Is it Illegal to Pursue Your Education?
A recent policy change by the North Carolina Community College System is stirring up all kinds of consternation, and our friends at the Pope Civitas Institute are in the middle of it.
Earlier this month, the NCCCS lawyer (David Sullivan) issued a policy memo to the state's 57 community colleges directing them to admit undocumented individuals. Previously, about a third of the state's community colleges had policies that denied admission to undocumented individuals. About a third more had no formal policy on the issue, but had practices that effectively barred undocumented individuals from attending.
The new policy brings the community college admission policy into alignment with the existing UNC system admissions policy. Both policies say that undocumented students cannot be barred admission if they meet academic and other requirements to be let in. But, the students must pay out-of-state tuition since they are not legal North Carolina residents.
The new policy is based on a 1997 advisory opinion from then-Attorney General Mike Easley. Typically, Governor Easley backed off the new policy quickly.
The right-wing reaction has retread their same tired arguments. What's most interesting in this case is that one of their most tried and true arguments doesn't apply. Several Republicans have already said that they can't believe taxpayers would be required to pay to educate people who are here illegally. But the NCCCS says that the typical out-of-state tuition rate of $7,400 per year is well above the $5,375 it takes to educate a student each year. Therefore, admitting undocumented students is actually a way for the cash-strapped community college system to save taxpayers money!
Over at NC Policy Watch, Chris Fitzsimon has a great piece on why it matters that these are "Children, not Illegals or Aliens." I'm not going to rehash his comments here. I'll just emphasize his point that this policy change is really going to benefit children who were brought here unwillingly by parents who crossed the border.
As an educator, I work with the children of undocumented immigrants every day. They are top performers in high schools across the state, and they have a lot to offer to their new home if only we would let them.
See, when kids are in school they learn more than the curriculum. They learn the American Dream. Every day they hear "If you work hard and get your education, you can be whatever you want to be." Except that for these kids, the rug gets pulled out from under them as soon as they graduate from high school. Their options for pursuing post-secondary education are limited and they have no way to pursue legal work or citizenship.
Morally, I think it's anti-American to pitch the American Dream to children of immigrants and then withhold education and opportunity from them. Economically, we need these students fully participating in our workforce to sustain our economic strength in the 21st century. As UNC's Dr. James Johnson has been explaining for years, changing demographics in the U.S. are leading us towards a severe labor shortfall. To sustain our economy, we will have to add immigrant labor to our workforce over the next 20-30 years AND to educate every single child currently enrolled in U.S. public schools (including children of undocumented immigrants). Obviously, the debate about community college admissions is just a tiny example of why comprehensive immigration reform is so badly needed.
What will happen now? Will the current media cycle on this issue die down? Maybe, but the political cycle is likely to continue.
The current Community College President, Martin Lancaster, is due to step down next year. Meanwhile, the CC board is searching for a new president. While it's likely that Lancaster took action on this now because his term is ending, it's not clear whether or not he had the support of his board. Will this become a central issue in their hiring process?
Because the legal precedent came from the AG's office, there is already pressure on Roy Cooper to rule on the policy. And you can be certain that a bill will be introduced in the legislature to overturn the policy and ban "illegals" from community colleges. Such a bill might also seek to overturn the UNC system admissions policy. Since it's pretty likely such a bill would pass, we have to ask if the Democratic leadership can keep the bill from getting to a floor vote.
In the meantime, there are a few things progressives can do.
-Write letters to your local papers supporting the policy.
-Call on Community College Board Members to uphold the new policy and hire a president who will do the same.
-Call on legislators to resist any attempt to intrude on the Community College's autonomy by banning enrollment of undocumented students.
These are good kids. They want to be teachers, firemen, mechanics, and even politicians! It's time to end shortsighted attempts to fix immigration policy by punishing children. Do we really want them to be both uneducated and working illegally? There are clearly better alternatives.
- Graig's blog
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Front paged.
Leave it to the free-market fundamentalists to not get this. It's time we all got in the swing of being good global citizens and neighbors, and realize that a few dollars spent now can save us thousands spent later.
Thanks, Graig.
Be the change you wish to see in the world. --Gandhi
The only way a bill like this would pass....
is with Democratic support. It is those "Democrats" who want to punish children that we need to get rid of PDQ.
One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Great post, Graig. Thank you.
