Take the Index's Oscar poll!

• Make your picks for this year's Academy Award winners

• Most Popular
• Latest Comment
Most Popular
• Our View: Illegal immigrants deserve equal rights, education
• Hunt for gold in Missouri continues after 132 years
• Home sweet Soybomb
• Nixon proposes 12 percent cut
• Immigration bill meets opposition
• SOPA infringes on freedom of speech
• McHenry excels as top 'Dog
• Truman students protest SOPA/PIPA
• Local indicted for child pornography
Latest Comment
• Immigration bill meets opposition
  "The Equal Protection Clause in the 14th amendment guarantees equal protection of law to any person within the state's jurisdiction, not specifically legal citizens."

  Actually, the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment guarantees, according to Supreme Court jurisprudence, equal protection of the law for people similarly situated. The US and state tax codes are a case in point; hugely different tax burdens based on income, source of income, deductions, etc., etc. If the Constitution really did require what is claimed above, once someone was able to get to the US, they would be no different than a US citizen as far as the law was concerned. That clearly is not the case, nor should it be!

  In Plyler v. Doe, one of the rationals for this wrongly held decisions was that the Court, found, "... while the "exclusion of all undocumented children from the public schools in Texas would eventually result in economies at some level," ... funding from both the State and Federal Governments was based primarily on the number of children enrolled. In net effect, then, barring undocumented children from the schools would save money, but it would "not necessarily" improve "the quality of education. The court further observed that the impact of {the Texas law} was borne primarily by a very small subclass of illegal aliens."

  Assuming the Court was correct in 1982, which I do not, that the cost to taxpayers was negligible and the numbers of illegal alien children in K12 school was very small and their impact on the quality of education had little or no consequence, it's clearly not correct today. The number of children is huge, the costs in dollars is astronomical and the negative impact on the quality of education for the children of American citizens is likewise huge.

  The purpose of these laws, in part, is to gather irrefutable evidence of the terrible consequences to the American people and their children of the wrongly held Plyler v. Doe decision so that it maybe overturned. Of course the amnesty open borders crowd will fight tooth and nail to block any and all efforts to quantify the extent, costs, and all other consequences of illegal aliens and their children in our country.

  Make no mistake, massive immigration, legal and illegal, is not a partisan political issue. Both the Democratic and Republican parties not only support it but have passed the laws to effectuate it. They both talk about it from the perspective of their special interests, but neither has or will do anything to stop it until their election to office is sufficiently threatened.

  That is why the voters of this country must make it clear that their vote first and foremost is conditioned on the removal of all illegal aliens and the drastic reduction of legal immigration.

  posted by: Paul Cartier