Protecting the Human Rights of Undocumented Immigrant Children in SB 2065, a policy brief.

 The conversation surrounding public education and its future is ever present. With the federal executive branch signing an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, there are many programs and laws within that can now be challenged at the state level. The Department of Education is aiming to shut down almost all operations besides funding for low-income schools, funding for children with disabilities, and Pell grants and federal student loans. As stated by Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia, a large portion of why the Department of Education was created was to “guarantee the enforcement of students' civil rights.” Students were guaranteed the right to a public education regardless of their background. It is worrisome that legislators may push to remove this right to education from the hands of undocumented immigrant children. 

Senate Bill 2065 in Illinois is looking to protect this right for all children, regardless of immigration or documentation status. With SB2065, a student cannot be denied free education, participation in school activities, or benefits from school. These rights can also not be denied to any person(s) associated with the child. This bill also prohibits schools from disclosing any personal information regarding a student or an associated person’s immigration status. A school cannot let an immigration officer onto the school site for any reason unless they have proper identification, a judicial warrant, a statement of purpose, and approval from the superintendent and their legal counsel. These protections are going to allow the most vulnerable students to continue their education. The attack on immigration and education go hand in hand, and this bill would help add protections for this population. 

A simple reason to favor this policy is the Supreme Court Case Plyler v. Doe. This case ruled in 1982 that it would be prohibited to deny a child education based on the immigration status of their family. The court voted this way with their reasoning being the 14th amendment. Concerning this case, the 14th Amendment is used to explain that states cannot deny “to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” A reason to be against this policy is that it could be viewed as overly tailored to the immigrant population, when these rights should be extended to all new students. While the bill was written for this population, many other demographics could also benefit from this type of legislation. 

Opposing this bill could be deemed as morally wrong. It is a belief among many that opposing this would greatly single out the children of immigrants. It is an American principle that all are equal before the law, and the law applies to all. Excluding these children from the right to education is harmful. The move to disregard these children from the education system would be against the very principles our democracy is founded upon.  A common argument opposing bills such as this one is that education is not a right. It is believed instead that the children of these immigrants have not earned the right to enjoy the public benefits of the United States. Their parents being undocumented means that they do not deserve the privileges that society has to offer. It is also a common misconception that paying for these children to be educated is too costly. 

As noted earlier, opposition to this bill may come from the fact that it is too narrowly focused. Adding more demographics or making the bill more general could help it get passed if there were a majority against it. With immigration being such a hot topic at the moment, it could be fairly polarizing, depending on the party. Making it more general could help appeal to the more conservative minded who are not open to working with undocumented immigrants. Opposing this bill could look bad politically. Since the topic of the bill is guaranteed education to children, opposition could come off as simply not being in favor of equal education with hints of racism and xenophobia. This could then lead people in the general public to make assumptions based on the stance chosen and severely oppose any future political action. There are no real downsides to supporting this bill besides losing potential supporters who most likely would not agree with your politics in the first place. 

To conclude, Senate Bill 2065 is a bill in which you should strongly support. With the current political environment, people want to feel as if their politicians are going to protect them and their children. Giving the children of immigrants a fair chance in the education system is only right. I suggest that you strongly support and consider becoming a co-sponsor to get this bill passed immediately. 

For the first policy paper, students may write either an advocacy letter or a policy brief that contains a recommendation.  This is a policy brief with a recommendation to support a bill to reaffirm the educational human rights of all children in Illinois, regardless of their immigration or documentation status. 

The Constitution of Illinois says that education is free and universal.  Although most school districts illegally and unconstitutionally ask parents to pay fees (which can be waived in cases of economic hardship), education is generally nearly free, and nearly universal, at least up to high school graduation. 

I think your brief does well to cite the Plyler v. Doe case.  This, along with the 14th Amendment and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Illinois Constitution all point in the same direction as this bill, that education must be universal, and no children can be excluded from public education or alternatives to public education if certain behavioral problems prevent mainstream public education. 

I think you also have done well to point out that attacks on public education are “hand in hand” with attacks on immigrants. Xenophobia has significant overlap with the tendency to complain about public education and argue for abolishing public education and replacing it with private schools and a system of vouchers that would give households money to pay for education at any of the private schools. 

In most Illinois senate and house districts it would look bad to oppose this bill.  However, we do have several extremely MAGA districts in rural downstate Illinois where I would expect opposition to this bill. 

