Georgia lawmakers are expected to convene under the Gold Dome in January for the 2022 General Assembly, and that means a second chance for bills that didn’t cross the finish line this year.
Immigration rights activists are hoping that a proposed law that would allow Georgia’s so-called dreamers — recipients of Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — to pay college tuition on par with other Georgian students will see lawmakers in 2022 for a second Let’s see .
“It’s obviously something we need to look at as a state,” said the bill’s author, Dalton Republican Assemblyman Kasey Carpenter. “A well-trained workforce will be of paramount importance in the 21st century. We have these kids that we’ve already invested in. It’s child’s play, but child’s play is not always the same as law.”
Under DACA, people brought to the US as children can live and work in the country without being deported, provided they have clean criminal records. In 2020, there were just under 21,000 DACA recipients in Georgia, according to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.
A federal judge in Texas barred the government from accepting new DACA applications in July, sparking an ongoing battle with the White House.
DACA recipients are entitled to the same public education as Georgians born in the US, but when it comes time to apply to college, they must pay out-of-state tuition, which can be up to three times higher than what their classmates pay.
A new report by FWD.us, an immigration lobby group, found that nearly 30,000 Georgians between the ages of 18 and 29 would benefit immediately from an extension of state tuition to all undocumented students and an additional 1,500 K-12 undocumented migrants would benefit every year for the next ten years when they graduate from high school.
Undocumented students graduating from technical college would repay the government investment within 10 years, and individuals earning a bachelor’s degree would repay it within 16 years via better-paying jobs, higher tax rates and greater earning power, it said the report. State tuition for undocumented students could add up to $10 million to the economy each year.
The carpenter’s bill would be narrower and would only apply to DACA recipients. And although Carpenter originally intended students to pay the same as others, the House Higher Education Committee last session changed it to allow universities to charge them between 100% and 110% of regular state tuition.
Universities would also have to give priority to qualifying state students who did not apply under this law, and schools could defer enrollment of DACA students until all applications from other students were either accepted, deferred, or rejected.
The revised bill also proposes to exempt universities that have not admitted all qualified applicants in the past two academic years, which would exclude the state’s most competitive colleges, including the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech.
Still, FWD.us estimates the bill would benefit 15,000 students immediately.
Jaime Rangel, a Dalton resident who works for FWD.us, asked the House Study Committee on Innovative Ways to Maximize Global Talent to consider the plan at the committee’s meeting Thursday.
“Twenty-one states have already expanded state tuition nationwide, the Texas and Florida legislatures are actually more open than Rep. Carpenter’s proposed legislation,” he said. “It’s both a Republican and Democratic problem, a problem that the legislature has banded together to solve.”
Carpenter hopes Georgia lawmakers will convene this winter to move his bill forward, although he acknowledges it’s not a sure thing, especially in a crucial election year when his fellow Republicans may be more inclined to take the legislation against the grassroots the party to play on conservative cultural issues.
“Politics are always a bit shaky in an election year, there’s no doubt about that,” he said. “I have a feeling it’s going to be an interesting year.”
But Carpenter said he feels pretty good about the bill’s odds. Businesses are looking for skilled workers, he said, and enrollments at several Georgia colleges are declining. While the University System of Georgia increased its overall enrollment by 2.4% between Fall 2019 and Fall 2020, the system’s nine state colleges experienced an average 7% decline in enrollment during that time, both facts that help sell the bill could budget conservatives, Carpenter said.
“If you spend money today to educate people, later the state gets its money back in the form of higher taxes,” he said. “It’s Republican bread-and-butter policy, invest a little for a better return.”
“I’m always optimistic, man,” he added. “I feel like I got a chance by day 40. So I feel pretty good about it. It’s good politics. And I think the more we educate people about this, let’s talk about things that we as a state can control, don’t let the FBI control what they don’t control. We don’t have to solve federal problems, but what we can do is make the best of the hand that is made available to us as a state, and that’s what this law seeks to do.”
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