The California Supreme Court bucked the general anti-immigrant trend of recent months by upholding the state's policy of providing in-state college tuition at California colleges and universities for undocumented students who spent their final three years of high school in a California high school. The San Francisco Chronicle's article is here; LA Times here.
The issue has been generating a fair amount of discussion lately. In 1982, the US Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe that states could not exclude undocumented children from public primary and secondary schools; the obvious next question was whether states could exclude such students from public higher education. The California case answers a secondary question - can a state (that, like California, has chosen to allow enrollment of undocumented students) charge only in-state tuiition to undocumented students living in the state, albeit illegally? The California Supreme Court says yes; the plaintiffs - a group of citizens living outside of California (who therefore do not receive in-state tuition) - vow to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. There are interesting questions of federalism, similar to those raised by Arizona's recent immigration legislation, but from an educational perspective, the arguments from both sides are similar to those raised in Plyler. The most significant difference is that Plyler involved a wholesale denial of education, whereas this case is about how much people have to pay for education - a distinction which may have constitutional significance.
Look for more on this topic to come up at the AALS annual meeting in San Francisco in January - the Education Law section's program (co-sponsored by section on Immigration Law) is on the topic "Immigration and Higher Education."