Posted by Angelo A. Paparelli on October 29, 2011

Entrepreneurs in Immigration Residence Are Set to Occupy USCIS

Light at the end of the tunnel.jpgThe Occupy Wall Street movement began with a poster, a word cloud, a QR Code and three lines of text:

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET

September 17th. Bring tent.

www.occupywallst.org. 

Steve Jobs launched his massively successful "Think Different" rebranding campaign for Apple in 1997 with a TV commercial and this script:

Here's to the Crazy Ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world...are the ones who do!

Alejandro Mayorkas, the Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), recently announced with the flourish of a press release an ingenious "Think Different" initiative that may well transform this vexed and vexing immigration agency.  His announcement heralded the new Entrepreneurs in Residence Program (EIR), an experiment that will tap the wisdom and experience of seasoned startup veterans to inject fresh air and fresh insights into USCIS.

The EIR, as the press release explained, "will utilize industry expertise to strengthen USCIS policies and practices" affecting foreign "investors, entrepreneurs and workers with specialized skills, knowledge, or abilities." As Director Mayorkas explained, the "initiative creates additional opportunities for USCIS to gain insights in areas critical to economic growth . . .  [with the] introduction of expert views from the private and public sector [which] will help [USCIS] to ensure that our policies and processes fully realize the immigration law's potential to create and protect American jobs."  A two-stage effort, the EIR begins as a "series of informational summits with industry leaders to gather high-level strategic input" and then the heavy lifting follows with the assembly of a "tactical team comprised of entrepreneurs and experts, working with USCIS personnel, to design and implement effective solutions."

The EIR occupation of USCIS cannot come a millisecond too soon.  Just like a Dream Act kid who keeps getting blamed for the mistakes of her undocumented parents, USCIS, only nine years old, keeps receiving many of the same brickbats that bombarded its ancestor, the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).  Unlike the DREAMers, however, USCIS has magnified INS's peccadilloes and committed new more egregious ones of its own.  Ted Chiappari and I describe the venial and mortal sins of USCIS at length in our article, published last week in the New York Law Journal, "Intubation and Incubation Two Remedies for an Ailing Immigration Agency" (link courtesy of ALM Enterprises).

Whether intended or inadvertent, EIR is a deft stratagem, even more artful than Clintonesque triangulating.  Cleverness taken to the fourth degree, EIR, captured in one word, is all about quadrangulation.  If it is to succeed, EIR must task its occupiers to infiltrate and attack from within the four-sided challenge that is USCIS today: (1) the immigration stakeholder community and the USCIS Ombudsman clamoring for more user-friendly enhancements to fusty USCIS interpretations of work-visa eligibility, (2) the ever-campaigning President saying "we can't wait" for the enactment of job-creating legislation, (3) Socialism-incliningRepublicans in Congress, led by GOP commissars Smith and Grassley, who seem, counter-intuitively, to embrace immigration regulation more than job creation, and (4) the agency's anti-business, unionized adjudicators who prefer chaos theory over customer service.

Who will Director Mayorkas tap as the EIR's movers and shakers to prod, awaken, reeducate and redirect USCIS? As noted in the NYLJ  "Intubation/Incubation" article, ideally they should be "industry leaders" with just the right background:

[Entrepreneurs who] harbor a strong interest in an expansive reading of the employment-based immigration laws. Their likely interpretation would view the immigration laws as offering many opportunities to grow startup and established businesses in the U.S. by harnessing the innovations and skills of bright, energized and talented non-citizens. Prospective EIR participants with such interests and perspectives probably will have already used and intend to use again the employment-based immigration laws to secure USCIS's permission to hire foreign workers.

As the EIR experiment in intramural administrative sport begins, an October 29-30 Wall Street Journal editorial ("The Other Jobs Crisis") captured spot-on the immigration dysfunctions that beset America today. Migrant farm workers flee Alabama and Georgia, two states with nativist laws that cause produce to rot in the field. With few Americans willing to descend to back-breaking stoop labor, "incarcerated criminals" are dragooned to "work the fields." Republicans in Congress, the supposed "champion[s of] deregulation and business-led growth" focus on "immigration control" as "one of their main passions," while continuing "to ignore the economic costs" and the need "to overhaul the guest worker program to widen avenues for legal immigration."  Meantime, ironically on www.WSJ.com, GOP Presidential front-runner and pizza-chain turnaround artist, Herman Cain, callously rebukes the Occupy Wall St. protestors: "If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself! ... It is not a person's fault if they succeeded, it is a person's fault if they failed."

