Who Is Really Draining Maryland's Resources?

Every political season, the same argument resurfaces in Maryland statehouses and county councils: undocumented immigrants are a drain on public resources. They overwhelm the schools. They strain the hospitals. They take more than they give. It is an argument deployed with confidence and rarely with data.

So let us look at the data.

What emerges is not a story about undocumented immigrants draining Maryland. It is a story about who actually captures public resources disproportionately — and the answer will not surprise anyone who has ever read a tax expenditure report, but may shock anyone who has only been reading the headlines.

What Undocumented Immigrants Actually Pay vs. What They Receive

Before examining where Maryland's budget goes, it is worth establishing the baseline fiscal position of undocumented immigrants with precision — because the "drain" narrative depends on a picture that the data does not support.

The $96.7 billion in taxes breaks down as follows: $19.5 billion in federal income taxes, $32.3 billion in federal payroll taxes, and $37.3 billion in state and local taxes (ITEP, 2022). Of the payroll taxes, $25.7 billion went to Social Security, $6.4 billion to Medicare, and $1.8 billion to unemployment insurance — programs from which undocumented workers are entirely barred from collecting benefits.

Against those contributions, the benefits actually available to undocumented immigrants are almost entirely absent. They are ineligible for SNAP, Medicaid, TANF, SSI, housing assistance, federal student aid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Social Security retirement, and Medicare. The only federal benefits accessible to them are emergency Medicaid — which reimburses hospitals for life-threatening care and pays the institution, not the individual — and K-12 public education, which is constitutionally mandated regardless of status under Plyler v. Doe (1982) and cannot legally be withheld.

Emergency Medicaid spending on all ineligible immigrants totaled $3.8 billion in FY2023 — representing just 0.4% of total Medicaid spending nationally (KFF, August 2025). K-12 education for approximately 985,000 undocumented children costs an estimated $12.8 billion nationally at the average per-pupil rate. Combined, these represent the maximum plausible benefit received — approximately $1,436 per person annually against $8,889 paid in.

Even the Cato Institute — a libertarian think tank not known for pro-immigration advocacy — found in its 2023 analysis that non-citizens consume 39% less Social Security, 23% less Medicare, 5% less Medicaid, and 35% less SNAP than native-born Americans on a per capita basis. For undocumented immigrants specifically, the figures are more extreme: they consume essentially zero from Social Security, Medicare, SNAP, TANF, SSI, and housing assistance, while collectively paying $51.8 billion annually into those programs.

The Social Security Administration's own Office of the Chief Actuary concluded in Actuarial Note 151 (April 2013) that "the presence of unauthorized workers in the United States has, on average, a positive effect on the financial status of the Social Security program." This is not an advocacy claim. It is the SSA's actuarial projection, based on the straightforward arithmetic of contributions made versus benefits that will never be collected.

The fiscal picture is unambiguous: undocumented immigrants are among the most cost-effective contributors to the American tax system — paying in at rates comparable to working citizens while being systematically excluded from the programs their taxes fund. The question of whether they "drain resources" is not a close call. The data answers it clearly, and the answer is no.

What Undocumented Immigrants Actually Contribute

In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid an estimated $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes nationally. In Maryland alone, that figure was $779.3 million — ranking ninth among all states. These are not estimates of what immigrants might someday contribute if granted citizenship. These are taxes paid now, under current law, often without access to the benefits those taxes fund.

A Maryland-specific total effective tax rate for undocumented immigrants is not publicly reported — ITEP and other researchers publish state-level dollar amounts but not state-level effective rates broken down by immigration status. What is available is the national average: undocumented immigrants pay 10.1% of their income in state and local taxes, compared to 7.2% for the top 1% nationally (ITEP 2022; Americans for Tax Fairness 2023). The older Maryland Center on Economic Policy figures (2016) show 8.3% for undocumented immigrants versus 6.7% for Maryland's top 1% — a consistent directional finding. Maryland's tax structure — heavy reliance on sales taxes, property taxes embedded in rent, and income taxes without EITC access — mirrors the national conditions that produce this disparity. The direction is not in question: undocumented immigrants pay a higher share of their income in state and local taxes than the wealthiest Marylanders. They pay in. They are statutorily barred from most of what they pay for. The arithmetic of the "drain" argument runs precisely backwards.