Student enraged by Tennessee legislation concerning adoption

As I was searching the internet for information on present day policies in the news I came across a very interesting title that caught my eye right away. The title of the article that grabbed my attention is Tennessee OK’s Anti-LGBTQ Discrimination in Adoption. Overall, the article discusses how the governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, signed the discriminatory adoption bill into law. This means that any faith based adoption and foster care agencies in the state of Tennessee can turn away same sex couples and other prospective parents who violate the agencies’ religious beliefs. As I was reading this article, another aspect that stood out to me is that eight other states have similar laws, with West Virginia still pending on the law. This article had me very intrigued and I am glad that I decided to read the entire article. 

This article mainly caught my attention because I want to go into the adoption field with my degree. Reading this article actually disgusted me and infuriated me. Reading more and more into it I could not help but agree with what a lot of the individuals who oppose this bill were stating. One of these individuals, the Human Rights Campaign President Alphonso David,  was expressing that with “this bill will do nothing to improve the outcomes for children in care, it shrinks the pool of prospective parents and is a blatant attempt to discriminate against LGBTQ Tennesseans.” I could not agree more with this statement made by Alphonso David. It does limit the amount of prospective parents and will eventually lead to an increasing number of children in care. What I do not understand is why they feel like LGBTQ parents would not be a deem-able fit to be parents to children that need a good home. Alphonso David also stated “These legislators are disregarding the best interests of kids in the child welfare system to create a ‘license to discriminate’ against qualified, loving prospective parents.” After reading that statement, it got me to thinking about how LGBTQ parents have just as much love to give and just as much the possibility to provide a wonderful life to a child as a heterosexual couple. Another point that was made in this article is that by allowing faith-based discrimination against the LGBTQ adoptive parents, this law is limiting the pool of potential parents. By allowing this law, agencies can even discriminate to refuse to place these children with close relatives who are LGBTQ or of a different faith than the agency believes in. This bill that is being passed as a law is only harming the children. A statement made by the Rev. Stan J. Sloan, the CEO of Family Equality, “If the bill is signed into a law, Tennessee will join a small group of states that have broken the cardinal rule of child welfare-that the needs of children should come first.” When I think about this statement, it really upsets me how some people can be so against LGBTQ and other religious beliefs that they would put children’s needs below these hateful feelings. In my opinion, if you are going to act this way towards these groups of people, you need to find a different line of work. The individuals that suffer the most from this bill are the vulnerable children, and that is not fair to them. It is also not fair to discriminate against these groups of people. 

After reading this article and trying to let my brain process all of this absurd information, it made me that much more determined to try and change some aspects of child welfare. As I want to work on adoption cases when I earn my degree and start working in the field, I am getting a first look into what I may be dealing with. This article has made me want to change some aspects of the child welfare system but it also makes me nervous to see what the system is going to be like in a year or so when I do start working in the system. Is the system going to be even more beyond repair to where it may be a lost cause? I have always told myself that “I know I can’t change the whole world, but if I can change the life of just one individual, I will consider myself successful.” Overall, this article infuriated me, but it also made me that much more determined to start working on the child welfare system. 

First, I agree that it’s infuriating that people have such prejudices and will be allowed to base decisions on placement using these prejudices to discriminate against potential parents. Any argument that homosexual or queer parents are by nature of their sexual relationships or identities unfit parents isn’t supported by evidence, because even if this were generally true, the adoption agencies could still screen adoptive parents and use valid reasons related to actual unfitness rather than using sexual orientations and identities as a determining factor.

But, for the sake of enhancing our critical thinking, let’s consider the possible motives. 

One possibility is that these adoption agencies have people who dislike LGBTQ, and they are motivated by hatred and a desire to harm the LGBTQ parents who would like to have children through adoption. Another possibility is that they want the “best interests of the child” and believe that any child that grows up in a household headed by LGBTQ will be harmed in some way, and the harm that the child suffers as a result of being in a family with LGBTQ parents is greater than the harm the child suffers if they are must wait longer to find an adoptive family. This would raise empirical questions: how much longer would children have to wait if LGBTQ adoptive parents weren’t allowed to adopt from some agencies? If the discrimination is only allowed in regions where at least agency does not discriminate, would all potential LGBTQ adoptive parents go to the agency that didn’t discriminate against them, and would that remove all harm children would suffer by needing to wait longer for adoptive parents (because there would be no increase in waiting time)? What moral principle would a person claim justifies this sort of bill? I understand that freedom of thought and religious belief is a very fundamental value, and would that freedom of religious expression be damaged by any policies that forced religious groups to allow children in their custodial care to be adopted out to families that were LGBTQ, or atheist, or non-Christian, or “immoral” according to some peculiar religious teachings of the sect operating the child welfare agency (e.g., interracial marriages?) 