Like his Chief of Staff, Herman Cain is just blowing smoke.  He should know that not everyone can find a job in a nation with a 9.1% unemployment rate (but if Cain is truly "counter-factual" on the cause of U.S. joblessness, he is manifestly unfit for the presidency).  America desperately needs more job creators, the salutary byproducts of a functioning, business-friendly immigration system.  Since Congress will not act, and the President can't wait, my hope is that Director Mayorkas will install "demented" entrepreneurial occupiers of USCIS, "Crazy Ones" who "are crazy enough to think they can change" America by occupying his benighted agency.  

Posted by Angelo A. Paparelli on October 22, 2011

Legislatively Required, Bureaucratically Enabled Immigration Deaths

skull.jpgMany dysfunctions within the immigration ecospace are disturbing, but some make my blood boil.  The conniption that brought me to this Howard Beale moment erupted after I belatedly read a Forbes online article, published last April, by Osha Gray Davis ("A Death in Juarez: How U.S. Immigration Policy Is Tearing American Families Apart"). The Forbes piece reported on two people murdered in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez and countless others living there in fear (just across from El Paso, ironically, one of America's safest cities) while waiting for the completion of snails-pace immigrant visa procedures at the U.S. consulate.    

Sadly, Americans by now may be inured to the everyday nature of the drug cartels' killing fields in Mexico, particularly in Juarez.  Last year, 15,000 people were slaughtered in Mexico -- the direct or collateral damage from the drug wars. Juarez, with over 3,000 killings a year, has earned a macabre distinction as Mexico's Murder Capital.  Just this month, two U.S. citizens, a mother and son from Kansas, died there when assault-rifle fire sprayed their SUV.

The situation has become so dire that even the Department of Homeland Security recognizes the importance of returning deportees to the interior of Mexico, far from Juarez, in order to "safeguard" the "the health, dignity, and well-being of undocumented migrants during the repatriation process."

DHS solicitude for the safety of the deported is commendable.  But why does it not also extend to more deserving Mexican citizens who, as the parents and spouses of U.S. citizens, may be eligible to receive green cards?  Why is it official U.S. policy that these immigrant visa applicants are permitted to appear for their mandatory visa interview only at the U.S. consulate in this city of blood lust? 

The problem is not a small one.  The consulate in Juarez is "the largest issuer of [U.S.] immigrant visas in the world," according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.  Neither is the waiting time trivial.  The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman reports that half of the Mexican citizens seeking U.S. immigrant visas who require a waiver of inadmissibility, usually on a showing of extreme hardship to a U.S. citizen spouse or parent, must wait up to 12 months for a decision in their case.  Since a wait of even one day in Juarez may make the applicant a sitting duck for cartel violence, a year-long wait is simply unconscionable.  Worse yet, as explained below, if a waiver application is denied, the family separation may be for ten years or more.

This deadly form of Juarez red rover arises primarily from a failed experiment in 1996 at the instigation of Representative Lamar Smith -- now Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee -- who championed the "unlawful presence" bar to reentry that became part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA).  The bar in most cases involves a decade-long ban on readmission to the U.S. (unless an extreme-hardship waiver is granted) for persons who entered illegally or overstayed the time period granted by the government.  The ten-year bar (like IIRAIRA's three-year and permanent bans on returning) is triggered only after the overstayer or EWI (one who "enters without inspection") has left the United States.  Thus, what might otherwise be a one- or two-day game of consular Russian Roulette in Juarez (as immigrant visa and waiver processing are completed) becomes a one- or ten-year-long exposure to cartel carnage for the 50% of extreme-hardship waiver applicants who are not granted expedited review or are denied a waiver.

As a 2011 law review article ("The American Dream Deferred: Family Separation and Immigrant Visa Adjudications at U.S. Consulates Abroad") argues persuasively, the "choice" facing U.S.-citizen spouses, parents and children of either separation from a loved one for up to ten years (if the waiver is refused) or relocation of the family to a narco-state (my wording) is a Morton's fork on which no one should ever be forcibly skewered:

This form of collective punishment is anti-family and can send ripple effects throughout American communities, from home foreclosures to an increase in single parent households. It is a drastic penalty to impose considering unlawful presence in the U.S. is a civil violation that has gone largely unenforced for many years. It also discourages families from participating in the legal immigration process due to the risk of a potentially devastating separation. After more than ten years since the passage of the unlawful presence bars, it is now appropriate to look closely at their impact and examine whether they constitute sound public policy.

