No School for Children Here Illegally : The landmark court ruling admitting them gave Congress room to alter states’ authority.

When illegal immigrants sit down in public school classrooms, the desks, textbooks and blackboards in effect become stolen property--stolen from the students rightfully entitled to these resources.

That is why I have introduced legislation to allow each state to decide for itself whether to provide those who have entered this country illegally with the same public education benefits as U.S. citizens and legal immigrants.

This legislation does not pertain to children born here to parents who are illegal immigrants. Under our Constitution, these children are U.S. citizens at birth and, as such, are entitled to a public education. Only those who have physically entered this country illegally would be subject to the terms of this bill. The time has long since passed when we can turn a blind eye to the effect that this group is having on our public schools.

California alone spends $1.7 billion a year to educate illegal immigrants. New York spends $634 million; Florida, $424 million; Texas, $419 million, and the list goes on and on.

Those with no legal right to even be present in this country are crowding classrooms, consuming supplies and compromising the quality of education provided to the children for whom our schools were created.

The foundation for all of this inequity can be traced back to the Supreme Court’s Plyler vs. Doe decision in 1982. In this oft-cited case, the court ruled 5-4 that under the equal protection clause of the Constitution, even those individuals who had violated federal law by entering this country were entitled to a free public education.

Much more rarely mentioned is one element of the court’s majority opinion, written by Justice William J. Brennan Jr., in which he noted that Congress had failed to prevent illegal immigrants from occupying public schools.

“Faced with an equal protection challenge respecting the treatment of aliens,” Brennan wrote, “we agree that the courts must be attentive to congressional policy; the exercise of congressional power might well affect the state’s prerogatives to afford differential treatment to a particular class of aliens. But we are unable to find in the congressional immigration scheme any statement of policy that might weigh significantly in arriving at an equal protection balance concerning the state’s authority to deprive these children of an education.”

It is my intention to take Justice Brennan up on his invitation to enact the “congressional policy” that would allow the states to decide whether to remove from their schools those who, under the law, should be removed from this country.

Some will argue that we have a responsibility to educate this group, regardless of their legal status, simply because they are here. My response would be that an act of geography is not the same as an act of jurisprudence. Just because someone has succeeded in breaking into your house, that does not entitle him to a seat by the fireplace, a warm meal and a good night’s sleep. Only in the case of illegal immigration, it seems, is illegality so rewarded, condoned and encouraged.

Nothing irritates and refutes the advocates of illegal immigration more than discussing the issue against the harsh light of the law. These advocates would have us believe that illegal immigration represents an enormous gray area, a category of individuals for whom all allowances must be made and of whom we can demand nothing for fear of being portrayed as racist and xenophobic. It is a simple truth that in the arena of public debate, when facts fail, it is “race” that rises.

We need to stop making allowances and start making laws--or at least ensure that those laws already on the books are being enforced and protected. We cannot allow the advocates of lawlessness in the form of illegal immigration to decriminalize and rationalize acts that are at their very core against our standards of fair play and justice.

The promise of a free education is only one of the magnets we have created to encourage people to violate our borders. It should be clear that any solution to our immigration crisis must include an elimination of these incentives. Allowing states to make their own decisions on education serves this purpose.

Illegal immigrants belong back in their countries of origin, and we should do everything possible to encourage them to embrace that simple truth.