Don’t Co-Opt Education Policy

In Arizona, a war is being waged on affordable education. According to Proposition 300, a piece of legislation passed in November 2006, the state is prohibited from subsidizing in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. While this may seem at first glance to be a reasonable curb in the fight against illegal immigration, the reality is something different. The people primarily affected by this measure are the children of illegal immigrants—many of whom have been living in the United States since before they can remember. Now these young adults, great majorities of whom are culturally American, are finding themselves locked out of American educational opportunities.

An article in The New York Times last week featured Yvonne Watterson, the principal of one competitive Phoenix high school in which students are encouraged to take classes at a local community college. Watterson discovered last year that she would be forced to deny many of her students the opportunity to take college courses because the state would no longer subsidize the costs for them. For one student she described, this meant a rapid downward spiral—one week the teenager was a happy and successful student, and the next she was on a bus back to Mexico. Thanks to an aggressive fundraising campaign, Watterson has managed to raise enough money to pay for these subsidies for her affected students for the next year or so, but presumably, this money will run out in the near future.

Advocates of Proposition 300 claim that to allow these young people access to education is to incentivize illegal immigration. Education, however, is too valuable a social opportunity to let this hypothesis dictate this policy. Essentially, this excuse is little more than an attempt to veil the xenophobia that prevails in many parts of the American Southwest. Across Arizona and other Southwestern states, policies like Proposition 300 arise out of bigotry and racism. While the theme of this measure and the theme of curbing illegal immigration are related, the students affected by this ban on subsidies are unlike adult illegal immigrants who made a decision to cross the border illegally. Not only have these young people grown up in the United States, they are high-achieving and academically motivated students. Their educational futures should not be hindered by an action over which they had no control.

Even more bewildering about this situation is that to deny educational opportunities to these young people is paradoxical to the language of immigration-crackdown advocates. Critics of illegal immigration often claim that the reason they object to immigration from Mexico is that immigrants sap the resources of natural-born citizens—primarily, this takes the form of social welfare programs. While it is true that Proposition 300 curbs spending on immigrants, education is unique in that is helps immigrants to assimilate and become productive members of society. It seems like a rather un-American sentiment that proponents of Proposition 300 are not interested in welcoming well-educated immigrants who want to contribute to the public good, and it betrays a position that stems from irrational cultural anxieties instead of from exclusively economic concerns.

That educators like Watterson have managed to find temporary solutions is heartening for the time being, but these will quickly run out. This is why it is crucial that, in the name of equality, schools find new and sustainable ways of funding education for students like Watterson’s.

Perhaps what is worst of all about Proposition 300 is that it is just one of a slew of measures like it, in which education policy is being used as a bar on societal progress and equality. American educators must work hard to curb this dangerous co-opting before the entire system is in trouble.