But, what if we aren’t so much concerned with the violation of the religious rights of those family welfare agencies, but the religious groups operating them said they would shut down if they weren’t allowed to discriminate against parents who weren’t “spiritually worthy” in some sense (were atheist or LGBTQ or whatever). That would raise questions about harms to children arising from the new decrease in supply of child welfare agencies providing services.  

If our priority is the well-being of the children, I could imagine a situation where religious child welfare organizations could extort from me approval for a bill allowing them to discriminate.  This could happen if: 1) the agencies were doing a lot of help to a lot of children in foster care, and were very successful in placing many children in homes of people the agencies considered spiritually “worthy” (e.g., straight, religious, racially homogenous, and Christian); 2) there was in the same region an agency that did not discriminate against prospective adoptive families based on their “spiritual” condition (e.g., was happy to place children with LGBTQ, atheist, interracial, and non-Christian adoptive parents); 3) the religious agency would cease its operations if it was not allowed to discriminate; 4) there was no plausible alternative possibility of non-discriminatory agencies to take up the increase in demand for chid welfare services if the religious groups closed their child welfare services; 5) there was evidence that if the religious child welfare was forced to not discriminate, and therefore reacted by closing down operations, children awaiting adoption would face much longer waits and placements in areas much further away.  If all those five conditions were met, I think I might regretfully allow some agencies to discriminate, because it would be a way to avoid harm to the children. 

The article did not give us enough information to understand if the government in Tennessee was going to pass the law because failing to do so would cause a collapse in the provision of child welfare services in their state.  Were the child welfare services and adoption services in Tennessee highly dependent on private religious organizations that were threatening to close their doors if they were not permitted to discriminate?  Were there other private child welfare organizations that could place children with LGBTQ parents, so that there would be no delays in adoptions, but where those non-discriminatory agencies unable to take up the service demand if all the discriminatory private agencies ceased providing services?  I wanted to know those, so I could know if this was an entirely ridiculous case of politicians conceding to demands from ignorant citizens to implement stupid policies, or whether this was a case of politicians genuinely concerned about religious freedom and making a pragmatic decision to accommodate some people for the sake of maintaining an adequate level of services to children in foster care and awaiting adoption. 

SNAP and College Students

I began by reviewing the article entitled “Rethinking College Students and SNAP” by Tom Allison, found on the list of current events for this class.  This title really drew me in because people do not understand how difficult college can be when dealing with your own adult life outside of school.  Most young adults are trying to get away from parents and learn to become their own responsible self, but college can be both a learning experience and, also a stress in lives of students everywhere.  You have no time for a steady routine like in high school.  You are trying to work when not at school, sucking up all your hours of daylight, leaving your homework time to interfere with your sleep schedule.  Depending on the major and the coursework, you may spend more time at school than others, leaving you to only be able to work a part time minimum wage job.  To help pay for groceries, many college students turn to SNAP.

This article focuses on the financial deficits in many college students’ lives and the problems they have affording enough food for themselves.  At Spelman College and Morehouse College, students held a hunger strike to change the school policy banning the sharing of any unused meal swipes with another student.  This lasted two weeks before the schools announced a plan to help students who cannot afford proper nutrition for themselves.  The article discusses that nearly 20% of college students are eligible for SNAP, but only 3% of students actually use it.  Students do not seek help for food often because of embarrassment and humiliation, and so many students go hungry because of this.  The article mentioned that these factors can lead to bad grades and even dropping out of school entirely.   The author goes over the two problems with SNAP and college students, which are the application process and the eligibility standards. In my opinion, I believe the largest barrier of college students gaining SNAP benefits is that they must work at least 20 hours a week.  College students sometimes have coursework that will take up nearly every hour of their free time outside of class; taking 20 hours of that week is a large chuck of time for completing necessary assignments.  

I find a great deal of understanding from this article, because I think I was in this position my first two years of college.  Trying to go to school five days a week, do the assigned coursework, study for quizzes and exams, and work part time, was extremely stressful and hard on me.  I was living on my own and scared to ask my parents for help.  I wanted to be able to prove to them that I was able to do this on my own without any help, which I think a lot of college students can relate to.  There were periods where I was eating ramen noodles and peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and dinner almost every day.  I would always hear the typical college stereotype that “college students are broke” and I just thought this was a normal part of the college experience.  

I am glad that UIS Volunteer Services (I think) hands out free food to students in need, but campuses everywhere need to have groups like this.  We need nationwide knowledge of the nutritional deficits that college students face and find a way to fix this gap.  Changing eligibility requirements as mentioned in the article is a major obstacle that would be crossed by waiving the hours worked each week for students and supplement their class hours instead.  