Although IIRAIRA and the administrative time required in the waiver adjudication process might seem to mandate this result, existing executive authority to administer the immigration laws readily allows for a suitable fix (until Congress can be persuaded to repeal the unlawful presence bars).  Here are various actions the Obama Administration could take to solve the problem:

  • Grant "parole in place" and expand the "technical-reasons" or no-fault-of-the-applicant forgiveness provision of Immigration and Nationality Act § 245(c) to allow persons otherwise required to attend an immigrant visa interview in Juarez to apply for their green cards through the adjustment of status process. This is the best option for non-willful overstays and Dream Act kids who EWI'd because the unlawful-presence bar would not be triggered and extreme-hardship waiver adjudication would be unnecessary since the applicant would not leave the United States; or
  • Adopt a policy to confer extreme-hardship waivers within the U.S. before the consular interview to all non-criminal Mexican applicants based on the dangerous conditions in Mexico and the overriding equity of the family relationship to a U.S. citizen relative.  This is similar to an old Immigration and Naturalization Service Operations Instruction and a precedent decision, Matter of Cavazos, which allowed comparable applicants to obtain green cards through adjustment of status despite inadmissibility; or
  • Shut down the U.S. consulate in Juarez until conditions in the city are safe.  (The State Department did close the Juarez post for a few days after two consular employees were killed last year.) State should instead designate alternative consular posts after negotiating with one or more friendly and safer countries to allow Mexican applicants eligible to apply for a hardship waiver to enter for the purpose of attending the consular interview.  This approach would be modeled after the "stateside criteria" and "third-country processing" arrangements with Canada and other nations in the 1980s for Iranians and other foreign nationals who could not travel to their country of citizenship or last residence because of the unavailability of consular facilities there.  It would require an agreement with the host countries to assure the readmission of any denied applicants through the grant of advance parole to reenter.  Denied visa applicants given advance parole and readmitted to the U.S. would then be eligible under current law for adjustment of status, if USCIS granted an extreme hardship waiver, or for prosecutorial discretion, if the waiver were denied.

As these options show, seemingly mandatory legislative procedures that lead to immigration deaths only appear necessary if the Administration is unwilling to look under the hood of the immigration laws to find more compassionate and life-saving alternatives. End the immigration deaths in Juarez NOW. 

Posted by Angelo A. Paparelli on October 16, 2011

Journalism's Immigration Challenge

newspaper stand.jpgThe Fourth Estate is under siege.  Newspapers try valiantly to maintain readership as advertising revenues plummet. Mostly free access to digital versions of print articles causes young and old readers alike to prefer Web-based media. The short-form writing of USA Today -- embraced by readers in a hurry -- and the public's preference for color and graphics over text combine to weaken demand for the kind of in-depth reporting that wins Pulitzers.  Pressures mount to present a "balanced" report, even when one side of the argument is illogical or extreme.  Bloggers -- some of whom may lack commitment to traditional journalism's code of ethics -- publish stories that scoop traditional reporters even if confirmation of the facts is rushed or ignored.

Immigration, perhaps more than any other subject, challenges professional journalists. The law is complex, obscure and difficult to understand and even harder to explain. Immigration procedures are varied and the decisions of courts and bureaucrats often seem arbitrary, inconsistent or otherwise inexplicable.  Stridency and bias on both sides of the immigration debate frustrate efforts to uncover the real facts. Deadlines and word limits make thorough and accurate reporting elusive.

There is reason, however, to be hopeful.  In 2010, the Atlantic Philanthropies joined with The New York Times to support journalism institutes that try to improve reporting on a variety of important topics, including immigration. One such effort, "The Changing Face of America - Immigration from the Ground up," co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the UC Berkeley Law School, will soon present a five-day intensive for journalists.  Last year's program is viewable online.

I spoke at last year's event on the topic, "Jobs Americans Can't (Won't) Do. Balancing Labor Market Needs with Worker Rights." As shown in the video below, I maintain that reporting on our nation's dysfunctional system of immigration requires heavy lifting. I offered a case in point, the Department of Labor's convoluted process of labor market testing which requires deep digging into legislative history and the discovery that bureaucrats have created political cover for themselves while perpetrating a cruel hoax on U.S. workers and the public.  