These contributions come through sales taxes on every purchase, property taxes embedded in rent, payroll taxes withheld from wages — and in many cases, income taxes paid via Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs), from which filers frequently do not claim refunds out of fear of government contact. Some undocumented workers have Social Security and Medicare taxes withheld from wages they will never collect benefits from. The Maryland Comptroller even has a term for this: "unallocated withholding" — tax revenue collected from workers who never file returns to claim it back.

"They are Marylanders. They are taxpayers — let me repeat this, they pay their taxes — and yet they have been cut out of nearly every federal benefit." — House Majority Leader Eric G. Luedtke (D-Montgomery), Maryland General Assembly

If Maryland were to grant full legal status to its undocumented population, the Maryland Center on Economic Policy estimates state and local tax contributions would increase by more than $85 million annually. Higher wages from work authorization, combined with greater tax compliance, produce a fiscal dividend. Deportation, by contrast, produces a fiscal loss — for every million undocumented people removed nationally, public revenues lose an estimated $8.9 billion per year.

The Actual Resource Drain: Corporations and the Wealthy

While the political debate focuses on whether undocumented kids deserve in-state tuition, a quieter and far larger transfer of public resources has been ongoing for decades in Maryland — flowing not to the poor or the foreign-born, but to corporations and high-income households.

The Corporate Picture

An estimated one-third of the 150 largest corporations operating in Maryland pay zero state income taxes. Not a reduced rate. Zero. These are companies that use Maryland roads to move their products, Maryland courts to protect their contracts, Maryland schools to train their workforces — and contribute nothing to the income tax base that funds those services. Meanwhile, a small business owner in Baltimore County pays her full freight.

Nationally, the federal government spends $181 billion per year on direct business subsidies — more than three times what it spends on traditional welfare programs for low-income individuals. In Maryland specifically, large multistate corporations have long exploited a "nowhere income" loophole, shifting profits to out-of-state affiliates to avoid state tax liability. Governor Wes Moore's 2025 tax reform proposal moved to close this by adopting "combined reporting" — a mechanism already used by 28 other states. The fact that Maryland was not already doing this is itself a data point about who the tax code was written to serve.

The Wealthy Household Picture

Maryland's overall tax system, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy's 2024 analysis, ranks as the 41st most regressive in the country. Translation: the people with the least pay the most as a share of their income, and the people with the most pay the least.

The mechanisms driving this inversion are not obscure. Maryland's 6% sales tax applies the same rate to a $10 t-shirt bought by a construction worker and a $500 silk blouse bought by a Potomac executive. The capital gains preferential rate — lower taxes on investment income than on wages — overwhelmingly benefits wealthy white households: nationally, just 2% of capital gains tax cuts flow to Black households and 3% to Hispanic households. Property tax assessment inaccuracies consistently favor high-value homes over low-value ones, and assessments in Maryland have been shown to cause Black and Hispanic homeowners to pay disproportionately more than white homeowners in comparable properties.

The home mortgage interest deduction, available only to homeowners, disproportionately benefits higher-income families and white households with greater rates of homeownership — while renters, who are disproportionately lower-income, receive nothing equivalent and have property tax costs passed through to them via rent regardless.

"The wealthiest 1 percent of Marylanders pay a smaller share of their income in state and local taxes than everyone else. Large, profitable corporations are able to exploit loopholes to reduce their Maryland tax responsibility to zero." — Maryland Center on Economic Policy, 2024

The Comparison Maryland Politicians Won't Make

To make this concrete, consider what the data shows when we line up the actual players in Maryland's fiscal ecosystem:

† Effective rate data for undocumented immigrants is available at the national level only (ITEP 2022; MD Center on Economic Policy 2016 provides an older Maryland-specific state/local figure of 8.3%). All other effective rates in this table are Maryland-specific (ITEP Who Pays? 7th Ed., 2024). The national undocumented rate and the Maryland undocumented rate point in the same direction relative to the top 1% in both comparisons.

