the words of Sheri Few

The Arizona legislature is debating a bill that would require the state to count the number of students enrolled in public schools who cannot prove legal status and report what it costs to educate them. If knowledge is power, this knowledge will empower citizens to make informed choices on how their education dollars are spent. We need a similar law in South Carolina.


Taxpayers at the local, state and national level have every reason to expect transparency into how much of their hard-earned tax money is used to provide education benefits to children of law-breakers with no right to trespass into this nation. Once the numbers of students in the system without citizenship or legal immigration status is known and the drain they represent on the public treasury is calculated, voters will have the ability to debate what can and should be done about the situation.


It is possible that citizens will see the data and conclude that any impact is slight and the benefit of educating the children of illegal immigrants is worth the cost. But I suspect that once the facts are known about what this one aspect of not enforcing our immigration laws costs the country at the state and local level, we citizens and our politicians will be moved to act.