. We’re going to be fully responsive to the requests that have been made to us as we always are.”
Ramirez said providing in-state tuition to out-of-state undocumented students would be beneficial for UNM in the long run.
“We really see that these students have strong connections to New Mexico,” he said. “When they get their degree, these are the students who are going to stay and develop our communities, develop the economy of New Mexico and contribute back.”
