If kids aren't educated in school, they'll be educated on the streets.
Should the children of illegal immigrants be turned away from public schools? Unless a controversial amendment to the new federal immigration bill is stripped out before the bill becomes law, that is exactly what states will be permitted to do.
You can't blame the states for feeling frustrated. The federal government has not controlled illegal immigration, and the states have been stuck with paying for the services illegal immigrants use. But denying their children an education is no way to solve the problem. For one thing, it is probably unconstitutional. A similar Texas law was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1982, and a California law, which passed in 1994, has never been implemented and is currently mired in the courts.
There's no question that adults who are undocumented aliens should be held accountable. But is it fair to make their children pay? They did not choose to break the law, and they can't go back home on their own. As the 1982 Supreme Court decision put it, punishing the children of illegal aliens for the wrongdoing of their parents is grossly unfair -- it "does not comport with the fundamental conceptions of justice."
It is also unlikely to be effective. The amendment says that allowing undocumented kids to attend U.S. schools "promotes violations," but this is ridiculous. Does a Mexican worker leave the village where he was born and undertake a journey that is difficult and dangerous simply to enroll his kid in kindergarten in L.A.? These parents don't come here to take advantage of U.S. schools; they come to get jobs. Refusing to educate the kids will not make a dent in the number of illegal aliens entering the country, and it won't make the ones who are here pack up and go home. As a deterrent, it is worthless.
Supporters of the amendment admit there are problems, but they say that the biggest problem is the cost of educating the children of illegal aliens. However, the cost of not educating these children is even greater. Even if they never become citizens, they are likely to remain in this country -- probably in the states and cities where they now live. The 1982 Supreme Court decision talks about the price children themselves will pay if they are denied an education: "The inability to read and write will handicap the individual deprived of basic education each and every day of his life." It also points out that the cost is passed on to the rest of us:
By denying these children a basic education, we ... 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 creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries, surely adding to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare, and crime .... [W]hatever savings might be achieved by denying these children an education, they are wholly insubstantial in light of the costs involved to these children, the State and the Nation.
These sentiments are being echoed today by a large number of people -- Republicans as well as Democrats. Although Robert Dole strongly favors the amendment refusing these children an education (he was on the other side in 1982), other prominent Republicans such as Senators Orrin Hatch and Alan Simpson, Mayor Rudolph Guiliani, Governor George W. Bush, and former President George Bush say it is unwise and wrong. So do many law enforcement officials. If kids aren't educated in school, they'll be educated on the streets, where they will become victims or victimizers -- and in many cases permanent charges on society. An article in the Wall Street Journal ("The Cops' View: Don't Close School to Illegal Aliens," June 26, 1996) quotes Dade Country, Florida, police chief Donald Warshaw, who says, "If you're a street juvenile with no direction ... your whole morality is going to be based on what you learn on the streets. That's going to drive you to the commission of minor crimes, leading to the commission of major crimes."
If we are really serious about discouraging illegal immigration, a good way of doing it would be to issue ID cards showing that people are entitled to work. But this kind of proposal never gets anywhere because too many employers depend on the cheap labor that illegal immigrants provide. Supporting an amendment to refuse undocumented kids an education doesn't cost these people anything -- at least not now - -and it gives the impression that they are tough on illegal immigration.
The Supreme Court got it right in 1982. Fairness, common sense -- and cost-benefit analysis -- all tell us that it is wrong to deny the children of undocumented aliens a free public education. One way or another, most of them will be participants in our society. It is up to us to decide what kind of participants they will be.