Educating Illegal Children Is Educating

¶ … Educating Illegal Children

Is Educating the Children of Illegal Immigrants a Burden to the Public School System

2003 byline appearing in the Washington Times reported that the states pay 7.4 billion dollars annually to educate the children of undocumented parents, or illegal aliens in the United States (Dinan, 2003, p. A04). The article quotes figures supplied by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which probably gained the data by way of a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request, these numbers are difficult to find in the vast amounts of information published by the United States Government. The goal of the government is to mitigate the information surrounding the cost and risks to American taxpayers posed by the undocumented people in the United States. Presumably, the government's reason for hoping to mitigate the negative is prevent an all out uprising that has might give birth to a new avenue of racism in the hearts and minds of Americans; and to prevent vigilante actions that could put at risk the lives of millions of undocumented adults and their children. Whatever the reason for making the figures associated with the cost of caring for illegal aliens in America, we know that the cost to the American taxpayer for educating the minor children of illegal aliens is indeed a burden to the taxpayer and to public education systems that are struggling to stay afloat in an atmosphere of tax cuts and rigorous laws like the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002.

The Cost to States

According to the Washington Times article, FAIR sifted through the rhetoric of political right and left that seems to dodge the issue of illegal entry into the United States, and found a formula that yielded the numbers cited in the article. FAIR calculated the cost this way:

The report's authors used the Urban Institute's estimate of 1.1 million illegal immigrant schoolchildren in the United States, then broke that down by state using the Census Bureau's estimate for illegal immigrants per state.

The costs are based on per-pupil averages and don't account for extra costs of providing English as a second language classes, nor do they account for disparities of per-pupil costs in different counties in a state (p. A04)."

Of course the states hardest hit by the cost of educating children of illegal aliens are the border states; those states that border the southern border of the United States and Mexico, which represents the largest point of entry for undocumented people into the United States.

Under federal law, it is illegal for schools to deny admission on the basis of citizenship, race or other criteria that might give rise to allegations of racism. As a result, it was reported in a 2002 Washington Times byline by Jerry Seper (2002), the border states are experiencing severe repercussions stemming from providing educate and healthcare to illegal aliens (A01). The articles cites the case of Pyler v. Doe, which resulted in overturning a State of Texas law intended to prevent the children of illegal aliens from attending school in that state (A01). The article describes the events surrounding the case, which also resolved the question of whether or not states were responsible for educating the children of illegal aliens.

In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, said children of illegal immigrants have a constitutional right to a free public education. The high court prohibited schools from adopting policies or taking actions that would deny illegal aliens access to education based on their immigration status.

The ruling, in a case known as Plyler vs. Doe, overturned a Texas law that at the time allowed school districts to bar illegal immigrants or require them to pay tuition.

By denying these children a basic education," the court said, "we deny them the ability to live within the structure of our civic institutions, and foreclose any realistic possibility that they will contribute in even the smallest way to the progress of our nation.

It is difficult to understand precisely what the state hopes to achieve by promoting the perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries, surely adding to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare and crime," the majority opinion said.

The court said school officials could not require children to prove they were in the country legally by asking for documents such as citizenship papers, but could require proof the child of illegal immigrants lived within school district attendance zones, as they might for any other child.

But the high court warned the schools to be "careful of unintentional attempts to document students' legal status," which could lead to the "chilling" of their rights. The court said schools could not inquire about a student's immigration status, make inquiries that could expose the students' legal status and could not require the students to supply a Social Security number.

The court also prohibited any communication with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service concerning a student's immigration status and said the schools should not cooperate with the INS in any manner that "jeopardizes immigrant students and their right of access (A01)."

The Supreme Court's ruling established an entitlement to the children of non-citizens in America, and people who entered the country illegally, rewarding them with access to taxpayer sponsored education that has drained the resources that should be available to the American children and those people who entered America by the required lawful ways.

In 2002, the former INS Commissioner, Doris Meissner, was asked this question by a journalist for Foreign Policy magazine:

FP: Do you believe there should be restrictions on the social services illegal immigrants can access?

DM: You cannot allow illegal immigrants access to all services. It creates too much incentive for people to come here. But you can't deprive them of all social services either, particularly healthcare and education. The debate on disincentives to counteract illegal immigration took place in the mid-1990s with then Governor Pete Wilson and Proposition 187 in California. My view is, and the view of the Clinton administration had been, that we restrict access to work. People come here to get jobs, and we have to focus on that. Governor Wilson and the Republican Party believed at the time that we needed to severely restrict social services. That approach was held unconstitutional in the courts. But it led to legislation in 1996 that restricted access to social services, not just to illegal immigrants but to legal immigrants, which was a departure for us historically. Since then, there's been a lot of backtracking. I think we have decided as a society that even if people are illegal, healthcare and education have to be made available to them -- because ignorant people are going to create problems for you, and their illnesses can put the rest of the population at risk (p. 23)."

It is not that Americans as a society do not support the notion of opportunity through education; or that they are not of a charitable mind and spirit. Americans merely like to choose their charities, and when people enter the country illegally, contrary to the very system under which Americans live and a systems that Americans believe protects their Constitutional freedoms; then they become less focused on the charitable act and more focused on the resulting chaos when the laws of the nation are thwarted as is the case of illegal entry into the United States.

There is no quid pro-for Americans in providing free education to the children of illegal immigrants. Americans have become the camels of the world; supporting the needy of the world with little complaint until recent years. Recent years have seen an increased trend towards globalization, seemingly supported by American political leaders with little dialogue between those political leaders and their constituents. As a result, Americans have seen jobs that they believe should be done by Americans outsourced to third world nations. They have also seen corporations use outsourcing as a means to dump employee rosters of individuals who receive benefits like healthcare, vacation pay, sick pay, and who make good wages for doing technical work, to outsource those jobs to third world countries; only to return a year later and offer the employees their jobs but as 1099 contract workers without the benefits they once had for those jobs.

These conditions make the issue of educating the children of illegal aliens more sensitive in the American heart and mind. The question is: Will educating the children of illegal aliens be the straw that breaks the camel's back? If current trends arising out of globalization and illegal immigration do not change, then Americans' charitable hearts and minds will change as they begin to experience more and more of the impacts of those conditions economically and socially.