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Kris Kobach: Education Is a Federal Responsibility—When It Comes to Immigrant Students

Posted November 16, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.
Categories: National

You may have seen a news report Monday that the California Supreme Court upheld that state’s law allowing undocumented immigrants who graduated from local high schools to pay in-state tuition at state colleges. What you may not have noticed was the name of the lawyer representing the losing side: Kris Kobach.

Kobach was recently elected Kansas Secretary of State. He just completed a term as the head of the Kansas GOP. Still not ringing a bell?
Kobach was paid hundreds of dollars per hour as Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s immigration law adviser. And he was the principal author of Arizona’s SB 1070. You know, the law so unconstitutional that it never went into effect.

In defending SB 1070, Kobach said that the federal government, which has the sole constitutional authority to make immigration laws, could not prevent a state from setting up and enforcing its own immigration laws.

He attacked the California education law, which is a mirror of a similar law in New York, by arguing that states should not be able to regulate what is clearly a state function, i.e., the provision of an education to its young people. There’s no mention of “education” in the Constitution, and, as you probably know, we don’t have federal universities, like you might find in other countries.

Kobach is an odd sort of states’ rightist. He believes that governmental functions given to the federal government can be usurped by the states, and that legitimate state functions should be undermined by high-priced lawyers from out-of-state.

Perhaps Kobach went court-hunting in California because a similar suit he filed in Kansas failed miserably last year.

Tags : california, dream act, education, kris kobach, sb 1070, undocumented students

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