Marietta Daily Journal

KSU’s preferential treatment of illegal immigrant student is disgusting
by Laura Armstrong
MDJ Columnist
May 10, 2010

After learning the other day that KSU went to bat for the student being deported after it was discovered she was not only in this country illegally, but had been a student at KSU for three years, I’m regretting my initial sympathy for the girl. I’m also angry at the university leadership, pandering when they should be leading on an important issue.

Most citizens really don’t care how much “potential” the young lady has; the actions of the university show Dan Papp and crew are giving special treatment to her, based on ethnic heritage, or her race or possibly even her GPA — it doesn’t really matter which. The point is, they’ve bent over back-wards to bring her back when I doubt they’d be doing the same if she didn’t have the backing of various Latino activist groups.

D.A. King, a local expert on immigration policy and the consequences of illegal immi-gration, told me, “According to all the re-ports I’ve read, there are numerous viola-tions of both federal and state laws in this case, both of which are designed to protect our shrinking public benefits in Georgia.”

And it’s true. The student, Jessica Colotl, may have been granted a deferral by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (an act of discretion, it was explained) but she remains an illegal alien and many laws have been broken.

While it was initially reported Colotl claimed to pay out-of-state tuition, it was later reported KSU had granted her in-state status. How many students and their parents, legal citizens of nearby states paying five times the amount in tuition, are feeling the sting of that one?

Certainly Dr. Papp can’t wait for this to blow over, but I hope it doesn’t. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know if Jessica, who en-joyed membership in the Latina sorority on campus, also enjoyed the benefit of federal Pell grants, Georgia’s HOPE scholarship or one of the coveted federal work-study jobs on campus? Our tax dollars already paid for university lawyers to intervene on her behalf, so it wouldn’t surprise me if we were paying her tuition too.

Might local law enforcement shed light on how her gold Honda was insured or how it passed emissions and was registered with-out a valid driver’s license or address? Speaking as a mom required to jump through multiple hoops making all that happen for my college daughters’ two out-of-state vehicles, I’m especially interested in how that all worked.

It’s been reported Jessica wants to attend law school. Will her deferral extend for years, and which law school will admit her? Who will pay for that, La Raza? GALEO? Coca-Cola? Me? I cannot wait to find out.

Does anyone out there know Jessica’s real address, anyone? Or how the university doesn’t seem to care that she doesn’t have one, or how she had a Mexican driver’s license if she came to this country at age 7 or age 10 (depending on which version of the truth you’ve read)?

How does all this work, Dr. Papp? And can you really say you are serving the citi-zens of Georgia when it’s a fact that deserving Georgians are being turned away from attending KSU while illegal, undocumented, ineligible-by-law people are being admitted and then given special treat-ment along the way?

I’m sure if we followed the money, we’d have our answers. But right now I’m just too disgusted.

HERE