Jay Tea at Wizbang! notes that Massachusetts is in a bit of a pickle when it comes financial aid and illegal immigrants:
Massachusetts...[gives]...free schooling to children up through high school, and admit them to colleges without restraint. They also offer college scholarships to students who score the best on the MCAS test, the state-wide assessment exams all students have to take.Posted by kswygert at December 21, 2005 01:43 PMThat policy -- a truly laudable one -- ran into a problem recently, when Lt. Governor Kerry Murphy Healey attended a high school ceremony and personally handed out certificates to 148 seniors recognizing their achievements and offering them the scholarships. The complication was that four of those students are illegal aliens -- and federal law forbids granting any financial aid to illegal aliens...
What caused this little embarassment is simple. Massachusetts schools are forbidden from inquiring about students' immigration status (the polite way of saying "are you here legally or illegally?"), and the officials who process the scholarships simply couldn't ask -- they just picked the top scorers and passed them along.