Items in Gov. Scott Walker’s new biennial budget would cut programs that provide aid and support to immigrants, a move that has drawn outrage among immigrant advocacy groups.
Walker’s 2011-2013 budget contains proposals that would end access to in-state tuition for undocumented immigrant college students and eliminate the FoodShare program for low-income legal immigrants.
The Milwaukee-based immigrant advocacy organization Voces de la Frontera reacted to the proposals with harsh criticism.
“With this budget, Walker is seeking to institutionalize discrimination against low-income immigrant families,” Executive Director Christine Neumann-Ortiz said.
In terms of eliminating the FoodShare program, which benefits legal immigrants who do not meet federal residency requirements, Walker said the growing cost of the program was unsustainable in the budget bill.
Rep. Donald Pridemore, R-Hartford, who will introduce a bill this week giving police the right to ask for proof of residency from criminal suspects, said he supported these budgetary measures on philosophical grounds.
“It’s not a question of how much money it’ll save us. It’s a question of principle. We shouldn’t be giving any taxpayer-funded benefits to people who have come to this country illegally,” Pridemore said.
Another of Walker’s pieces of legislation, the budget repair bill, contains a provision that would deny prenatal care for undocumented pregnant women. The proposal has been met with criticism from both sides of the immigration debate.
“This makes a mockery of anyone who claims to be pro-life, which is most of the so-called conservatives who are hostile towards undocumented immigrants,” Neumann-Ortiz said.
Dave Gorak, Midwest Coalition to Reduce Immigration Executive Director, also said he disapproved of the measure.
“We don’t support the elimination of necessary medical services to anybody, and that includes the unborn children of undocumented pregnant women,” Gorak said. “We have high ethical standards in this country, and we shouldn’t turn away anyone whose life is on the line from medical care.”
Still, Gorak said apart from the elimination of prenatal care, he supports the budgetary measures reducing benefits to undocumented immigrants because they provided incentives for illegal immigrants to come to Wisconsin. The benefits Walker is seeking to eliminate through his budget were punishing the U.S. taxpayer, Gorak said.
Neumann-Ortiz identified the proposal within the new biennium budget to end undocumented students’ access to in-state tuition as particularly harmful toward the undocumented immigrant community.
“One of our members, an undocumented student supporting her young family, is only able to study engineering at UW-Milwaukee because she has access to in-state tuition,” Neumann-Ortiz said. “If this item in the budget goes through, she would have to drop out of school. She would be forced to pay out-of-state tuition, which she can’t afford, even though she has lived in Wisconsin almost her entire life.”
This item in the budget would repeal a 2009 law allowing undocumented students who have lived in Wisconsin for at least three years and who have either a high school diploma or a GED to pay in-state tuition at UW System and technical college system institutions.
However, it appears only about 20 or so undocumented UW System students have taken advantage of that law thus far, UW System spokesperson Dave Giroux said.