Civitas has a long, sad history of short-sighted, insular thinking. Their position on this issue is no surprise. For all their rhetoric about the miracle of free-market fundamentalism, it's ironic that they draw a line around the flow of capital when it comes from th children of people in this country illegally.
Of course if they really got their way on immigration issues, two things would happen. First, the profit margins for all the rich white guys who fund their propaganda would poof overnight because their labor forces would disappear. And second, they'd further distance themselves from legal immigrants who increasingly (and rightly) see the Republican Party as the xenophobic haters that they are.
Help With Law Enforcement: Repeal the Law
I have a metal sign on my wall. It hung on a wall inside a barn in eastern NC for more than 80 years (it's from the 1920s, in other words). I bought it at an auction, and had it framed, because it captures the libertarian solution to a whole lot of problems, including the very real one raised in the post above.
The little metal sign says,
Help the President with Law Enforcement. Repeal the 18th Amendment. For Prosperity .
The coalition that kept Prohibition in place is referred to, in Poli Sci circles, as the "Baptists and Bootleggers" coalition. The Baptists for moral reasons, and Bootleggers for economic reasons, wanted the state to crack down on legal liquor sales. Baptists got their morality, and the bootleggers got a protected monopoly.
I agree with Graig, completely. But the solution is not, or is not ONLY, a policy that welcomes illegals to schools. Sure, that's the right thing to do. The real solution would be new little metal signs:
Help the President with Law Enforcement. Make Immigration Legal, for Law-Abiding Hard-Working Foreigners. For Prosperity.
Because here's the thing: The Baptist and Bootlegger coalition has come back. Lou Dobbs and xenophobic nativist elements of our population want to pull the ladder up. "I've got mine! Screw you!" So they play the moralistic public loudmouth role.
And the Bootleggers? Well, those are the giant ag corporations, and the meatpackers, and all the other companies that depend on KEEPING immigration illegal so they can underpay, abuse, and nearly enslave immigrants. That's the economic part.
So, my point is that allowing illegals in schools is a baby step. Let's make them legal, and we'll solve all sorts of problems that DERIVE from the underlying irrationality of our immgration policy.
"It is to secure our rights that we resort to government at all." --Thomas Jefferson to Francois D'Ivernois, 1795.
I'd love to hear more about this . . . operationally
How do we get from "screw the illegals" to "Make Immigration Legal, for Law-Abiding Hard-Working Foreigners?"
Is this the oft-debated "path to citizenship" that has been a wedge issue inside both parties, separating the patriotic purists from the borderless business interests?"
I don't always agree with you, but I always love how you think.
**********
Follow up question . . . what's your view of baby-steps vs. big bangs? It seems to me that neither works very well as a practical matter, regardless of the issue. Which generally pushes me toward large, transformational change. That's clearly the winning model for certain high-growth sectors in business.
Two Brief Answers
1. Remember, there is no monolithic business interest here. Some business interests favor reducing borders, others want to keep them. I think our immigration policy should be as follows:
a. Gain control of borders. I don't mean a wall, but I mean some actual way of keeping criminals and repeat offenders, and terrorists, out.
b. Guest worker program. Make it possible for people to be legal. Plus, this is a probation period. "Law-abiding, hard-working" immigrants wouldn't get deported. And, given (a) above, deportation would stick. Use fingerprints and retinal scans for positive IDs.
c. Citizenship for guest workers who qualify after five years. Possible, not obligatory. So, it's not "become citizen or go home."
2. Having said that....I'm for baby steps on most matters, because that is all that is politically feasible. But on immigration, health care, and military / foreign policy, at the national level, we need to go as large as possible, and make the changes big and fast.
"It is to secure our rights that we resort to government at all." --Thomas Jefferson to Francois D'Ivernois, 1795.
Thank you, Dr. Munger
You should be running for President.
Two Brief Answers about my Mexican lawnboy by Mike?
Two Brief Answers*Michael Munger
They sure are?
