THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

This doesn’t necessarily have to be an issue with citizenship per se....

Basically the system seems to be calling this person an out of state student. If the student has been declared a dependent by their parents, then the parents’ residency is legitimately considered IMHO.  That’s the way it works for ALL students so it would actually be unfair if dependent children of illegal immigrants would get to be considered in-state, independent students for the purposes of financial aid and tuition.

I do not know all of the facts, so the above scenario might not truly be applicable. But it is offered as one potential reasonable explanation that has nothing to do with discrimination.

NJ residency of parents is probably as good proxy as anything else, at least anything easily administered, for “Have the kid’s parents paid NJ taxes, and will they continue to do so?” and “Is the kid likely to stay in NJ when s/he graduates?”

#1

I understand that states often do not consider so-called illegal immigrants to be legal residents of their state. For a lot a things, that makes sense. I’m not sure, however, if that makes sense for the purposes discussed here. The legal resident requirement is, as #2 pointed out, a good proxy for taxes paid and likelihood of staying in the state. But it obviously fails in the particular situation here, where someone can have lived in the state for a long time and paid taxes but be per se not a resident of that state due to their immigration status.

If the requirement indeed is that a person have a parent who is a legal resident, it looks to me like it would pass constitutional muster.

Longtime poster here… can someone please explain to me what “illegal immigrant” actually means?  Especially in terms of legal rights in the US.  I’m not being flip, I’m genuinely ignorant.

I understand the term to mean having established residency in this (or any) country without having first obtained a visa, where required by law.

Inside the European Union, those countries by treaty have allowed their residents to move from one country to another and establish a new residence without first asking permission of the new host country.

Are we surprised by a law’s failure at the extremes, though?  Legal residency serves as a proxy because, a la #2, governments want to keep those people in state but don’t want to spend the money to figure out which ones they want. 

Residency requirements for public college tuition have already passed constitutional muster under a test which gives them exactly zero deference.  It’s the “state-created resource” argument.  DREAM or even amnesty wouldn’t fix any of this.

There’s no such thing as an “illegal immigrant”.  If you are an immigrant, you are a legal US resident (foreign-born naturalized US Citizen, or foreign-born permanent resident, which is what I am, green card holder).

A non-immigrant is someone here in a visa, like an H1, TN (NAFTA), F1, etc.

An undocumented resident would probably be the correct term.  Whether it’s “illegal” is subject to interpretation. Refugees, people who fear for their safety, children brought here, are all examples of people who could be given immigrant status, but who were nonetheless undocumented.

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As for the issue at hand: what if a person emancipates himself or becomes a ward of the state?

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Also note that undocumented residents also may pay taxes, so the point of being undocumented does not mean they did not pay taxes.

I actually like “unauthorized immigrant”.  “Undocumented immigrant” makes it sound like people just lose their passports.  It’s still better than “illegal immigrant”, though, a term which attempts to criminalize an action with precisely zero description of what’s illegal about it.  Might as well call theft “illegal possession” or speeding “illegal driving”.

As for the issue, I think, although I’m not certain, that it’s about who’s paying the bills.  If kids can have their parents pay their tuition and declare themselves residents of different states, then everybody from every state could get in-state tuition anywhere.  If this student wants to get in-state, then the state’s residency requirement probably stipulates that whoever pays the bills needs to be a resident of New Jersey.  In the rare case where this student’s parents were residents of merely another state, not to mention another country, I bet that he would be similarly barred from getting in-state.

The comments in that link tell me more than the story itself.  Lots of anger.

You can’t be an illegal immigrant any more than you can be an illegal citizen.  An immigrant is as lawful as a citizen.  An immigrant means you’ve been processed and approved by USCIS.

Tango, the word immigrant has been around a whole lot longer than USCIS or any other authority which would process or approve an immigrant. An immigrant is just someone who moves from one country to another. Since the word was “created”, sometime around the end of the eighteenth century or so, we and other countries have put restrictions on immigration. So of course someone can be defined as an “illegal” immigrant. We can come up with nicer euphemisms if we want or a more precise term but to call someone who has come to a country without following the proper legal procedures and intends to stay permanently sounds like a reasonably accurate description to me.

Since we are talking about the legality, it would behoove us to be more careful in defining terms.

“Immigrant” is being used perjoratively, when in fact *I* am an immigrant, and I have all the rights of a US Citizen (other than voting).  “Illegal immigrant” is often used interchangeably with “immigrant”.

I obviously don’t have proof of this other than my own perception, but I think “illegal” is used interchangeably with “illegal immigrant” more than “immigrant” is, which makes the term even less reflective of anything. 

That’s the problem I have with the term.  Usually crimes have everyday names that distinguish actions which would be legal under some circumstances but not others (like “murder” for “illegal intentional killing of somebody without the state’s authority to do so").  Maybe we just haven’t tried to change it, but it seems like the only purpose of slapping the word “illegal” in front of a noun—and, more inaccurately, dropping the noun altogether—is to make the term derogatory.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use immigrant interchangeably with illegal immigrant but perhaps I don’t read or spend time with ignominious sorts. Many people just don’t like immigrants, legal or not.

Of course those who sympathize with “illegal immigrants” like to use softer terms for it. And those who don’t prefer to use terms that reflect their view. It’s no different than other things, like “estate tax” versus “death tax”. Neither is particularly wrong, in that the tax applies to a person’s estate and applies when they die. One purposefully sounds worse than the other. The english language is delightfully diverse. And the words someone uses makes it pretty easy to identify their bias.

Yeah, but the problem with its being derogatory—or even perceived as being derogatory—is that it just adds so much unnecessary vitriol to the conversation.  What you call it doesn’t make the case for it any worse or better.  But people have preconceived notions about people who call it one thing or the other. 

If you (generic you) and I (generic I) are in an argument about the merits of an immigration policy, and you say “illegal” and I say “undocumented”, there’s a pretty good chance, in our current political environment, that we’re going to be distracted from each other’s arguments because you think I’m a commie sap and I think you’re a right-wing nutjob (generically, might I reiterate).  So all of a sudden we’re arguing about which one of us is the bigger jackass instead of arguing about the merits of immigration policy, which is just so counterproductive.  I’d say this happens in 2 out of 3 modern conversations about politics.