The political conversation in Maryland has consistently directed public anxiety toward the first row of this table while ignoring the last two. That is not accidental. It reflects whose interests shape the conversation.

The In-State Tuition Question, Revisited

The debate over in-state tuition for undocumented Maryland residents offers a case study in how the "drain" narrative is deployed selectively. The objection is that limited university slots should not go to people who did not "earn" their right to be here. But this framing collapses under examination.

Begin with the most basic question: do these people live in Maryland? The answer is factual, not legal. You either sleep here, pay rent here, send your children to school here, buy groceries here — or you don't. Immigration status is a separate federal legal classification administered by federal agencies under federal law. It has nothing to do with the factual question of where your life actually takes place. Residency is a question of presence. Immigration status is a question of federal paperwork. Conflating the two is not legal reasoning — it is a choice to import a federal classification into a state factual determination where it does not belong.

And here is the contradiction that opponents of the DREAM Act have never resolved: Maryland has no trouble recognizing undocumented residents when it wants to collect from them. The Comptroller of Maryland accepts their ITIN tax filings. The state collects sales tax on every purchase they make. Property taxes are embedded in every rent check they write. Utility companies bill them at their Maryland address. Courts serve them notices there. ICE finds them there. The address is real. The residence is real. Maryland recognizes it for every purpose that involves extraction.

If you are accepting taxes from someone because they "live here" — and you are, every year, without objection — then they live here by your own definition. You cannot maintain two different definitions of residency: one for when money flows in, and another for when benefits flow out. Pick one. If they don't live here, refund the taxes. If you're keeping the taxes, the residency is established. The debate is over.

This is not a philosophical point. It is a structural one. Maryland's own in-state tuition eligibility criteria require filing a Maryland state tax return as proof of residency. The same document the state uses to collect taxes from undocumented families is the document their children must submit to qualify for in-state rates. The state designed that symmetry itself. It cannot then claim the document establishes residency for one purpose while denying it for the other. That is not a legal framework. That is extraction dressed as principle.

First, the verification mechanism that opponents propose — tax documentation — already confirms that undocumented families are paying into the Maryland system. If tax contribution is the test, they pass it. Second, the "limited slots" argument applies equally to any population movement, yet we do not hear calls to deny in-state tuition to Americans who recently moved from New York or California. The concern activates selectively.

Third — and this point is almost never raised — citizenship is not required for admission to Maryland public universities at all. The University System of Maryland does not ask for immigration status during the admissions process. An undocumented student applies through the exact same Common App process as everyone else; the admissions committee does not consider immigration status. The entire controversy is therefore not about who gets into the classroom. It is purely and exclusively about one thing: who pays the lower tuition rate. Strip away the rhetoric and that is what remains. A pricing dispute. And on a pricing dispute, the question of who contributed to the subsidy being priced is the only question that matters.

Before the DREAM Act, that pricing penalty was concrete and severe. Undocumented Maryland students — regardless of how long they had lived in the state, how many years they attended Maryland public schools, or how many years their parents filed Maryland taxes — were automatically classified as out-of-state students by default. According to the Maryland Department of Legislative Services fiscal analysis, the gap between in-state and out-of-state rates across USM institutions averaged approximately $11,600 per year. On top of that, these students were entirely ineligible for federal financial aid, Pell Grants, or federal student loans — the standard financial toolkit available to every documented student facing the same tuition bills. The cumulative effect was not a neutral policy. It was an active financial penalty, levied annually, against students whose families had spent years or decades paying into the system that built the university they were being surcharged to attend.

Fourth, the economic logic of exclusion is self-defeating. Undocumented young people who grow up in Maryland are not going to leave Maryland if denied in-state tuition. They will remain — less educated, with fewer options, with lower earning potential, paying less in taxes, and more likely to require public assistance. The state forgoes both the tuition revenue and the long-term fiscal dividend of an educated resident. Everyone loses.

The talent retention argument is not sentimental. It is the most rational capitalist case available: if you believe in maximizing human capital output, you educate the brilliant and the hardworking regardless of the paperwork their parents held when they arrived. A child who grew up in Gaithersburg, attended Maryland public schools for thirteen years, and now wants to study engineering at UMCP is not a foreign actor extracting a subsidy. She is a Maryland asset waiting to be invested in.

