Holder Outburst Raises Concerns About American Subsidy of Illegal Immigrants’ Public Education

By Joe Guzzardi
May 21, 2014

In an official Justice Department statement issued recently, Attorney General Eric Holder angrily demanded that U.S. public schools remember their obligation to enroll all students regardless of their immigration status. Education Secretary Arne Duncan joined Holder in delivering his menacing remarks. Citing “troubling reports,” Holder threatened that his department would “do everything it can” to make sure schools fulfill their obligations, pursuant to guidelines it wrote in 2011.  

During my 25-year career in the California public school system, illegal immigrants were routinely enrolled without inquiry into whether they were legal U.S. residents. The only documentation requested, and then only infrequently, was evidence that enrollees lived within the district.

The American Civil Liberties Union, however, insists that schools in Alabama, New York, New Jersey and Arizona routinely require proof of legal standing.  Holder said that overreaching enrollment procedures have a “chilling effect” on illegal immigrant students and their parents. 

While it may be true that a tiny percentage of the nation’s 14,000 school districts have wrongly asked for legal status corroboration, the broader, more practical and most important questions are how long the U.S should be expected to educate the world including illegal immigrants and, by extension, how much longer should taxpayers be obligated to subsidize aliens’ educations?

The recent Holder guidance has its origin in the 1982 Supreme Court decision which held that illegal immigrant children have the right to public education. In Plyler v. Doe, the court struck down a Texas statute to deny funding to such children. The 5-4 vote ruled that the Texas law violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, which reads: “No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Interestingly, Chief Justice Warren Burger expressed the majority of Americans’ opinions when he wrote in his dissent that the Equal Protection Clause doesn’t mandate identical treatment of different categories of persons. Furthermore, wrote Berger, it’s not “irrational” for Texas or any other state to conclude that it doesn’t have the same responsibility to provide benefits to persons “whose very presence in the state and this country” is illegal as it does to provide benefits for persons lawfully present. Berger concluded that states may “reasonably and constitutionally” withhold government services to illegal immigrants.

Although much Capitol Hill speculation has centered on whether aliens should be included in the Affordable Care Act, less attention is paid to the costlier problem of educating illegal immigrants. Because many illegal immigrants are relatively young and generally healthy, they need less health care on average than U.S. citizens and therefore represent a small percentage of national medical spending.

But also because they’re young and often have above-average fertility rates, illegal immigrants account for a disproportionately large share of public education costs, by far the biggest expense state and municipal governments incur on aliens’ behalf. Census Bureau and National Center for Education Statistics analysts predict that over the coming decades immigration will account for 96 percent of the overall school-age population increase with illegal immigration accounting for half the increase. Billions have been spent and billions more will be spent to educate foreign nationals.

Holder used his feigned outrage over illegal immigrant education enrollment policies as another platform for the Obama administration’s determination to promote more immigration, pass amnesty legislation and, at the same time, deport ever fewer aliens.

Although it’s inconceivable that he’d do it, Holder should join Americans in their understandable concern about the folly of endlessly subsidizing illegal immigrants in increasingly overcrowded classrooms. 

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Joe Guzzardi is a Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Writing Fellow whose columns have been syndicated since 1987. Contact him at [email protected]