Education on taxpayers' dime: Are undocumented students gett
Education on taxpayers' dime: Are undocumented students getting free ride in schools?
The Oregonian (Portland, Oregon)
October 7, 2009 Wednesday
In his column on Sunday, Richard LaMountain estimated a single cost related to undocumented immigrants, estimating that the Beaverton School District alone spent $7.3 million to $12.1 million on undocumented immigrant students ["Costs come at expense of programs, other students," Oct. 4].
He neglected to calculate how much those families paid in taxes and, in particular, Social Security.
While some studies --such as "The impact of unauthorized immigrants on the budgets of state and local governments" by the Congressional Budget Office --assert that there is only a modest net cost to some states from undocumented residents, these figures do not even include the federal taxes paid by undocumented immigrants.
Even if undocumented workers have taxpayer identification, they will never receive any benefit from what they pay into Social Security. The money received from this population goes on to benefit all U.S. citizens.
According to The New York Times, undocumented immigrant workers are providing as much as $7 billion each year to Social Security.
ANGUS MCCAMANT
Aloha
Richard LaMountain's opinion piece "Costs come at expense of programs, other students" [Oct. 4] spouts a whirlwind of statistics in an effort to prove that school-age illegal immigrants are draining the public education system. Reliable statistics regarding undocumented immigrants are difficult to obtain for obvious reasons.
However, most undocumented immigrants working at farms, plants and restaurants are having taxes withheld from their paychecks. They are not able to apply for the refunds that others in their income bracket receive.
What services do they receive for their tax contributions? They are not eligible for welfare, food stamps, public housing or Medicaid.
If fact, education is one of the only benefits undocumented immigrants are eligible for --and that only applies to the 15 percent of undocumented immigrants that are school-age children, according to LaMountain's own statistics. In the end, what exactly is LaMountain suggesting?
Should we deport all 12 million to 20 million undocumented immigrants? Should we bar innocent children from our schools? Children cannot control where they live and should not be punished for the "crimes" of their parents.
SARAH WILLOUGHBY
Oregon City
Richard LaMountain wants Congress to overturn Plyler v. Doe, a 1982 Supreme Court decision prohibiting public schools from excluding children who are undocumented immigrants. Since Plyler held that excluding such children violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, it cannot be reversed by Congress alone.
It would take a constitutional amendment.
More fundamentally, excluding these children would be horrible public policy, as even the four justices who dissented in Plyler recognized.
"Were it our business to set the nation's social policy, I would agree without hesitation that it is senseless for an enlightened society to deprive any children --including illegal aliens --of an elementary education," wrote the four dissenting justices in the Supreme Court decision, including Chief Justice Warren Burger. "I fully agree that it would be folly --and wrong --to tolerate creation of a segment of society made up of illiterate persons."
PAUL F. DELESPINASSE
Corvallis
DeLespinasse is an emeritus professor of political science at Adrian College in Michigan.
Richard LaMountain takes a practical look at education, much as a family discusses what it can and cannot afford.
Unfortunately, the 500-pounder sitting on the couch is a teenager with a credit card, also known as the federal government. The teenager says, "Wouldn't it be nice to educate all those poor folks? Here's my credit card. Let's do it."
All the poor folks in the Southern hemisphere hear the sound of that card being swiped and they are on their way.
What do we do with the next 100 million? Resources are finite. We cannot continue to allow the courts to hand out free education to the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with compassion and everything to do with survival.
MIKE PETERSON
Newport
There is a fundamental flaw in the logic of Richard LaMountain's opinion piece in the Sunday edition of The Oregonian.
He does not realize, or conceals from his readers, his knowledge that many of the children of undocumented immigrants are themselves American citizens.
He believes the number of undocumented immigrant children in Beaverton schools to be between 9.4 percent to 15.6 percent of the total, based on an estimate from the total numbers of Hispanic students in the school district.
In order to achieve the sort of cost savings he suggests are possible, you would have to ban not only undocumented children but also the citizen children of undocumented immigrants.
During World War II, the United States imprisoned not only Japanese citizens but also their children, who were American citizens.
Of course, most people realize today that this was unjust and violated the tenets of what really makes America great. The anti-immigrant sentiment of today will, no doubt, be recognized in 60 years as similarly anti-American and unjust.
STEWART KING
www6.lexisnexis.com