Who Actually Paid for the Subsidy?

There is a question that never gets asked in this debate, and it is the most important one: where does the in-state tuition subsidy actually come from? If we are going to argue about who deserves it, we should first establish who funded it.

The answer is straightforward. In-state tuition at Maryland public universities is subsidized by Maryland state and local tax revenue — primarily Maryland income taxes, Maryland property taxes, and Maryland sales taxes. The University System of Maryland receives 29% of its budget from Maryland state appropriations. Maryland public schools are funded 47% from local sources and 42% from state programs. Federal funding accounts for only about 10.5% of Maryland school funding — and even that flows through federal programs like Title I and IDEA, not through any general federal tax contribution tied to individual states.

This matters enormously for the "who deserves it" argument. Consider two students applying to the University of Maryland:

The New Yorker's parents contributed nothing to Maryland's tax base while raising their child. Their federal taxes do not flow into Maryland's in-state tuition subsidy in any meaningful or direct way — federal funding is a small fraction of the total, and it is not distributed based on individual taxpayer origin. The subsidy the New Yorker now accesses was built almost entirely by Maryland taxpayers — including the undocumented family next door who is being told they don't qualify for it.

There is no federal tax pipeline from a Manhattan apartment to a University of Maryland lecture hall. The subsidy is Maryland-funded. The undocumented family helped fund it. The New Yorker's family did not. And yet under the citizenship-based framework that opponents of the DREAM Act defend, the New Yorker has a superior claim.

This is not a close call. It is not a values disagreement. It is arithmetic — and the arithmetic does not support the opposition's position.

The Scale Nobody Is Talking About

If the concern is really about limited slots and subsidy access, the right question is not how many undocumented students exist in Maryland — it is who is currently in the pipeline to potentially qualify for in-state tuition, and under what requirements. Applying a symmetric methodology to both groups produces a comparison that is both precise and uncomfortable for the opposition's position.

The qualifying timelines are different for each group and that difference matters: a domestic transplant aged 16-17 who moves to Maryland needs just 12 months to potentially qualify. An undocumented child aged 14-15 already living in Maryland needs 3 years of Maryland high school attendance before they can even begin to qualify. So the correct apples-to-apples comparison is between those two cohorts — each at the start of their respective qualifying windows.

For the transplant side, we have confirmed Census data. In 2024, 16,917 children aged 5-17 moved to Maryland from other states (U.S. Census Bureau, ACS 2024 1-year estimates, Table B07001, margin of error ±3,885). Applying uniform age distribution within the 5-17 band — 2 of 13 single years — yields an estimate of ~2,603 children aged 16-17 entering the 12-month qualifying window that year. For the undocumented side, no equivalent direct count exists. Undocumented population figures are modeled estimates by definition. Applying the same uniform age distribution methodology to the range of published Maryland undocumented population estimates, the 14-15 year old pipeline falls between ~1,800 and ~3,500, with a central estimate of ~2,500. Full methodology is in the box below.

By contrast, the Maryland DREAM Act was estimated at enactment to affect approximately 435 students per entering class (Maryland Department of Legislative Services, 2011) — students who had already spent years or their entire childhoods contributing to the Maryland tax base.

Nobody petitioned for a referendum on the ~2,603 transplant children entering the 12-month qualifying window every year — a confirmed Census figure. Nobody demanded that families moving from Virginia or New York prove three years of Maryland tax returns before their children could potentially qualify for the state subsidy. Nobody asked whether those parents had contributed to the Maryland tax base that funds the universities their children might attend at reduced rates. The scrutiny exists in one direction only — and it is not the direction the numbers suggest warrants the most attention.

The DREAM Act opponents were animated by a modeled pipeline of ~1,800 to ~3,500 undocumented 14-15 year olds already living in Maryland — who faced a 3-year qualifying window, strict eligibility criteria, and compounding barriers that filtered actual enrollment down to 435 per class. They were unbothered by a comparably sized and faster-moving transplant pipeline, confirmed by Census data, with a fraction of the requirements and none of the Maryland history. In no scenario does the undocumented pipeline dramatically exceed the transplant pipeline. The scrutiny was not applied symmetrically. It never is.