Providing SNAP benefits on more generous terms with more accessible eligibility standards would be an easy way to help pay for college education. One of the many nice things about SNAP (speaking a a food producer—I am sometimes a farmer in the summer when not on my 9-month contract as a professor with the university) is the fact that it stimulates the economy by increasing demand for good food products (I can sell more peaches and apples and berries if poor people and college students get SNAP benefits allowing them to purchase my produce).  SNAP and other food benefits are really just another way to subsidize grocery stores, farmers, and industrial food corporations.  We get all the money eventually.  Since just handing money to food producers violates some people’s sense of fairness (we tend to not be poor, and yet there are many very large subsidies for some very wealthy agribusiness corporations), why not give us the money indirectly by giving it to college students, impoverished families with children, and persons who would otherwise be embarrassing us with their gauche tendency of getting sick with malnutrition or starvation in this rich civilization we have built? 

College students are a special population to consider.  Persons who succeed in college tend, on average, to make tens of thousands of dollars more than they would if thy merely took some college, finished an associate degree only, or completed their education with a GED or high school degree.

The 2017 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us:
Median usual weekly earnings of a college graduate: $1,173
Median usual weekly etc. of a person with an associate degree: $836
Median usual etc. of a person with some college and no degree: $774
Median etc. of a person with a high school degree or GED: $712.

So, if we have a policy that costs us, say, $5,000 per college student, and 10% of those students who receive this $5,000 in SNAP benefits complete college because of the SNAP benefits, because with those benefits, they would have given up and settled for “some college” you can see that we're raising the incomes of 10% of the recipients by about $400 per week, or approximately $20,000 per year after they graduate. The government may only directly recover $5,000 of that $20,000 through income taxes and payroll deductions, but there are multiplier effects as well, as the increased earnings of a higher educated population contribute to overall economic prosperity, and if colleges and universities are doing their work right, we should also have many benefits in terms of happier people, better citizens, more creativity, and wiser voters from the increase in educated persons. 

The next question is, does the increase in tax revenue and economic flourishing from that 10% that made it through college because they received $5000 in SNAP benefits pay for 100% of the cost of providing those SNAP benefits to all the poor college students, including the 90% who would have somehow found a way to graduate without the SNAP support?

It depends upon how long people work, I guess.  Let us do a thought experiment.  Assume the SNAP benefits are given to 100 poor college students, at a cost of $1,250 per year for four years, each student is getting $5000 in benefits over four years.  So, over the course of four years while those 100 students are in college, the program costs $500,000.  We imagine that 90 of those students would have graduated anyway, even without SNAP, so the benefit for society is that those students were able to study on full stomachs and not work so many long hours, and perhaps they learned more as a result, or had less emotional stresses, but let us assume we did not increase their earnings.  Only for 10 of those 100 students did the SNAP benefits make the difference, allowing them to graduate and earn $70,000 per year on average over a 30-year post-college-degree working life rather than the $50,000 per year they would have earned on average over a 30-year post-college-drop-out working life.

Let us say that those students earning an extra $20,000 each year pay 14% of that in payroll taxes and 11% of it in federal income taxes, so that we get back 25% of the $20,000 each year, on average.  That's $5,000 per year.  Let us also say that without a college degree, each of those students would have needed about $10,000 in benefits for four years of poverty or near-poverty in their lives when they would have qualified for Medicaid or SNAP or the EITC or something like that, but by getting them a college education, we prevented that.   So, we saved $400,000 in benefits we didn't have to pay out, and we gained $1,500,000 in increased tax revenue (ignoring entirely the multiplier effect).  So, based on those assumptions, we get back $1.9 million in reduced benefits paid out and increased tax revenues.  But, we gave $5,000 to 100 students, so the program cost us $0.5 million.  So, was it worth it?

Wow, it looks like a SNAP benefit to college students that costs us $1,250 per year in SNAP benefits for the students and induces 10% of beneficiaries to graduate from college when they would otherwise drop out with “some college” as their highest attainment is going to reap big returns, approximately $3 to $4 long-term dollars for ever $1 spent on the program.   I wonder if the 10% figure is accurate as an estimate of the facilitation of college degree completion we might get by just offering about $100 per month in SNAP benefits to all poor college students. Anyway, it looks like a good policy in terms of cost effectiveness if the assumption of producing about a 10% increase in graduation rates among poor students holds true.  

Programs don't have to be cost-effective.  Even if the program lost money in the long run, we could justify it on moral grounds in terms of giving people a chance to finish college even if they are poor, so that we can have a society based on meritocracy where talented and hard working persons from poor families have a chance to complete college and compete against the many middle-class and wealthy college students for whom food at college is not an issue.