NTF issue paper: illegal140.doc. 9-15.
NEBRASKA TAXPAYERS FOR FREEDOM WORKSHEET:
ILLEGAL ALIEN CHILDREN OVERWHELM OUR SCHOOLS.
BACKGROUND. Illegal alien children benefiting from free education are overwhelming NE public school systems, requiring huge, new expenditures paid for by property owners. School districts must hire additional English as a Second Language and special education teachers, build new schools, add classroom space, and purchase bilingual textbooks and other teaching materials. Because word spread throughout Latin America that Pres. Obama would not enforce immigration laws for minors, the surge into the U.S. began immediately.
CALIFORNIA LESSON. The Los Angeles Unified School District laid off 900 teachers, because the district ran $650,000 over budget from funding education for illegal alien kids. Title I schools there teach students from lower socioeconomic and income levels, many of them illegals. The kids eat a free breakfast, not milk and a roll, but cereal, cereal bars with fruits, and juices. Much of this nutritious food wasted, trays of it dumped in the trash uneaten. One ESL teacher estimates that 50% of the illegal kids are obese or moderately overweight, but 75% of them own cell phones. This teacher spent thousands of tax $$ to buy new computers for the computer learning center, half of which within 1 month covered with graffiti by illegals. California schools provide day care services for illegal alien unwed, pregnant teens, so that they can continue in class. Illegal immigrant students raise hell with their female teachers, calling them putas, the Spanish word for whores, and throwing contaminated items at them. These students receive free education, free food, free day care, and free medical services in school, yet they loudly demand more rights, privileges, and entitlements. Lower standards of education rife in CA. schools, overcrowded classrooms, and Third World diseases spread to classmates. Overwhelming our schools is a 3rd World culture that does not value education, accepts their children becoming pregnant and dropping out of school, and refuses to assimilate.
NEBRASKA CRISIS. During 2014, over 57,000 children from Central America and Mexico surged across our southern border, many at the behest of their parents who wanted a free U.S. education for their children. The Obama Regime ordered over 200 dumped secretly in Nebraska with relatives or sponsors, neglecting to inform Gov. Heineman of their names and locations; the governor angrily complained. The federal HHS dept. has the obligation to locate homes for the kids while they await immigration court dates. VP Biden offered to check into the situation but never contacted the Governor, who requested the names and addresses of relatives and sponsors and their immigration status. He wanted to verify that these children were not receiving taxpayer-funded benefits and had health screenings before arrival. The Obama Regime refuses to tell our state and local officials the whereabouts of these kids. The Obama Office of Refugee Resettlement refuses to comment on the locations of these minors, citing fear for their safety. No consideration for safety of our citizens. Illegal alien kids quietly dumped in NE without vetting or our knowledge or consent. The Grand Island schools found about 60 of them enrolled in late summer 2014. Many more appeared in the Omaha Public Schools. No one medically cleared these children for dispersion into our Nebraska schools, where they can spread diseases. Radical Att.-Gen. Eric Holder threatened to prosecute NE school districts and superintendents who refuse to allow these illegal kids into their schools. NE public schools with finite resources face a huge expense in accommodating these illegal kids, all eligible for free breakfasts and lunches. Several teachers have quit, frustrated at having to teach so many children who cannot speak English and misbehave badly. Thus, these kids live in NE cities and attend our public schools for years without consequences. The feds refuse to fund this educational mandate.
COURT ENTANGLEMENTS. Because of the huge backlog in deportation hearings, the immigration service (INS) told our governor that these illegal children would remain in NE indefinitely. They supposedly would report to immigration services for adjudication but most do not. Illegal alien kids placed with illegal alien adults most likely will not appear in immigration court, as both would fear deportation. There is no requirement that their parents or relatives legally entered the U.S. Thus, the kids disappear into NE society. The immigration court system was backlogged with 30,000 pending cases before the most recent surge. Court delays that already persist for years will grow longer as the beleaguered system absorbs the cases for new kids, making the risk of quick deportation even less likely and further fueling perceptions that crossing the U.S. border causes few immediate consequences. At initial appearances in court, an immigration judge often tells kids to return in a year with a lawyer, usually a leftist attorney who pleads that his client faces danger in his or her homeland and as a refugee is seeking asylum. “The longer the process goes, the less likely it is that people will return,” said Doris Meissner, a former head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The Omaha immigration court is the most backlogged in the U.S. because of the surge in juvenile cases. It takes about 839 days for a case to clear. Leftist attorneys seek to win special immigrant juvenile status for their clients, a legal status available to kids abused, neglected, or dumped by parents, or claim their eligibility as crime victims, falsely stating that they would fall prey to gangs or prostitution groups if deported. These attorneys cleverly try for asylum status, fibbing that clients face torture or death because of their religion, politics, or social group.