Another respected venue is the Institute for Justice and Journalism (IJJ) which has been offering fellowships to immigration journalists since 2003.  The IJJ's Immigration in the Heartland web site offers a wealth of excellent articles.  The next IJJ program will be in April and will focus on the 2012 elections, with the deadline for applications on January 17.

Some reporters excel in immigration reporting -- Miriam Jordan (The Wall Street Journal), Julia Preston (The New York Times) as well as Suzanne Gamboa and Amy Taxin (Associated Press) -- to name a precious few. Others rise to the top through editorial writing on immigration, such as Lawrence Downes (The New York Times), among the best of all.  Many others have embraced the task with energy and passion by devoting themselves to reporting on immigration reform, such as Phuong Ly, who established Gateway California, "a nonprofit that helps journalists connect to immigrants," and Julianne Hing of Colorlines. Probably the most courageous proponent of better immigration coverage by journalists is Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize winner who outed himself as an undocumented immigrant since childhood.

As the 2011 Fellows gather at UC Berkeley in November for the second annual institute (also titled,"The Changing Face of America - Immigration from the Ground up"), immigration aficionados and the public can look forward to better and still better reporting on the complex and life-changing issues arising in this turbulent Nation of Immigrants. 

Posted by Angelo A. Paparelli on October 09, 2011

Immigration's Defining Moment -- Do You Know Employment When You See it?

help wanted 2.jpgWith all the political hoo-ha about the need to prevent rascally businesses from employing unauthorized workers intentionally, the public ought not be faulted for assuming that the concept of "employment" under immigration law is clearly defined.  Sad to say, but the assumers give life to the maxim that when we consider facts not in evidence we make a derrière out of one another. I'm not suggesting that there is no definition of “employment”. Rather, the given definition -- despite the incorporation of a glossary of interwoven and related terms -- fails to offer enough nuance or clarity. 

[Stink alert!  We are about to venture into malodorous legalese. Hold your nose.  The journey will be worth it.] 

The relevant regulation, found at 8 CFR § Sec. 274a.1 (Definitions), provides:

(c) The term hire means the actual commencement of employment of an employee for wages or other remuneration . . . 

(f) The term employee means an individual who provides services or labor for an employer for wages or other remuneration but does not mean independent contractors . . . 

(g) The term employer means a person or entity . . .who engages the services or labor of an employee to be performed in the United States for wages or other remuneration. In the case of an independent contractor or contract labor or services, the term employer shall mean the independent contractor or contractor and not the person or entity using the contract labor . . . 

(h) The term employment means any service or labor performed by an employee for an employer within the United States . . . 

(j) The term independent contractor includes individuals or entities who carry on independent business, contract to do a piece of work according to their own means and methods, and are subject to control only as to results. Whether an individual or entity is an independent contractor, regardless of what the individual or entity calls itself, will be determined on a case-by-case basis. Factors to be considered in that determination include, but are not limited to, whether the individual or entity: supplies the tools or materials; makes services available to the general public; works for a number of clients at the same time; has an opportunity for profit or loss as a result of labor or services provided; invests in the facilities for work; directs the order or sequence in which the work is to be done and determines the hours during which the work is to be done. . . (Bolding added.) 

These definitions raise more questions than they answer. In the hypotheticals below, assuming that the individual in question has no legal right to engage in the specific actions noted, is the particular action prohibited "employment"?: 

1.      Self-employment?

  • Is a busker in a New York subway who does not solicit but accepts voluntary donations from passersby employed?
  • Does it matter if the busker puts his hat, upside down in front of him, in case anyone wants to make a voluntary offering?
  • Would an independent photographer, artist, architect or writer who produces a finished work for personal enjoyment be engaged in employment?
  • What if the individual later decides to sell the work in the U.S. -- does the sale cause the individual to have engaged in employment?
  • What about a professional knife-thrower's human target -- is (s)he employed when standing still as the knife approaches?
  • What about an usher in the theatre who escorts patrons to their seats and is thus  allowed to view the performance for free?
  • Does it matter if the show is such a flop that the producers routinely give away free tickets?
  • Are the legions of voluntary interns who receive valuable experience and college credit but no monetary payment employed?