1. Remember, there is no monolithic business interest here. Some business interests favor reducing borders, others want to keep them. I think our immigration policy should be as follows:*Michael Munger
Good Grief! Are you trying to tell us that there is still some American Corporations that don't have monolithic business interests in the States, since Globalism is now the rule of law among State nations. Has it ever occured to you, that maybe the simple answer to Global Fascist corporate trade might be ....If you are a American corporation or a guest foreign corporation using slave labor for your products, Than you don't get to sell it here period!
a. Gain control of borders. I don't mean a wall, but I mean some actual way of keeping criminals and repeat offenders, and terrorists, out.*Michael Munger
If not a Wall? Is there something else out there that we have miss from the last Mission Impossible movie or 24 TV series? Do you really believe that Ismalo-fascists terrorists [ Whatever the hell that is] are digging tunnels under the Rio Grande?
After 3000 years of ancient and modern history,
State Nations Walls are design to keep it's own citizens in not out! Your Wall papers please Mike!
b. Guest worker program. Make it possible for people to be legal. Plus, this is a probation period. "Law-abiding, hard-working" immigrants wouldn't get deported. And, given (a) above, deportation would stick. Use fingerprints and retinal scans for positive IDs.*Michael Munger
Why stop with these Police State ID methods, why don't we shove a GSP micro-chip up my lawnboy ass to make sure that he does not run off with my leaf blower. What kind of Big Brother Orwellian Libertarian are you?
c. Citizenship for guest workers who qualify after five years. Possible, not obligatory. So, it's not "become citizen or go home."*Michael Munger
5 years? You quote from Jefferson, yet you never got his thoughts on how many generations of foreigners should be allowed in the USA? Why is that?.
2. Having said that....I'm for baby steps on most matters, because that is all that is politically feasible. But on immigration, health care, and military / foreign policy, at the national level, we need to go as large as possible, and make the changes big and fast.*Michael Munger
Big and fast my ass! How do you plan to pay for it? With more funny money from the overheated Federal Reserve and US Treasury presses nowdays....Oh I get it, We stick more funny money debt on your kids and my grandkids....Hell man! We will be gone by that time, so why don't we leave our little naive kids to fiqure it out after living in cardboard boxes for the rest of their lives...Don't you just love the Tough Love political methods to get our future kids attention?
Growing the bureaucracy
is something that I have (almost) always viewed as a mistake; the costs incurred are rarely surpassed by the benefits provided to society, and the bureaucracy itself can achieve a state where it is no longer responsive to the needs of the people or their elected officials.
We're damned close to that now, in my opinion, and the President's contempt towards Congressional oversight has fed that unresponsiveness a great deal.
That being said, nearly every proposed "solution" to the problem of illegal immigration is going to require a massive amount of effort, and the price tag that goes along with that.
Considering the fact that we've eclipsed nine trillion dollars in national debt, over and above the pilfering of the Social Security Trust Fund, how can we afford to:
I'd say you could do that
for the cost of funding Bush's war in Iraq for two or three months.
More from the N&O
Thanks for the front page add and the compliments. I wish I had more time to post on education issues...
The N&O weighed in on today's editorial page. Their first piece basically says stop picking on kids who want to get their education and become legal. Their second talks about the social and economic costs of our continued immigration stalemate.
I've gotten a few emails about this post with good comments that I want to include. To tie in the second piece to my points above, I'd emphasize that greater education leads to less criminal behavior, more job-related income (i.e. more taxes paid into local and state coffers), and more integration into society.
Also, we need to attack right's use of the term "illegal" to describe people who have broken this particular law. Why not call people who have broken traffic safety laws or campaign finance laws "illegal"?
One final thought that the discussion above created for me. I was comparing this debate to the fight for civil rights or gay rights. In both of those movements, massive progress was made because white and straight people had close personal relationships with people of color and gay people. Those relationships became the impetus for action. I'm not sure that many Americans feel they have close personal relationships with undocumented individuals. Partially because undocumented people don't identify themselves that way, and also partially because of language barrier issues. But, educators do have relationships with these students and their families. I hope more educators will join me in advocating on the issue.
Graig,
I wish you had more time to post on education issues, too. :)
You know - this is brilliant. Tom Delay is not a politician anymore. He is an illegal politician. It's brilliant.
I see the education world at the opposite end - starting with the babies. I never know if the families I work with have papers or not. I won't even use the word "undocumented" here, because I can see for myself that they are here, they are families, and they are working, contributing members of the community. They wouldn't be coming to my office if they weren't. These are not the people we need to be concerned about. These are people we need to welcome into our nation - to increase our strength and diversity.
