Behold US' Most Ridiculous Anti-Immigration Policy

Florida's tuition rule is immoral, unconstitutional: Linda Greenhouse
By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 1, 2011 1:45 PM CST
Behold US' Most Ridiculous Anti-Immigration Policy
Florida Governor Rick Scott is seen in this file photo.   (Getty Images)

Move over Arizona and Alabama, because Florida, the home of nearly a million Cuban refugees and their descendants, “has come up with perhaps the most bizarre and pointless anti-immigration policy of all,” writes Linda Greenhouse in the New York Times. The state’s Board of Education has quietly enacted a policy treating Americans born in Florida as non-residents if they can’t prove their parents are there legally. “You read that right,” Greenhouse says: This is a boldfaced attack on equal protection.

It's also a life-changing matter: With in-state tuition at the University of Florida costing $5,700 a year, and out-of-state $27,936, it’s “the difference between a college education and none.” The Supreme Court long ago ruled that states must provide a K-12 education for undocumented children, on the grounds that it was unfair to punish a child for their parents’ sins. “The Florida situation is something deeper and uglier. Its victims are, after all, American citizens, as fully American as Rick Scott.” (More Florida stories.)

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