The Attempt to Bar the Schoolhouse Door-Principle or Politics?

Last year, Congress set out to enact comprehensive immigration reform legislation. What began as a serious effort to reduce legal immigration and crack down on illegal immigration was gradually diluted as one special interest after another chipped away at provisions they found unfavorable. What emerged from the House and Senate is far less than what the American people wanted but, nonetheless, an improvement over the current disaster that passes for our immigration policy.

Now even these mild reforms appear to be in jeopardy as both parties and both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue engage in a game of political chicken over a single provision of the House bill. Forty-seven senators and President Clinton are threatening to kill the legislation if it emerges from the House-Senate conference committee still carrying the amendment that allows states to decide whether to provide free public education to illegal aliens.

Opposition to the House provision, named for its author, Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), is less a principled stand for the welfare of children than a game of political brinkmanship. It is clearly more important to many in Washington to find a way for their political opponents to take the blame for failing to pass an immigration bill than it is to do something positive to deal with a pressing national problem.

It is ironic that many of the same people feigning outrage over the idea that states should not be mandated to pay for educating illegal aliens also worked tirelessly to defeat a mandatory work verification system. The statement signed by 47 senators argues, “The ‘job magnet,’ not education, drives illegal immigration.” Yet many of these same legislators stripped the provision for mandatory verification from the bill, which had been strongly recommended by the bipartisan commission on immigration reform as a way to “demagnetize” the job lure.

There is something of a “heads we win, tails you lose” logic to this sort of reasoning. It acknowledges that jobs draw illegal aliens to this country, but since Congress is unwilling to remove the attraction, taxpayers must bear the consequences. Those who feel that they should not have to pay for the education of people here illegally are chided for wanting to punish children. Opponents of controlling illegal immigration have a long history of employing the rhetoric of moral superiority to make sure our borders are never secured.

Americans are among the most compassionate people in the world, but they have their limits. The current policy requires them to sign a blank check. However much it costs to provide education to illegal aliens, that’s how much the taxpayers must cough up. They have no say in the matter and there is no limit to their liability. In California, the current price tag for K-12 education for illegal aliens is $2 billion a year, one-third more than it cost in 1992. The Gallegly amendment gives each state the right to decide where the limits of compassion should be drawn, rather than having them dictated by circumstance.

The 1982 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court that is widely interpreted as saying that illegal aliens have a right to free public education actually acknowledges that the interests of taxpayers must be weighed. In its 5-4 ruling, the court recognized that at some point, paying for the education of illegal aliens might become a “substantial burden” to the community, and that some limits to public liability might have to be instituted.

Beleaguered taxpayers find it curious that the moral outrage of opponents of the Gallegly amendment is directed only at them. None of the 47 senators who protested the amendment had a word of condemnation for the parents of these children. Taxpayers, who tire of paying for the education of children who have no right to be in this country, are castigated as uncaring. The parents who brought them here illegally and would allow them to go uneducated rather than returning home seem immune from any moral sanction.

The real outrage is not that the current legislation contains a provision to protect taxpayers from the growing costs of educating illegal aliens. What is outrageous is that Congress and the White House did not make a serious effort to deal with the reasons those kids are in our schools in the first place. That failure should not result in an open-ended financial commitment on the part of the American taxpayer.