Maryland lawmakers take cues from California legal battles to craft a tuition policy for undocumented immigrants.

When the ­University of Maryland System pondered offering in-state tuition to undocumented students, chancellor William E. Kirwan looked to California — among the early states to pass such a law — for a model.

That changed last fall, when a California appellate court ruled the law conflicts with federal law. The California Supreme Court agreed to review that decision in arguments expected to be heard late this year or next year.

Meanwhile, undocumented students in California continue to receive in-state tuition.

But states like Maryland now are avoiding that model as it sits in legal limbo in California.

“We thought maybe what was happening in California did work for us. If a student were to graduate from a Maryland high school after going for three years and was an unregistered immigrant, we would grant them in-state tuition,” Kirwan tells Diverse. “But what seems to have happened in California is to say, ‘Well, you can’t use that to get around this’ — at least that’s what the appeals court in California says.”

California lawmakers approved Assembly Bill 540 in 2001, soon after Texas became the first state to pass a law granting in-state tuition to undocumented college students. Those laws — and others that followed in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Utah and Washington — came in the wake of 1996 federal laws that restrict benefits to undocumented immigrants.

One law banned awarding postsecondary education benefits to undocumented students on the basis of state residency “unless a citizen or national of the United States is (also) eligible for such a benefit without regard to whether the citizen or national is such a resident.” The other federal law said states may provide public benefits to undocumented immigrants “only through the enactment of a state law after Aug. 22, 1996” that provides for the benefit. So those 10 states eventually did.