Colleges must admit illegal immigrants

RALEIGH -- North Carolina's community college system has ordered the state's 58 campuses to admit illegal immigrants, overturning a policy of letting the heavily enrolled schools set their own rules for handling undocumented applicants.

David Sullivan, the system's top lawyer, dispatched a memo this month telling the community colleges that state regulations require the schools to admit illegal immigrants who meet the schools' basic requirements of being either a high school graduate or an adult in need of skills training.

"That's just wrong," said Sen. Richard Stevens, a Cary Republican and co-chairman of the higher education committee. "I can't believe North Carolina taxpayers would be asked to pay for the education of people who are in this state illegally."

Rep. Winkie Wilkins, a Democrat from Person County who is the head of the House committee on community colleges, said he was "blindsided" by the news.

The state's community colleges focus on training and retraining the work force, usually through skills and trade education. Melinda Wiggins is executive director of Student Action with Farmworkers, which helps children of migrant agriculture laborers get into high school and college. She said barring illegal immigrants from community colleges penalizes youths who were brought to the United States as children.

"North Carolina is their home. It's where they've been raised and lived," Wiggins said. "By denying them an education, we're really creating an underclass of folks here in the state who cannot contribute to society."

State public schools must accept children of illegal immigrants under federal regulations. The University of North Carolina system admits undocumented applicants, but a bill to provide in-state tuition to some was quickly shot down in 2005.

Out-of-state tuition

Community college executives said the admissions guidelines won't cost the state. Illegal immigrants must pay out-of-state tuition, $7,465 for a full class load, which is more than the actual cost of providing the education, $5,375, the officials said.

They also emphasized that under the old policy, with most schools admitting undocumented applicants, 340 of the 270,000 students last year -- or about one-tenth of 1 percent -- were illegal immigrants. If that figure quadrupled, the system could handle it, Sullivan said.

"Colleges should immediately begin admitting undocumented individuals," Sullivan wrote in the Nov. 7 memo.

It is unclear how many schools prohibited illegal immigrants from enrolling.

A study this year by Duke University graduate students listed 22 campuses as having written or unwritten policies to bar undocumented applicants. The Observer contacted the three schools nearest to Charlotte: McDowell Technical, and Cleveland and Stanly community colleges. All said they had no such policy and had been admitting illegal immigrants.

Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte has admitted illegal immigrants. So have Durham Tech, Central Carolina, Johnston, Piedmont and Vance-Granville community colleges, according to a report this year based on a survey in April of 2005.

Wake Technical Community College was among the schools that had to change its policy after the recent memo.

"We had just always required appropriate documentation" including legal residency, said Laurie Clowers, the school's public relations director.

Roots of policy review

The new policy memo came after an unverified complaint that an illegal immigrant was dismissed from one of the colleges and after the study by Duke students. The study was prompted by an unrelated research request from the community colleges.