City, county must curb immigration
Monday, February 11, 2002
By: Dan Stein

Los Angeles Daily News

FACED with a $133 million budget shortfall, the Los Angeles Unified School District is scrambling to find personnel, programs and infrastructure that can be trimmed. An already overcrowded and failing public school system will have to make do with even fewer teachers, classrooms, library books and the like.

Public education in the nation's second-largest school district -- already an abysmal failure -- is about to get a whole lot worse as the effects of the recession begin to be felt.

While the economic downturn is a global phenomenon that Los Angeles will have to endure along with everyone else, the crisis in its school system is a self-inflicted wound.

The city and county, through overt and deliberate policies of encouraging massive illegal immigration, have brought this crisis on themselves.

For decades, Los Angeles has made itself as welcoming as possible to illegal immigration, and millions of illegal aliens have availed themselves of the hospitality. The failure to control illegal immigration certainly rests with the federal government, and the responsibility for providing a free public education to the children of illegal immigrants is a mandate of the Supreme Court.

But the decision to reassure illegal aliens that all local services and benefits will be provided with no questions asked, and that no cooperation with federal immigration enforcement will be offered, was purely a local decision.

The result of these long-standing local policies is a school system in which half the student body cannot speak English proficiently, more than half of the kids qualify for the free school lunch program, classrooms are more crowded than ever in spite of a massive construction program, and music, art and other enrichment programs are but a memory of times past.

The most important consequence, however, is educational failure -- the long-term cost of which cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

Los Angeles has irresponsibly promoted and abetted illegal immigration and the burden of that irresponsibility will be borne by the children who are trapped in an educational system that cannot educate.

It is no longer enough for local governments, like Los Angeles', to divorce themselves from the effort to deal with illegal immigration by declaring it a federal issue. State, county and city governments have been part of the problem and they must start becoming part of the solution.

Los Angeles can begin to ease the burden on schools and other vital institutions by discouraging illegal immigrants from settling here.

To begin with, the city can revoke its Special Order 40 policy that has assured illegal aliens that local police will never report their presence to federal authorities. While police need some discretion to do their jobs, there is no justification for a blanket policy that shields illegal aliens from federal authorities.

Los Angeles is also in the process of expanding the number of day laborer hiring sites around the city. Under the existing policy, these city-run sites do not check whether the workers who use them are legal residents and eligible to work in the United States.

In addition to facilitating the violation of federal immigration laws, the city is aiding and abetting tax evasion, as many of the workers hired at these labor sites are paid in cash and off the books. The failure to collect taxes, in part, contributes to the severe budgetary squeeze that faces schools and other vital services in the city.

In addition, Los Angeles can decline to follow the lead of Orange and San Francisco counties, which have decided to accept Mexican consular ID cards as a valid form of identification. As legal residents have no need for consular IDs, the possession of such a document should be considered prima facie evidence that the holder is illegally in the United States and should be referred to federal authorities for further investigation.

Addressing the education budget crisis in Los Angeles will provide local politicians a unique opportunity to act on their cliches.

Politicians who invariably invoke the interests of "the children" to justify every position they take can actually do something for the kids by addressing the issues that are bankrupting their schools.

At best, Los Angeles schools will stumble from crisis to crisis, until and unless the city and county quit imposing additional burdens on them through policies that encourage illegal immigration.