Abbott’s plan is heartless and dumb
His opposition to immigrant kids in public schools shows how conservative politics are changing.
Gov. Greg Abbott’s statement Wednesday that Texas will challenge Plyler v Doe, a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision barring public schools from denying admission to children of unauthorized immigrants, or from charging them fees to enroll, is the latest example of just how profoundly mainstream conservative politics are changing in Texas and across the nation.
The Plyler decision has been relied upon as settled law for 40 years, not just because its outcome feels fundamentally fair — what choice did the children brought to the United States by their parents have in where they live? — but also because it reflected the real-world understanding that, right or wrong, many immigrants who are here today will remain here for years. As the federal government struggles to enforce immigration laws, the best thing that states and local governments can do is to treat with compassion those who are here, and to help them become as useful to the rest of society as possible.
That means helping their children grow up with the basic tools they’ll need as adults, including education. What the courts understood then, and is still the case today, is that denying them education would permanently assign those children to a kind of second-class existence — with all the implications that would have for the children themselves, and for the society where they grow into adults.
Justice Harry Blackmun, who joined the 1982 opinion but wrote separately to explain why he thought laws denying education to young people warranted special scrutiny, said the law in question, a Texas statute, was no less harmful than laws seeking to deny citizens the right to vote. “In a sense, then, denial of an education is the analogue of denial of the right to vote,” Blackmun said. “The former relegates the individual to secondclass social status; the latter places him at a permanent political disadvantage.”
Justice Lewis Powell, in a separate concurrence, was plainer still: “Illegal aliens will continue to enter the United States and, as the record makes clear, an unknown percentage of them will remain here,” he wrote. “I agree with the Court that their children should not be left on the streets uneducated.”
Chief Justice Warren Burger filed a strongly worded dissent. He disagreed with the majority that the right to education was so fundamental that laws limiting it warrant stricter scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. But even in disagreeing, Burger, a lifelong Republican, made clear how distasteful Texas’ policy itself was.
“Were it our business to set the nation's social policy,” Burger wrote, “I would agree without hesitation that it is senseless for an enlightened society to deprive any children — including illegal aliens — of an elementary education. I fully agree that it would be folly — and wrong — to tolerate creation of a segment of society made up of illiterate persons, many having a limited or no command of our language.”
And yet, 40 years later, that’s exactly what Abbott would have Texas do — relitigate a long-settled case, and with what end? Only to win the right for our Legislature to once again deprive children of an elementary education.
Texas and its leaders used to be proud of the way they could talk tough about border security and still make a credible claim to, as George W. Bush often said, compassionate conservatism. Suing to scrap Plyler means saying goodbye to perhaps the vestige of a vanishing capacity on the right to recognize our treatment of immigrants ought to be humane.
A decade ago, leaders here were proud of the Texas Dream Act lawmakers had passed in 2001 to allow graduates of Texas high schools who had been in the state for at least three years to pay instate tuition at state colleges, regardless of their immigration status. As an antiimmigrant mindset took root in the national party, Texans pushed back.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry ran for president in 2012 as a hardliner on border security, but when candidate Mitt Romney mocked the Texas Dream Act, he didn’t blink.
“To go to the University of Texas, if you’re an illegal alien, you get an in-state tuition discount,” Romney said during a debate. “You know how much that is? That’s $22,000 a year.”
Perry’s rejoinder: “I don’t think you have a heart.”
But Republican support was never just about heart. It involved a shrewd, fiscally responsible calculation as well. Texas needs all the qualified workers it can get, and helping students brought here by their parents afford a college education will pay dividends for Texas and America for years to come.
Back in 2001, Texas lawmakers passed the Texas Dream Act overwhelmingly. Only three House members and two senators voted no. Perry summed up his support for the bill in a speech a few months later. “We must say to every Texas child learning in a Texas classroom, ‘We don’t care where you come from, but where you are going, and we are going to do everything we can to help you get there.’ And that vision must include the children of undocumented workers,” he said. “That’s why Texas took the national lead in allowing such deserving young minds to attend a Texas college at a resident rate.”
When he ran again in 2016, the antiimmigrant rhetoric in the GOP primary was hot. Perry dug in, explaining as George W. Bush had before him that even Texans who push for tougher enforcement of immigration laws understand the value of coexisting with those who are already here.
Twenty years after its passage, who among the Texas GOP would defend the Dream Act now? Certainly not Abbott, busy as he is dreaming of a new way the state can relegate children of unauthorized immigrants to a life without even an elementary education.
Now would be the time to speak up, if there are any Texas GOP leaders willing to return their party to one with an ounce of enlightenment when it comes to the treatment of immigrants. Last month, a federal judge ruled that the Texas Dream Act is preempted by federal law, and if Texas wants to allow foreign-born students to pay in-state tuition, it must allow students from all 49 other states to do the same. The legal issues of the case, Young Conservatives of Texas vs. University of North Texas, will take months and perhaps years to decide. But what would be nice, is if Republicans now in power would follow Perry’s example, and that of many Texas Republicans before him, and speak up for those Abbott and others are so busy demonizing.