2.      The sale or rental of an asset?

  • Is a female employed if she sells one of her eggs in the U.S.?
  • How about a male who is paid for his sperm at a Los Angeles clinic -- is he employed?
  • If the female was born abroad possessing the usual full complement of eggs, is her acquiescence for a fee in the removal of one or more eggs an act of employment?
  • What about a male in the U.S. for several years, whose semen was presumably created while he lived here, engaging in employment when he is paid by the sperm bank?
  • Does it matter if the sperm bank offers him a cup, directs him to fill it, leaves a copy of Playboy in the private donation room and pays him an honorarium -- is this employment?

3.      U.S.-based "virtual" efforts (with servers located abroad and work saved "in the cloud")? 

  • What about a Silicon Valley blogger who accepts paid advertising -- employment, yes or no?
  • What about a math genius living in Connecticut who accepts a prize to solve a puzzling theorem with his laptop -- employment?

4.      The active management of an investment in the U.S.?

  • How about the owner/manager of a motel -- employed?
  • How about the owner of an optometry shop who gives eye exams and engages American optometrists to work with her -- employed?

5.      The present exchange of promises assuring action in the future?

  • What about the exchange of  mutual promises - is it employment today if an employer promises to hire a worker and the worker agrees to render services for wages, with the work to begin next week?
  • What if one of the parties reneges -- is it still employment as of the time when the promises were made?

6.      The operation of a U.S. business that creates jobs for Americans?  

  • What about a full-time student who invents the next Facebook-type free app in his Harvard dorm room and hires software developers, knowing that some day an IPO will make him a billionaire -- is the present intention to profit in the future enough to constitute employment?
  • What if other students, say, two twin brothers, gave the student inventor the idea for the app -- are they employed if they sue and recover damages or settlement proceeds for their idea -- is the payment for the idea employment?
  • What if the free app requires users to agree to Terms of Service that make any valuable user-produced data, photos or designs the property of the student app inventor -- does the retention of ownership rights constitute "other remuneration"?

7.      The payment for or receipt of valuable benefits?

  • Which of the foregoing individuals or entities that make payment of money "employers" in the United States?
  • Which of them must complete a Form I-9 (Employment Eligibility Verification) when they "hire" any of the foregoing "employee[s]" in the U.S.?
  • Which of them are committing  felonies for "harboring" an unauthorized worker (since the harboring statute includes employment as a prohibited act)?
  • Which of the foregoing recipients of the noted benefits have failed to maintain lawful immigration status and therefore are ineligible for prosecutorial discretion and deferred action or are removable (deportable)?
  • Which of these recipients of benefits are thereby ineligible to receive a green card through the adjustment of status process?
  • Are any of the reasons for adjustment ineligibility "technical" in nature or not the "fault" of the individual (no-fault and technical reasons are forgiveness provisions that allow the grant of a green card even if the person is otherwise ineligible)? 

My point is not to model a law school class by using the Socratic method and reductio ad absurdem arguments.  Instead, it is to illustrate that the immigration regulations in their present form do not offer the guidance needed to cover many everyday (and some unusual) situations. 

With so much riding on the correct interpretation, the government must take a hard look at the current, clearly inadequate regulations, and issue proposed rules that allow the public to comment on new, more transparent guidance.  In the absence of new regulations, the immigration agencies -- U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- should follow the lead of IRS and offer a voluntary settlement program to businesses and individuals who seek to come back to the sunny side of the immigration law. 

Posted by Angelo A. Paparelli on October 02, 2011

Suffer the Children: Immigration Heartlessness and Hypocrisy

Thumbnail image for frowning child 2.jpgA recent televised debate revealed an immigration fault line within the GOP. Texas Governor Rick Perry's many challengers for the Republican presidential nomination railed against his decision to extend in-state tuition rates to undocumented college students, brought to the U.S. as children, who graduate from the Lone Star State's high schools. His initial reply:

“If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they've been brought there by no fault of their own, I don't think you have a heart.”

The line stung many conservative "activists [who] hear ‘you have no heart’ as a dog whistle for ‘you people are racist,’ which obviously enrages them," according to Steven Duffield, a former staffer to Sen. John Kyl who oversaw the writing of the 2008 Republican platform.  Within days Perry, while still defending the Texas tuition law, apologized:  “I was probably a bit over-passionate by using that word and it was inappropriate.”

The relevant questions are not really whether conservatives lack the same missing anatomical feature as the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz or whether racism drives opposition to college tuition support for children brought to America illegally by their parents.  Rather, the fundamental issue is whether a legitimate principle animates the opposition. 

