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Most Utahns feel a state law that allows undocumented students to pay in-state college tuition should be repealed, according to a new Salt Lake Tribune poll.
Seventy-one percent of the 625 registered voters who were interviewed by telephone for the statewide poll this week said Utah should "repeal the current state law that offers the discounted resident college tuition rate to the children of undocumented immigrants."
Ruth Bick, a 63-year-old Ogden resident, said Utahns should not have to pay taxes to subsidize a college education for undocumented students. The state's middle class already is burdened enough with big tax bills, she said.
"Taxpayers should not have to pay for illegal children to go to school here," said Bick, a poll respondent who calls herself a political independent. "I just don't know what the answer is."
Layne Barnes, a West Jordan Republican who also participated in the poll, said children of undocumented immigrants already get free assistance and a free public school education, so "they should not be rewarded for breaking the law."
"I have no sympathy for them," he said of undocumented students.
But Shane Andrews, a stay-at-home dad and poll respondent, said in-state tuition is about wanting to "make them [undocumented Utahns] better people.''
''If they can't better themselves, their only alternative is to seek more public assistance," said the 32-year-old Republican.
The 2002 Utah law grants in-state college tuition rates to undocumented students who attended a state high school for at least three years and graduated. Last year, 169 students qualified for the tuition rates under the law, state numbers show. Rep. Glenn Donnelson, R-North Ogden, has sponsored a bill for the past three years to repeal the law, but he has had no success. Still, he has said he will try again.
Philip Bernal, Salt Lake County Hispanic Democratic Caucus chairman, said the poll results on the tuition question "are not positive for education or Utah's future." Bernal, who didn't take the poll, said it's all in the wording of the question because the poll could have asked: Should Utah residents, who have attended at least three years at a state high school and graduated, be allowed to pay in-state college tuition?
There's a "misperception" statewide that the law allows undocumented students, many of whom have spent most of their education in Utah schools and cannot apply for federal financial aid, to pay less tuition, Bernal said.
"They're residents of Utah like everyone else," said Bernal, who had worked in higher education for 34 years. "It's not a benefit - it's a right they have."
In a January 2006 Tribune poll, nearly 60 percent of respondents said Utah should "repeal the state law that offers the discounted resident college tuition rate to the children of undocumented immigrants."
The statewide telephone poll by the Washington, D.C.-based Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, Inc. was conducted Monday and Tuesday and had a margin of error of 4 percentage points.
Minorities make up 16 percent - Latinos 11 percent - of the state's population and 12 percent of Utahns do not speak English at home, according to the U.S. census. The poll did not ask about respondents' ethnicity.
Many Utahns also said they support building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border (56 percent); oppose a path to citizenship for immigrants who are in the United States illegally (54 percent); and feel the state government should not have a public information Web site in Spanish (46 percent).
Bick said a pathway to citizenship is out of the question. A wall would give the United States "control of the border." And she doesn't want millions of state tax dollars spent on translating services into different languages.
''I hate that I have to 'Press 1' to hear English,'' Bick said. ''If they're here, they should know English.''
Barnes, a Utah Minuteman Project supporter, agreed. He went to the border in Fall 2005 with a group of Minutemen to learn more about the area and definitely supports a wall.
"I would help build it," Barnes said.
He hears a lot on the news about Latinos committing crimes and blames them for Utah's unsafe streets. Barnes said he is frustrated that the employees at the fast-food burger joint in his neighborhood only speak Spanish.
"They're illegal aliens," he said. "I'm tired of being a victim."
Bernal said the wall being built on the border is not welcoming.
''It's the United States saying . . . we don't want to be neighbors,'' he said. ''If we decide later we don't like people who speak French, are we going to put a wall on [the U.S.-Canada] border?''