A slew of recent polls shows that a majority of Americans no longer favor Trump's hard-line approach toward undocumented immigrants. The more aggressively the administration moves against noncitizens, the greater the backlash from voters.
Gallup reported this month that only 35 percent of Americans approve of Trump's handling of immigration — far below the 62 percent saying they disapprove. A year ago, 55 percent of the public wanted immigration curtailed; now only 30 percent do. At the same time, 79 percent of respondents — an all-time high — say that immigration is a good thing for the country.
Other surveys — by the Pew Research Center in June, a Washington Post-ABC poll in April, and an NPR-Ipsos poll in February — have also documented an accelerating shift against the Trump administration's onslaught. Presidents often use their "bully pulpit" to attract support for their views, but Trump is having the opposite effect: On immigration, his signature issue, Americans are turning against him.
Among the targets of the administration's hostility, none elicits more sympathy from the public than the so‑called Dreamers — young people brought here unlawfully as children, who have grown up as Americans in everything but paperwork. (According to Gallup, support for a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers has grown to a whopping 85 percent.) Yet not even they are being spared by the administration. If Americans are already uneasy with the cruelty of mass deportations and detention camps, they may be even more baffled by the administration's determination to block Dreamers from pursuing a college education at a price their families can afford.
In lawsuits filed this spring against Texas, Minnesota, and Kentucky, the Justice Department maintains that offering in‑state tuition to students without legal immigration status — even if they were brought here as small children and essentially grew up American — violates federal law. In reality, it is the administration's assault that distorts federal law. It is also a brazen power grab that tramples states' rights, to say nothing of basic decency.
Beginning in 2001, Democratic and Republican legislatures decided that if young people grow up in a state, are educated in its schools, and want to pursue higher education within its borders, it makes no sense to penalize them financially merely because of their immigration status. If there are good reasons to give a break on tuition to local students who want to go to a local college, what difference does it make whether they have a passport, a green card, or neither?
Yet on April 28, President Trump issued an executive order purporting to block the states from allowing young undocumented residents — often kids who have no memory of any other home — to pay the in-state tuition rate at public colleges or universities. The White House claims that any state tuition break for an undocumented resident violates federal immigration law by "favoring aliens over any groups of American citizens."
But that isn't true. Federal law does not say that undocumented immigrants must be excluded from any in-state tuition benefit. It says only that they may not be afforded that benefit on the basis of residency if the benefit is denied to US citizens elsewhere.
Accordingly, the states that offer reduced tuition to undocumented immigrants condition the offer on criteria other than residency. In Massachusetts, for example, a student must be able to show that she attended high school in the state for three years and graduated with a diploma or a GED. That means a working-class Dreamer who has been in Massachusetts since childhood and attended public school would qualify for in-state tuition. But so would a US-born citizen whose home is in, say, California or Connecticut but who came to Massachusetts to attend a posh boarding school like Milton Academy or Groton.
States that offer in‑state tuition to undocumented students are acting not just humanely but rationally. Such policies reflect the common-sense principle that justifies giving a tuition break to any local student: It is in every state's interest to help its homegrown young people be as successful and well educated as possible.
Lower tuition makes higher education more affordable, which in turn boosts the number of local families that can send their kids to college, which in turn expands the state's population of educated adults. A more educated population strengthens the state's economy, since college graduates are more likely to be employed and to earn higher incomes. For states like Massachusetts, which suffers from high outmigration, a particularly strong argument for the in-state tuition break is that graduates of public institutions are more likely to remain in the state after college. Conversely, erecting barriers to education only leads to a less productive, less prosperous population.
None of these arguments has any logical connection to immigration or citizenship. They apply with equal force to those born abroad and to those born locally. And it is irrelevant whether those born abroad were brought to America by parents who had immigration visas or by parents who didn't.
Dreamers aren't freeloaders. Like their families, they pay taxes — property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, and even the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare benefits, for which they are ineligible. (In 2022, according to the latest estimate from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants paid almost $97 billion in federal, state, and local taxes.) Those taxes help sustain the public universities they hope to attend. Far from seeking an undeserved subsidy, they are more than willing to pay their own way. But they shouldn't be charged a higher rate than their native-born neighbors and classmates.
Aside from the Trumpian hard core, most Americans sympathize with the plight of undocumented immigrants who grew up in this country and have known no other home. That explains why (as Gallup reports) 85 percent of them would like Congress to make it possible for them to acquire citizenship. It also explains why in-state tuition for Dreamers has bipartisan support: The states that have enacted such policies include Oklahoma, Kentucky, California, and New York.
The Trump administration's lawsuits deserve to be dismissed on their legal merits, but they also deserve to be reviled as one more example of MAGA malevolence, which is grounded in nothing except a desire to hurt immigrants — often including legal immigrants.
Few Americans have any desire to punish young people who have done nothing wrong. The cruelty at the heart of Trump's immigration policy may thrill his base, but it repels a far larger America unwilling to abandon its values.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
-- ## --
Discuss his columns on Facebook.
Want to read something different? Sign up for "Arguable," Jeff Jacoby's free weekly email newsletter.