One voice reliably opposed to immigration, Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), which claims to espouse "low-immigration, pro-immigrant policies," suggests that we need to get beyond "weepy sentimentality" and instead focus on hard-headed realism:  

The case of in-state tuition for illegal aliens who arrived here as children is a case in point. These are clearly the most sympathetic illegal immigrants, which is why advocates have been exploiting their stories in the quest for a general amnesty.

Our hearts tell us to make accommodation for children who were brought here illegally at a very young age and who know no other country (in-state tuition specifically is just a stalking horse for amnesty for these young people in the form of the so-called DREAM Act). That is a noble and proper sentiment.

But our heads tell us that all amnesties reward lawbreaking and serve to attract more illegal immigration. It is for this reason that amnesties must be avoided and why the push for "comprehensive immigration reform" has failed repeatedly, and will continue to fail.

Curiously, however, Krikorian and others of like mind did not repeat that "all amnesties reward lawbreaking," when the Internal Revenue Service decided this month to waive interest, penalties and audit exposure, and accept only one-tenth of the employment taxes otherwise owed by employers who participate in its "Voluntary Settlement Classification Program." Known as the VSCP, the program is an amnesty for businesses that may have wilfully treated employees as independent contractors, thereby avoiding Social Security contributions and taxes.  Nor did Krikorkian and his ilk object when the IRS twice granted wealthy tax cheats amnesty in the form of immunity from civil and criminal prosecution who voluntarily revealed the existence of untaxed off-shore bank accounts and paid back taxes.

When scofflaws flout their tax obligations yet are thrice forgiven by the IRS, Krikorian ought to be complaining to high heaven that federal coffers are unjustly deprived of needed revenue and that these tax amnesties "serve to attract more illegal" behavior.  His CIS colleague, Steven Camarota, has certainly shown no reluctance to allege (no matter how inaccurately) that undocumented immigrants hurt law-abiding taxpayers, but is likewise reticent when IRS announces serial amnesties that benefit businesses and the wealthy and make fools of law-abiding Americans who comply with the tax laws.

On a scale of culpability, tax cheats line up nearer to mobster Al Capone, convicted of federal tax evasion, whereas DREAMers, who want no more than to gain a college education, are truly innocent and should be shown "hospitality" because we may well thereby be entertaining "angels unawares."  Instead, the federal government repeatedly forgives tax violators with nary a peep heard from the anti-amnesty crowd.

Even more alarming, this week a federal judge, appointed by Republican President George H. W. Bush, upheld portions of a vile Alabama law that requires schools to investigate the immigration status of kindergarten through 12th grade students, notwithstanding the 1982 Plyler v. Doe decision which struck down a Texas statute barring undocumented immigrant children from primary and secondary school.  In recalling Plyler, a Washington Post editorial, "Targeting Schoolchildren," zeroed in on the damage that legislatively inscribed hatred of the other (and their children) will cause:  

In turning the schools into immigration registrars, Alabama’s new law flies in the face of good sense and settled law. The Supreme Court has specifically prohibited such registration schemes by the states aimed at immigrants, legal or illegal. And, in a ruling almost 20 years ago, it conferred on undocumented students an unfettered right to a public education through high school.

The court did so for sensible reasons. It noted that there is no legal precedent in America for punishing children for the actions of their parents. Writing for the court in a 1982 decision squashing Texas’s attempt to exclude illegal immigrants from public schools, Justice William Brennan said, “It is difficult to understand precisely what the State hopes to achieve by promoting the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries, surely adding to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare, and crime.”

Apparently, Alabama didn’t get the message. By forcing schools to collect and report data on the immigration status of students and their parents, the state will frighten kids away from attending school.

True to form, CIS heralded the Alabama ruling: 

This decision further helps the legal landscape, generally speaking, for states and localities beating open-borders and leftist warfare by litigation. It improves the prospects of other laws recently enacted in other states withstanding vicious legal attacks.

CIS is quick to bandy the "open borders" epithet (I've been falsely dubbed an "open borders type" in a CIS blog post last summer).  But this self-styled "non-partisan" screed-poster that accuses opponents of the anti-kids Alabama law as "leftist," and Republican presidential contenders who oppose DREAMers, ought to wake up and realize that the biblical remonstration to "suffer the children" did not mean to torment them.