The DEI Contradiction No One Wants to Name

There is a logical trap embedded in the anti-immigrant position on university admissions that its proponents have not reckoned with, and it deserves to be stated plainly: if you are against DEI — against allocating slots based on characteristics of birth rather than merit — then you cannot coherently argue for reserving university access for citizens simply because they are citizens. Citizenship acquired at birth is itself a DEI preference. It is an advantage conferred not by achievement but by the accident of where one entered the world.

The in-state tuition debate, properly understood, is a question of state residency — not nationality. Maryland public universities exist to serve Maryland residents. The relevant question is: does this student live here, attend school here, and contribute to this community? Nationality is a federal classification administered by federal agencies under federal law. A state university setting tuition rates has no business importing federal immigration status into a residency determination that has nothing to do with it. Residency is residency. The jurisdictions are separate, and conflating them is not legal reasoning — it is political theater.

When opponents insist that citizenship must be the threshold for in-state access, they are arguing for a preference system based entirely on birth circumstance. That is, by definition, the structure they claim to oppose when it benefits someone else. You were not born a citizen because you were smarter, harder-working, or more deserving. You were born a citizen because your parents happened to be present on the correct side of a geographic line at a particular moment. That is luck. To then invoke that luck as a meritocratic credential — while denouncing DEI as an assault on merit — requires a level of intellectual inconsistency that should embarrass anyone who holds both positions simultaneously.

If the allocation criterion is grades and ability to pay — as opponents themselves propose — then apply it uniformly. A student who grew up in Maryland, excelled academically, and can demonstrate financial need has met every stated standard. Nationality adds nothing to that assessment. It is a non-sequitur dressed as a principle.

The meritocracy argument, taken seriously, actually favors the undocumented student in many cases. She did not inherit her slot. She did not benefit from legacy admissions, from parents who knew the system, from SAT prep courses financed by generational wealth. She competed on terms that were, in many respects, harder than those faced by her documented peers — navigating school without the security of legal status, often while working, often while supporting family members. If she earned the grades and can demonstrate Maryland residency through tax documentation, the meritocratic case for her admission is stronger, not weaker, than the case for a citizen who was simply born here.

Anti-DEI advocates frequently argue that group membership should never override individual achievement. Fine. Then evaluate the individual. Her group membership — undocumented — should count for as little as any other group characteristic in a genuinely meritocratic system. What should count is what she has actually done. And if what she has done is earn the grades, live in Maryland, pay Maryland taxes, and compete for a slot on the merits, then the meritocratic system has already rendered its verdict. The only remaining reason to override that verdict is something other than merit — and it is worth being honest about what that something is.

What Actually Happened: The Opposition's Predictions vs. Reality

The Maryland DREAM Act took effect in January 2013. More than a decade of data is now available. The opposition made specific, falsifiable predictions. Each one can be checked against the record. The verdict is not close.

The in-state share of USM enrollment tells its own story. The percentage of Maryland residents at public four-year institutions dropped from a majority in Fall 2013 to just 40.2% by Fall 2023 — a structural shift of more than 10 percentage points over the decade since the DREAM Act passed. USM was actively recruiting more out-of-state students to capture higher tuition revenue. The "limited slots" that opponents claimed to be protecting for Maryland residents were, simultaneously, being voluntarily ceded to out-of-state students in pursuit of premium pricing. Nobody organized a petition drive over that.

Meanwhile, the international student losses — driven directly by federal immigration enforcement — represent a revenue impact orders of magnitude larger than the DREAM Act's entire fiscal footprint. Eight of Maryland's 11 public universities reported international enrollment declines in Fall 2025, with UMD College Park alone losing nearly 300 students and UMBC losing more than 200 — a 23% drop — directly attributable to Trump administration travel bans, visa interview pauses, and visa revocations. The USM vice chancellor called these losses a threat to "academic strength and scientific innovation." No one called it a magnet policy.

