Every year, about 25,000 students graduate from California high schools and enter a sort of limbo. Though they've been raised and schooled here, they find out at some point that they were brought here -- through no choice of their own -- by parents who arrived as unlawful immigrants.
We recently discovered that Pedro Ramirez, student body president at Fresno State, is one one such student. But there are many other students in the San Joaquin Valley in similar circumstances.
California and nine other states have addressed this problem directly -- and the California Supreme Court issued an important 7-0 decision last week upholding their approach. Courts in other states should take notice.
Congress should follow California's lead and resolve the problem nationally by approving the federal version of the DREAM Act.
California's AB 540 of 2001, whose authors were Democrat Marco Firebaugh and Republican Abel Maldonado, passed overwhelmingly in the Assembly, 57-15, and Senate, 27-7.
This law allows students to pay in-state tuition in the public university system if they have attended a California high school for three years and have graduated. That makes them exempt from more expensive nonresident tuition. They are not eligible for financial aid, however, and must pay their own way.
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