White House: Don't discourage undocumented from schools

[alp227]

Source: USA Today

The Obama administration will issue new guidance to K-12 public schools around the country on Thursday, emphasizing that school officials can no longer discourage undocumented immigrants from enrolling in their schools.

"Such actions and policies not only harm innocent children, they also markedly weaken our nation ... by leaving young people unprepared and ill-equipped to succeed and contribute to what is, in many cases, the only home they have ever known," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement.

Starting with Arizona's landmark 2010 law, the nation saw a wave of state and local laws cracking down on undocumented immigrants. Some of those laws required parents of children to provide additional documentation to their local schools establishing the immigration status of the child or the parents.

Federal officials say that violates both federal law and the 1982 Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe, which struck down a Texas law that allowed school districts to bar undocumented immigrants from public schools. In a letter co-authored by officials at the departments of Justice and Education, they said state and local school districts continue attempting to prevent undocumented immigrants from going to school.

Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/05/08/obama-immigration-undocumented-students/8840289/

[kylie5432]

1. As a teacher and a progressive, I have to disagree with our government

I know I am on the opposite side of this from many of you, but undocumented immigration has helped to ruin schools in Los Angeles and I hear the same from my colleague in Northern California. In his district, the administrators got rid of accelerated math to include lower level math for those who don't speak English. This drove high achieving kids from the middle school and into charters - which I don't like. The administrators wouldn't listen to the parents so they pulled their kids out. So we have to be intellectually honest. It is unfair to the citizen population to overwhelm their schools with millions of those who don't speak English while the citizens pay for it.

In one of my classes, 10 girls were either pregnant or had a child at home. The desire to go to college is low, no matter what the examples set by the teachers are. It is truly a tragedy.

Every nation is essentially a nation of immigrants but it has to stop somewhere. With 320 million people and no jobs, we just have to stop.

Since I have taught for 11 years I feel I have the experience to speak out in a unpopular way on this topic. True progressives don't believe in unregulated immigration because it lowers wages.

[alp227]

3. Wow...really?

Do you know anything about the DREAM Act? Maybe your experience shelters you from it, but if you look at the DREAMers movement you'll notice a LOT of these immigrant children want to be successful in America - it's just the sins of their parents, if you will, holding them back! Don't stereotype every undocumented immigrant because of your unpleasant experience. And guess what? In a nation that commits flagrantly illegal hiring of these immigrants...whether to harvest our food, clean our offices, flip our burgers, tend our gardens, you name it...and then start families, we've got to pay the long term consequences (like comprehensive immigration reform) of short term gains (cheap labor).

[firesalesman]

4. Absolutely right.

I hope you don't get banned for saying this.

[Agschmid]

12. Why would they get banned?

[firesalesman]

18. Why, indeed?

[pampango]

5. "Every nation is essentially a nation of immigrants but it has to stop somewhere." At least since

the 1840's with the Know Nothing nativists, there have been Americans who have said "It has to stop NOW."

Every generation of Americans has been proud of PAST immigrants. (It's hard to complain about your own parents or grandparents immigrating.) It has always been (at least since the 1840's) CURRENT and FUTURE immigrants that were the great fear.

Of course, if the Know Nothings had succeeded, we would not have the rich immigration-based, multicultural society that we have today.

[Drunken Irishman]

6. Good thing it didn't stop before your family emigrated over here, eh?

What a ridiculous post.

[firesalesman]

7. Is illegal immigration the same as legal immigration?

I don't think so. If you really are of Irish descent, your ancestors came legally.

[Drunken Irishman]

8. If the rules that are in place were in place then, they wouldn't be here legally.

Do you not get that?

[firesalesman]

10. If Paris were the same size as New York....

...would New York be smaller than it is, or would Paris be bigger than it is?

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

So much for counterfactuals.

[Drunken Irishman]

11. Ridiculous point...

They're two completely different points. We're only American because of lax immigration policy for a huge chunk of our nation's early history. Had the rules we have in place today been around then, most of us wouldn't be here. We're fortunate the older generations weren't as heartless to immigration and the American Dream as we've become and that's the point of my post. It's a good thing it didn't stop before your family emigrated over here, eh?

It's ironic that a nation of immigrants are so anti-immigration. It's the total American mentality - I have mine, so fuck you.

[firesalesman]

13. Laws change with times.

As times changed, immigration rules got stricter. This helped to protect the US working class, whose standard of living is currently being destroyed, in part, by illegal immigration. No other country in the world would permit its immigration laws to be broken wholesale, as we have done.

Instead of ignoring our own immigration laws, we should (a) enforce them, and (b) do something to help third world countries like Mexico improve their own economies so their citizens do not need to leave their countries to find work. Our current policies are not an act of kindness toward people in the Third World or to our own people, whose wages continue to be forced down by the huge injection of undocumented workers. And don't tell me that Americans won't take the jobs that illegals will take. If construction and agriculture jobs paid a decent wage, Americans would take those jobs, just as they used to do.

If you care about the US working class, you will think twice about supporting illegal immigration.

[Drunken Irishman]

14. Like I said, you personify the new American ideal...

"I've got mine so fuck off..."

And as I said before, it's a good thing our laws weren't as xenophobic back then as they are today or most of us would be slumming it up in another country. Our immigration laws are restrictive, ridiculous and have done nothing to change the landscape of illegal immigration. They've failed. Supporting a failed immigration policy, when you yourself benefited directly from lax immigration, is not only hypocritical, it's a drain.

[firesalesman]

15. You have a right to your interpretation of my view

Cheers!

[JoePhilly]

9. So undocumented girls are more likely to get pregnant than documented girls?

I call BS.

[LeftyMom]

16. So why are SE Asian kids the best performers in CA schools?

They're either immigrants or the children of immigrants, many of them undocumented, and many of them don't learn English until they go to school. Why are you talking about "immigrants" without including them?

Do you think "immigrants" is the polite word for Mexicans? Because that seems to be the implication in your post, based on talking about jobs and language and all the usual code word crap.

You sound like an old Pete Wilson campaign ad.

[Starry Messenger]

17. I teach in Northern California and that whole post is unmitigated horseshit.

Immigration doesn't lower wages, asshole bosses who undercut wages to exploited workers lower wages.

More kids are interested in college now that they aren't going to be charged out of state tuition fees--which put college completely out of reach to immigrant kids for years. How could you plan for a future when you'd have to pay out the nose, unfairly, for college?

Schools are there to teach children who need to learn, not exclude children on the basis of immigration status. The kind of system you are advocating would lead to degradation of entire generations of children, and would escalate racist violence in a heartbeat.

Creating an "other" in any society leads to a genocidal society.

[CreekDog]

19. How do know know which is undocumented?

You don't check their papers, that is for sure.

[DustyJoe]

2. Goose vs Gander

Maybe documentation will work both ways.
To enroll a child in our local school district we need ...

. Childs Birth Certificate
. Parent or Guardian ID
. Current valid Immunization records
. Proof of current physical residency within school and bus boundaries

Maybe a push for people with no documentation could relax some of the document requirements for the rest of us.