While the DREAM Act does not grant instate-tuition rights to undocumented students, oppoonents of the legislation have effectively spread myths purporting that "illegal aliens can get instate-tuition anywhere" with passage of the legislation. This is baseless and untrue--in state tuition and residency determinations is a state prerogative. Eleven states currently provide in-state tuition to children without legal status in the United States (Texas, California, Utah, Washington, New York, Oklahoma, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Nebraska.) Thus far, legal challenges and lawsuits filed against these states have been dismissed by courts.

For a legal background of the in-state tuition debate, we first look to Vlandis v. Kline et Al (1973), in which two students who had recently established residency in Connecticut brought suit against the state under § 1983, alleging that the provisions of 1971 Conn. Pub. Acts § 126(a), which created an irrebuttable presumption of nonresidency for purposes of determining tuition between residents and non-residents in the state's universities, violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the suit—“the state was forbidden by the Due Process Clause to deny an individual the resident rates on the basis of a permanent and irrebuttable presumption of nonresidence when that presumption was not necessarily or universally true in fact.” The court concluded that due process required that students should have the opportunity to present evidence of their bona fide residency within the state for in-state tuition purposes.

This holds true for undocumented students—children that are brought up in a particular state, and attend and graduate from secondary schools in that state should indeed be deemed residents for tuition purposes. Most statutes that give undocumented students instate-tuition are based on this premise. After all, as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe:

<!--[if !supportLists]-->1.      <!--[endif]-->The undocumented status of these children vel non does not establish a sufficient rational basis for denying them benefits that the State affords other residents.

<!--[if !supportLists]-->2.      <!--[endif]-->Neither is there any merit to the claim that undocumented children are appropriately singled out because their unlawful presence within the United States renders them less likely than other children to remain within the State's boundaries and to put their education to productive social or political use within the State.

Undocumented or Illegal is not an immutable characteristic for these students—it is subject to change. The U.S. Supreme Court recognized that the ‘illegal alien’ child of today could be the U.S. citizen of tomorrow and there was no way of determining that the undocumented child would in fact be deported hence, “it would of course be most difficult for the State to justify a denial of education to a child enjoying an inchoate federal permission to remain.” Similarly, since deportation is a federal procedure and until it is completed in cases of individual undocumented students, it is impossible for a state to deem that a person is a ‘non-resident’ for tuition purposes because s/he may just indefinitely remain in the state after establishing it as home. Hence, granting in-state tuition to undocumented students based on their residency in the state becomes a rational and reasonable objective for the state.