New path to legal status?

A proposal to give qualified undocumented students a pathway to legal status through education or military service has re-emerged in Congress.

The American Dream Act would also explicitly grant states the option to provide in-state tuition for undocumented college students.

Those provisions would be excellent news for Utah's higher-education community, which has been in a perennial battle with lawmakers over whether the state can legally provide the in-state tuition rate to undocumented students, said David Doty, assistant commissioner for higher education in Utah.

"From purely the educational standpoint, we in our institutions would certainly like to be in the position of not having to wrangle over this year after year after year," he said. "We would like to see this settled."

Utah's law granting in-state tuition to qualified undocumented immigrants passed in 2002 in anticipation of the Dream Act, which was originally sponsored by U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. The federal measure has yet to pass. Most recently, the act was part of the Senate's comprehensive immigration-reform bill, which Hatch opposed last year.

And Hatch isn't a sponsor of the current legislation.

In a statement, Hatch said he is undecided on whether he'll support the new version, sponsored by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. The act has also been introduced in the House.

He said he's concerned that while past versions provided exemptions for infractions by minors, the current act would provide those exemptions for all ages.

"I still believe we should give states the option to help good kids who are here illegally through no fault of their own," Hatch said. "Past efforts focused on a narrow, targeted group of children. This new bill appears to be much broader."

State Rep. Glenn Donnelson, R-North Ogden, who this year unsuccessfully attempted for a fourth time to repeal Utah's tuition law, said the law originally hinged on the Dream Act's passage.

"They jumped the gun," he said. "The Dream Act didn't pass."

Doty said the Utah Attorney General's Office has said Utah's law doesn't violate federal law, which prohibits granting benefits to undocumented immigrants based on residency unless that benefit is available to all citizens. That's because Utah's law is based not on residency but on where a student went to school, he said. It requires students to attend a Utah high school for three years and graduate to obtain the in-state rate.