LOCAL SCHOOLS COSTS. Lincoln Public Schools must spend $1.2 million to hire additional teachers for illegal aliens. Alien children have increased by 35% in 1 year. The district increased class sizes after 306 alien students entered the system in 2014, thus offering less attention to native-born pupils. Lincoln elementary schools offer illegal kids snacks, after school sports and study programs, and English instruction to pre-schoolers and parents at their homes, including family reading nights. 7,000 pupils, 14% of OPS K-12 students, are in ESL programs. Over 15,000 of its students speak a foreign language at home. There are 1,800 refugee students in OPS from 12 different countries, who speak over 109 different languages. Militant Latino parents and community organizers raucously demanded a Hispanic principal at Omaha South HS, waving signs in Spanish. Because of the huge influx of illegal aliens in South Omaha, over 60% of the student body at South High is Hispanic. Hispanic students at OPS Bryan High demanded a mandatory student celebration of the Mexican Cinco de Mayo holiday, but white students loudly protested, leading the school administration, which initially had endorsed the plan, to announce optional attendance, causing rankling among Hispanic students and tension between white and Latino students. The administration quickly stopped a petition by white students protesting the celebration. Many South Omaha elementary school classes have 2 teachers, one of whom is bilingual, doubling the instruction cost. Instead of utilizing the proved immersion language method, OPS offers bilingual education K-12. Only 8 other U.S. school districts use this plan. These OPS alien kids also receive before and after school individual tutoring, summer school programs, and cultural activities. OPS schools have become multipurpose welcoming centers for illegal aliens, children and parents able to see a nurse or immigration or subsidized housing official. Bilingual family rooms offer Spanish loan books and tapes. OPS invited teachers from Mexico to help teachers operate bilingual summer school programs and share curriculum, instructing our teachers how schools operate in Mexico. OPS spends a small fortune on Spanish-language library books and prints in both Spanish and English all correspondence with parents. OPS also has established bilingual kiddiegarden and 1st grade classes for children, students taught half the curriculum in English and half in Spanish, 1 teacher for each. The objective is to make all the kids bilingual, even though our state constitution clearly states that English is our state language. Illegal alien children from Mexico, Somalia, and Kenya have flooded Lexington, NE. schools, 62% living in poverty and on welfare. The learning curve dropped so low that this district lowered its graduation requirements. 10% of Schuyler school students do not speak English as their primary language. The South Sioux City school district, which also serves Dakota City, tabs bilingual employees to assess each illegal alien child for placement and connects families to health care, utilities, and school materials. Their parents can attend parenting and English classes. Grand Island public schools offer illegal kids free breakfast, translators, and transportation in its ESL program. The Mexican Cinco de Mayo holiday celebrated every year to lift cultural pride. Total NE public school costs reach over $2.3 million annually.
DISEASES. Viral outbreaks are occurring in public schools nationwide, and a great number of illegal kids bring in contagious diseases, including scabies, chicken pox, staph infections, and TB. Our children are susceptible to these dread diseases in their classrooms now.
LEARNING COMMUNITY. Taxpayers in the 11 school districts within the Learning Community (LC) subsidize programs for non-English speaking parents of illegal alien children in a family literacy program. 5 South Omaha elementary schools host this program for kindergarten parents that includes language learning, computer instruction, parenting classes, and free child care. Bilingual parent educators visit their homes every few weeks to assist with child discipline, problem-solving, reading, and cultural adjustments. The LC created an expensive multicultural diversity plan with a task force. The intent is to bus poor alien kids all over the 11 school districts within the LC to create a socio-economic balance in every school building, with constant monitoring and reports. This program over years has not increased student academic achievement. Taxpayers in districts that receive an influx of these poor, illegal alien kids are angry, forced to pay their school property taxes as subsidies.
OBAMA OBJECTIVES. This predicament is purposeful, as the Obama Regime on its government website solicited escorts for unaccompanied immigrant kids. Obama embarrassingly asked our state if it had a big facility suitable for housing large numbers of illegal children. His objective is to alter the population demographics of NE to make our state more Democrat, as most Hispanics vote Democrat. In 2014, Obama returned fewer than 2,000 of these kids to their home countries. He issued several presidential edicts on immigration, including 1 program to allow young immigrants who illegally came to the country before 2007 to avoid deportation, obtain a work permit for 2 years, and become eligible for a number of welfare benefits, an incentive for others to sneak into the U.S. Another edict allowed over 500,000 young illegal immigrants granted temporary deportation waivers to apply for 2-yr. extensions. Added pressure on school taxes.
THE LEGALITY. The Obama Justice and Education Depts. both warned school districts that, under the Plyler v. Doe Supreme Court case, a state may not deny access to public elementary and secondary education to a child residing in a state, even if residing illegally. Actually, this ruling meant only that, because illegal aliens are persons under the equal protection clause, if states deny them free primary education, states must have a reason that passes scrutiny. The Supreme Court ruled in Plyler only that a Texas law did not pass such test. Therefore, Plyler does not apply to secondary and post-secondary education, did not hold that public education is a right, did not give legal status to illegal alien kids, does not prevent a school from inquiring about the legal status of and reporting illegal alien kids, and does not prevent arrest and deportation of an illegal child. Despite this revelation, the NE Education Commissioner caved in and ordered all NE public schools to enroll illegal alien children.
ALIEN BOOSTERS. Not surprising, the leftist Omaha Together One Community and NE Appleseed welcome this tide of child migrants into our schools, though both contribute nothing for their care.
CONGRESSIONAL RELIEF. NE Sen. Deb Fischer sponsored a Senate bill to require notification of state officials when the feds transfer minor illegal aliens to a state. Conservative House members pitched bills to force Att.-Gen. Holder to provide monthly reports to Congress on the number of illegal alien minors in each state who fail to appear before immigration judges.
TAKE ACTION NOW. We must protect NE taxpayers from financial burdens caused by illegal alien children. The quality of education for our children suffers. Nebraska is among the 10 highest states with non-English speaking students, most of the growth caused by the meatpacking industry. Such is why we must lobby our congressmen to pass a mandatory E-Verify law that will screen out illegal aliens seeking employment and support notification requirements regarding minors. Press your congressman now to pass legislation to disallow public school education for illegal alien children. These laws would greatly encourage illegal aliens to leave both our state and country.
Research, analysis, and documentation for this issue paper done by Nebraska Taxpayers for Freedom, with express prior permission granted for its use by other groups in the Nebraska Conservative Coalition Network 9-15. C