The DREAM Act did not cause the harms opponents predicted. It caused the benefits supporters projected. A decade of data has rendered the verdict. The opposition was wrong on the fiscal cost, wrong on the enrollment impact, wrong on the magnet effect, and wrong on the employment argument. What they were right about is that 435 Maryland-raised students per year would be able to attend college at rates that reflected their actual connection to Maryland. That happened. Maryland is better for it.

The Hidden Cost of Exclusion: What Diverse Universities Are Actually Worth

The "slots" framing of the DREAM Act debate treated university seats as a fixed resource to be rationed among competing claimants. That framing was wrong about the mechanics — tuition rates are not admissions slots — but it was also wrong about the underlying economics. The assumption was that admitting a diverse or immigrant-origin student imposed a cost. The research literature, and the actual revenue data, say the opposite.

University rankings — the mechanism by which institutions attract research funding, top faculty, and premium students — explicitly reward diversity. The QS World University Rankings, one of the two most widely cited global ranking systems, directly incorporates international student ratio and international faculty ratio as scored metrics. An institution attracting a sizeable population of international academics sees benefits in terms of its research and teaching diversity and collaboration. The rankings reflect what decades of educational research have documented: diverse campuses produce better outcomes for everyone on them.

A 2010 meta-analysis published in the Review of Educational Research found that several types of diversity experiences are positively related to several cognitive outcomes in college students. Students who reported higher levels of contact with diverse ideas and diverse people were more likely to show growth in their active thinking processes — specifically, increases in measures of complex thinking. The peer group is not incidental to a university education. It is, for many students, the primary mechanism through which cognitive development occurs. Homogeneous campuses produce less of it.

The economic data on international students specifically is unambiguous. In the 2023-2024 academic year, 1.1 million international students at U.S. colleges and universities contributed $43.8 billion to the U.S. economy and supported more than 378,000 jobs — the highest amount ever recorded. More than half of international students pursued STEM fields, with one in four studying math and computer science and nearly one in five studying engineering. Educational services support more U.S. jobs per $1 billion of exports than any other sector in the economy.

STEM international students and scholars contribute substantially to the American economy, generating billions in revenue for their home institutions while producing cutting-edge research and patents. In 2017, international students formed nearly half of first-year graduate students enrolled in full-time natural science and engineering programs nationally. The research pipeline of American universities — and by extension, American technological competitiveness — runs significantly on immigrant and international talent.

Maryland specifically is not immune to these dynamics. The University System of Maryland's vice chancellor stated directly that Trump administration immigration policies "will constrict the pipeline of international talent that contributes to our academic strength and scientific innovation." This is not an ideological claim. It is an institutional assessment of how enrollment composition affects research capacity, grant competitiveness, and rankings — all of which affect the long-term value of a USM degree for every student enrolled, documented or not.

The DREAM Act debate was framed as a question of whether undocumented students were taking something from documented students. The actual research literature on campus diversity suggests the reverse is closer to the truth: diverse campuses — those that include immigrant-origin students, international students, first-generation students, and students from varied socioeconomic backgrounds — produce better learning outcomes for every student enrolled. The undocumented Maryland student in the classroom is not extracting a resource from her documented peers. She is, in most cases, making the educational experience of everyone around her more valuable.

The politics of exclusion did not just harm the students it targeted. It harmed the institution that excluded them. And the immigration crackdown now driving international students away from Maryland campuses is doing the same thing — at 11 times the fiscal scale — with the same logic, the same politics, and the same refusal to reckon with what universities are actually worth and how they actually work.

Who Is Really Gaming the System?

The income deflation strategies used to reduce Expected Family Contribution on financial aid forms are well-documented and well-compensated — consultants charge thousands of dollars to help upper-middle-class families shelter assets and underreport income to qualify for more aid. These strategies are legal, sophisticated, and entirely inaccessible to a family filing taxes on an ITIN in a language they are still learning. The gaming of need-based systems happens at the top, not the bottom.

Similarly, the "welfare queen" mythology that drives anti-immigrant sentiment nationally has been decisively contradicted by data. The largest racial group receiving federal assistance is white Americans at 43%, reflecting population demographics. The group most consistently paying more than their fair share relative to what they receive — by effective tax rate, by benefit ineligibility, by payroll taxes paid into systems they cannot access — is undocumented immigrants.

