Missouri Rejects Lawmakers' Attempt To Block Immigrants From Receiving ... - ThinkProgress

CREDIT: Richard Drew, AP

City University of New York students Freddy Vicuna, left, and Monica Sibri stand near the school's Hudson Gate, in New York. Freddy participated in a hunger strike after the New York state government took out a provision allowing undocumented immigrant students to apply for financial aid,

Some good news came to undocumented immigrants in Missouri this week, when officials ruled that language in a state appropriations bill could not prevent students from receiving state scholarship funds for college.

The Missouri Department of Higher Education defended undocumented students’ access to Missouri’s A+ Scholarships even though state legislators made a small word change in a general assembly appropriations bill to stop funds from going to “unlawfully present” to “unlawful immigration status.”

This affected students who are protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, who couldn’t attend college before DACA without being charged an international tuition rate. President Barack Obama made the executive order on DACA to protect undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children, which he announced in November of last year.

It’s a pretty big win for undocumented immigrant students in Missouri because scholarships would be available for students for the first time since the scholarship program was created two decades ago, according to KansasCity.com. The department’s commissioner, David Russell, said the bill, which passed, “has no legal authority to withhold scholarship awards from otherwise eligible students.”

It read that in order to appropriate money for “expenses, grants, refunds and distributions from the Department of Higher Education … further provided that no funds shall be expended at public institutions of higher education that offer a tuition rate to any student with an unlawful immigration status in the United States that is less than the tuition rate charged to international students…”

Rep. Scott Fitzpatrick (R) made the change, and said, according to KansasCity.com, “I didn’t want their education to be subsidized by Missouri taxpayers.”

The department’s decision is significant because it comes at a time when numerous states are resisting DACA. The New York State Assembly and Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) left financial aid funding for undocumented immigrants out of the state budget this year, prompting 50 undocumented college students and allies to protest the move with a week-long hunger strike. As many as 26 states filed a joint lawsuit as a means of preventing the president from carrying out the executive order and Republican legislators have offered various amendments to eliminate DACA programs. An Institute for Immigration, Globalization, and Education survey of 909 undocumented immigrants across 34 states, released in March, showed that undocumented students were far more likely to succeed in college under the DACA program.

Although Missouri’s undocumented immigrant population isn’t comparable to states like Texas or California, there are an estimated 57,000 undocumented immigrants in Missouri, according to the nonpartisan research organization Migration Policy Institute. According to the Springfield News Leader, only about 27,000 of those immigrants can benefit from the Obama administration’s protections from deportation because so many Missouri immigrants haven’t been in the U.S. for the five years required under the program.

As the undocumented immigrant population has increased in the United States, Republicans have been outspoken on their opposition to immigration reform, despite the fact that 72 percent of Missourians said they are in favor of such legislation, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) voted against the “border surge” amendment, a bipartisan bill to spend $30 billion on border security and increasing the number of patrol agents, which passed in 2013, because it didn’t go far enough with border security. The chairman of the Missouri GOP, Ed Martin, said the Missouri Republican Party does not support amnesty.