On Tuesday, the Kansas House voted 72-50 to approve the repeal a 2004 law that allows undocumented students to be recognized as state residents and pay in-state tuition at Kansas state and community colleges. The bill has since moved to the Senate and groups like the Kansas/Missouri Dream Alliance are organizing to stop it from moving any further. Yet I find myself coming back to Kansas Rep. Connie O'Brien's remarks on the topic from several weeks ago.
From a Valentine's Day article in the Topeka Captial-Journal:
[O'Brien] spoke during the meeting of her son's difficulty paying for classes in 2010 at Kansas City (Kan.) Community College and a feeling of despair at waiting in line at the college with a female student who appeared to them to have been born outside the United States.
“My son, who's a Kansas resident, born here, raised here, didn't qualify for any financial aid,” according to a recording of her statement to the committee. “Yet this girl was going to get financial aid.”
"My son was kinda upset about it because he works and pays for his own schooling and his books and everything and he didn't think that was fair. We didn't ask the girl what nationality she was, we didn't think that was proper. But we could tell by looking at her that she was not originally from this country," she says on the recording.
During the meeting, Rep. Sean Gatewood, D-Topeka, asked O'Brien to clarify her remark.
"Can you expand on how you could tell that they were illegal?" Gatewood asked.
"Well, she wasn't black," O'Brien said. "She wasn't Asian. And she had the olive complexion."
How dare the girl stand around in line with her dark skin? And, also, what finely tuned perceptive powers O'Brien has. Even Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer doesn't know what, exactly, undocumented immigrants look like, and she's staked her political career on cracking down on them. O'Brien was chastised by Kansas Democrats, who accused her of "blatant racism," but she defended herself thusly: "I never said that [student] was a Mexican-American," adding, "My son-in-law is from Afghanistan, and he's olive complexion."
On Wednesday Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback said he's not too excited about the idea of repealing the law. His support comes as a bit of a surprise -- as senator he supported a filibuster of the federal DREAM Act in December which almost certainly would have benefited a subset of these same students. If lawmakers repeal the in-state tuition law, Kansas will become the second state after Oklahoma, which did the same in 2008. So far, 11 states have passed in-state tuition laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In the past academic year, undocumented students at Kansas State University's Manhattan campus were able to pay $222.40 per credit hour as in-state residents, as opposed to $590 per credit hour. It's a significant price difference, and all the more so for undocumented youth because they're barred from accessing federal financial aid, including grants and loans. In Kansas, 413 students benefited from the law last year alone.
Folks in favor of a repeal argue that allowing undocumented students to be recognized as residents of their home states costs the state $1 million in lost revenue. People who want to protect the law say that its repeal wouldn't actually translate to more income -- college costs for undocumented youth are prohibitively expensive. They're more likely to just drop out.
The economic rationale is just another iteration of the "we're-under-siege" argument. They're commonly dispensed by folks pushing anti-immigrant policies, and you can certainly hear undertones of both in O'Brien's waiting line panic. But you can also hear her say out loud what others are much more careful not to: Brown-skinned folks scare her. Excuse me, olive-skinned.