Be the change you wish to see in the world. --Gandhi
great post
Thanks for addressing this issue here; I believe it's important for progressives to start leading the way on a just and fair comprehensive solution to immigration. I'd like to see our political "leaders" have to courage to do work together for a solution that will benefit our communities, rather than cave to rhetoric and fear mongering.
Sorry for my negativity...
I'm a little pissy today because it looks like my younger son (23) made a couple of hundred dollars too much last year to qualify for assistance on some medical bills, so I'm not feeling very "sympathetic" right now.
I'll get over it and go back to being a raving Socialist soon. Probably by early afternoon.
No worries
It's good to have someone be pissy besides me.
: )
Welcome to America
Where we talk about "an honest days work" and then punish people for actually working.
I was in a similar situation last year. Where the amount I owed extra after filing taxes was greater than the amount I earned over the level that would have made me eligible for the earned income tax credit. So that extra week of work I snuck in to make a few extra dollars ended up biting me in the butt.
Thankfully I didnt have any medical bills to add on to it.
Good luck to your family.
"Keep the Faith"
Richard Moore sez "screw 'em" too.
Jumps on the bandwagon with Fred Smith and Bill Graham in telling college-aged children of illegal immigrants they're not welcome in community colleges.
Way to go, Richard. The least you could have done is said it should be looked at on a case-by-case basis.
The Republicans are playing this issue like a violin.
Wow.
He just lost some points with me. Has Bev Perdue said anything?
Be the change you wish to see in the world. --Gandhi
Not yet.
The reporters make the circuit trying to get a statement from everyone. I hope she doesn't allow herself to get pressed into the corner on this, but it'll be hard to avoid the trap. That's why I like the case by case basis.
All laws are enforced on a case by case basis. This should not be different. A 17 year old living with parents who are here illegally is different from an older adult who just arrived illegally. I personally think the right answer is "Change the Law" and "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" . . . but the lunatic fringe sees too much political advantage in the issue to really want to see it resolved.
Dole and Graham
have almost exactly the same thing to say about this issue. And I won't be surprised to see Patty McHorny jumping in, too.
What they're arguing is TOTAL BULLSHIT. No one has pointed to one instance where a citizen has been denied enrollment in a community college class because an illegal immigrant (or whatever we're supposed to be calling them) is taking their spot.
Tom Fetzer
That is because both had their positions on the subject written by Tom Fetzer. Its not really surprising its the exact same thing. They have the same consulting firm running their campaigns.
"Keep the Faith"
They Can't
As far as I know, there's no attendance cap for community colleges.
Seriously. I'm two steps from writing None of the Above on my gubernatorial primary ballot.
----
There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracts. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of the comfortable past which, in fact, never existed. - Robert F. Kennedy
I'm right there with you
I have been firmly in Moore's camp. Now I'm just disgusted with them all. At this rate we might want to find someone named, "None of the Above" or we'll be handing the governor's mansion to a Republican.
Bob Orr Jumps In
And jumps the shark along the way . . .
Ah yes. Now Bob's getting back in touch with his Art Pope paternalistic roots. Poor stupid illegal immigrants. We're not helping them by allowing them to get educated while they're up against the wall in virtually every way imaginable. It's okay for employers to hire them (wink, wink) and it's okay to take their taxes, but letting them get educated? Not so much.
With regard to the question of "eliminating the distinction" . . . that's double talk. There are a thousand other ways the distinction between legal residents and illegal residents is present in the lives of these individuals every damn day.
I actually hoped Bob Orr would have the integrity to reframe this gotcha issue and address the real challenges behind sound bite Republican bullshit. What a disappointment.
I'm not going to take back anything I said about his intellect, but all that stuff about being a nice and thoughtful guy? That was nothing but wishful thinking on my part.
The guy's a con artist. Either that, or I'm a sucker. Probably both.
Sponge Bob! Snake Oil saleman against Mexicans?
The guy's a con artist. Either that, or I'm a sucker. Probably both.* A
Hey! Don't be hard on yourself about being a sucker for Sponge Bob, unless you order his unconstitutional on-line course legal books from the Pope Foundation at a amazing low price of 300 bucks a pop for each chapter.
I just love his comment about the part where he said the founders of North Carolina approve of torture to the Indians and the American patriots trying to stop them from playing the Indian bead lottary during the American Revolution.