Maryland is now, as of 2025, beginning to correct some of these structural imbalances, with Governor Moore's tax reform package raising rates on the highest-income households, closing corporate loopholes, and expanding credits for working families. These are meaningful steps. But the political will required to pass them came after decades of a tax code designed to do the opposite — and the "drain" narrative that distracted from that design served its purpose well.

Remove the Financial Barrier. Watch What Happens.

There is one more data point that reframes this entire debate — and it comes from the outcomes of the very students opponents fought to exclude.

TheDream.US, the nation's largest scholarship program for undocumented college students, published a ten-year impact report in February 2025 tracking more than 11,000 scholars across nearly 80 partner colleges. Their six-year graduation rate for scholars attending four-year colleges: 76%. For context, the national six-year graduation rate across all institution types is 61.1%, and for students at public four-year universities specifically it is 70.7% — both figures from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center's December 2024 data.

Before drawing conclusions from that comparison, a methodological note is necessary. TheDream.US scholars are not a representative sample of all undocumented students. They are a positively selected group — competitive scholarship applicants with institutional advising support, designated Scholar Advisors at every partner campus, and financial assistance that removes the primary barrier most undocumented students face. A fair comparison is not between TheDream.US scholars and the general student population. A fair comparison is between TheDream.US scholars and other scholarship recipients.

That comparison is also available. According to the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS), private scholarship recipients nationally graduate at rates roughly 15 percentage points higher than non-recipients — placing supported scholarship students at approximately 75-80% at the six-year mark. TheDream.US scholars, at 76%, land squarely within that range.

The conclusion is not that undocumented students are uniquely exceptional — though many are. The conclusion is simpler and more structural: when you remove the financial barrier, undocumented students perform exactly like other students with equivalent financial support. Their outcomes are not depressed by lack of ability or motivation. They are depressed by lack of money. The variable is financial access, not human capital.

Now consider who these scholars are: 67% female, 82% first in their family to attend college, with a median household income of $25,000. They are, by every measure, among the lowest-income, least-resourced students in American higher education. Without scholarship support, they would likely fall into the 48.2% graduation rate bracket — the rate for students from the lowest-income neighborhoods nationally. With it, they perform at 76%.

Their children were then charged out-of-state rates to attend it — rates two to three times higher than what a student from New York who arrived last year would pay, after contributing nothing to Maryland's tax base.

This is not a question of merit. The data on outcomes is unambiguous: remove the financial barrier and undocumented students perform exactly as well as other supported students. What opponents defended was not meritocracy. It was a financial penalty imposed on students whose families had already paid — while exempting students whose families had not. That is not a neutral policy. That is reverse DEI: a disadvantage distributed by birth circumstance, dressed up as fiscal prudence.

The "limited slots" argument assumed that giving a slot to an undocumented student meant a citizen lost out. The data suggests the opposite: when financially supported, undocumented students fill those slots at graduation rates comparable to other scholarship recipients. The seat does not go to waste. The investment returns. The only question was whether Maryland would make it — or whether it would continue penalizing students for the tax contributions their parents had already made.

The Case for Educating Every Child in Maryland

There is a version of this argument that goes beyond fiscal arithmetic, though the arithmetic is already sufficient. A child who wants to go to school and is turned away does not become less of a child, or less of a Marylander, or less of a human being. She becomes less educated. The state has gained nothing by that outcome. The school building is still there. The teacher is still paid. The seat is empty.

We do not, as a society, look at a classroom full of eager children and see a problem to be managed. We see — or we should see — the entire point of public investment in education. The argument for keeping certain children out of those classrooms is not a resource argument. The resources are already allocated. It is something else, and it is worth being honest about what that something else is.

Maryland faces a genuine fiscal challenge in the coming years. The Blueprint for Maryland's Future will require sustained revenue investment through 2030 that current projections cannot cover. The answer to that challenge is not to extract more from the population that is already paying above its proportional share while receiving below its proportional benefits. The answer is to look at who has been under-contributing relative to what they receive — and to close that gap.