How about amnesty for our schools?

The campus of the Sidwell Friends School, where President Obama sends his daughters, is 20 acres for an enrollment of 1,097 students in all grade-levels.  That’s just under 55 students per acre.   Nearby Woodrow Wilson Senior High School is 6 acres with an enrollment of 1,950 students.  That’s 325 students per acre, which means Sidwell Friends has six times more space for its entire student body, ranging from elementary, middle and high school, than does the closest public high school in metropolitan Washington.  At least seven public schools in Washington have higher enrollments than capacity to teach students.  And Washington, D.C. isn’t on a national border. 

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly half of America’s public schools – the ones most Americans attend and the ones where immigrants from the United States’ southern border enroll– are overenrolled and do not have the resources to provide quality education for their students.  A report released in 2010 from the Departments of Education and Justice found that public schools in urban areas with enrollments of over 1,000 students are more likely to have cases of school-based violence.  In border states like Texas, Arizona, and California, where illegal aliens are most likely to reside, the President’s policy may have the unintended consequence of further exacerbating school violence, which often correlates with gang activity, as well as worsening the already unsolved problem of overcrowded schools.  

{mosads}In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe that undocumented children and young adults have the same right to attend public primary and secondary schools as do U.S. citizens and permanent residents.  So when on November 20, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson issued his memorandum on deferred action (i.e. deferred prosecutions for the apprehension, detention and removal of undocumented immigrants), any immigrant who entered the United States before the age of 16 will qualify for deferment of prosecution.  In other words, our already overcrowded schools – many occupied by the 1.1 million undocumented children under age 18 living in the U.S. – will become even more crowded.  

In a column in The Hill, George Mason Public Policy Dean Mark Rozell explained that whether one favor’s Obama’s immigration policy or not, sensible policy tends not to be developed in the way the president flexed his immigration muscle: where prospective presidents can simply reverse and re-establish policies throughout administrations over time.  The advantage of the legislative process – albeit rife with gridlock and partisanship – is that there is an incentive for agency stakeholders – like the Department of Education and the Department of Justice – to provide input on the legislation in ways that aggressive executive action directed toward one agency (the Department of Homeland Security) does not. 

Deferred action and prosecutorial discretion for underage illegals may sound good, but the president seemingly failed to consider the practical consequences this policy would have on the lives of most Americans.  The president should have consulted with the Justice and Education departments before enacting his broad executive action on immigration.  But why would he? Having never attended a U.S. public school, the president is unlikely to think about how his policy affects the people who do not have the privilege to learn in a spacious, grassy-knolled private school campus.  The president knows more than anyone that elections matter and the public-school attending majority of Americans selected a different Congress to make its laws.  The president clearly ignored that signal.  But it is our newly elected Congress – our constitutional system’s most representative branch – and not the ivory bubble of the presidency that is the best means for enacting policies that affect our everyday lives.  Sadly, we shouldn’t be surprised that a president who never took a class in his country’s own public education system is unconcerned with what the rest of America wants. 

Epstein, a lawyer, is executive director of Cause of Action in Washington, D.C.