Ghostbusting

The Ghostly Voice^TM of the Amarillo Globe-Republican, writing in this morning's "Monday Briefing" wails and gnashes its spectral teeth over reports that immigration officials aren't allowed access to schools in Albuquerque, N.M. The Ghost is shocked and horrified by these reports.

We have to wonder: did the Ghost even go to high school? I mean, this is hardly the first indication we've had that the Amarillo Globe-Republican is being largely written and edited by Jed Clampett and the two mountain men from Deliverance.

In the first place, no law is enforced in high school the way it is in the outside world. You may think that sentencing a kid to in-school suspension for smoking pot on campus is excessively lenient-- and maybe it is-- but the quickest way to make someone a criminal is to send them to prison for a first offense . . . and education remains the best way to turn them into productive citizens. If this means purposefully looking the other way on occasion so a rebellious kid can get through school, so freaking be it.

Secondly, I teach high school ESL classes to a number of immigrant kids in various states of legality. I couldn't teach if la migra was poking around my classroom all the time. I couldn't teach the undocumented alien kids, I couldn't teach the documented kids, I couldn't teach the citizen kids, I couldn't teach your kids.

Thirdly, you will notice the common thread in the previous sentence: kids. At teacher school, the education faculty go on and on about providing a "safe learning environment". The campus police officer-- who periodically decides that U.T. shirts are "gang apparel"-- is intrusive enough in my high school. What happens when the doors are thrown open to Border Police, National Guardsmen, and Minutemen to come in and enforce their own immigration agenda?

That's the point: the schools and law-enforcement, though both necessary, have different agendas. The old American system-- the one that sort of worked-- was built on checks and balances. There's nothing wrong with different agencies of "the government" opposing each other. Checks and balances keep everybody from overstepping their bounds. There's nothing in the Constitution about "seamless integration" of services and enforcement. And there shouldn't be.

spacedark