Phoenix mayor promises to stand with ASU, support DACA students

PHOENIX — Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton promised Tuesday to stand alongside Arizona State University officials in supporting students protected by President Barack Obama’s immigration actions.

Stanton says these Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals-eligible students are part of America’s future as well as Arizona’s.

“Could there be a more self-defeating public policy than removing the DACA program?” he said. “These are young people who came here NOT of their own volition. They’re our future.”

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, ASU President Michael Crow published a letter that said the school is committed to encouraging and supporting DACA-eligible students. He also said these students are still eligible for in-state tuition rates.

“Arizona State University’s commitment to DACA students and to all DREAMers remains unchanged,” he wrote. “It is based on the core principle set forth in ASU’s charter that we are ‘measured not by whom we exclude, but rather by whom we include and how they succeed.’

“This commitment, particularly as it applies to immigrants, honors the vision of Arizona’s founders. They ‘believed that an educated citizenry was extraordinarily important to the new state’ because ‘they had witnessed the most intense immigration in the history of America’ and ‘were keenly aware that education was responsible for preserving America’s unity while wave after wave of peoples arrived from other countries.’

“The Arizona Constitution requires that our public school system ‘shall be open to all the children of the state.’  Ariz. Const. art. XX, Para. 7 (emphasis added). It is an obligation that ASU takes seriously. And, particularly when it comes to immigrants, it is one that I take personally.”

Follow @ClineKathleen