Masten moved to house arrest

A Missouri senator is proposing a controversial bill about illegal immigration. 

Senate Bill 590, which had its first hearing Tuesday, would require school districts to verify students' immigration status upon enrollment and would allow police to demand documentation during traffic stops under reasonable suspicion  that the driver is in the country illegally. 

Sen. Will Kraus, R-8, introduced the bill this month as a way to determine the cost of illegal immigration to Missouri taxpayers, but opponents of the bill argue its provisions violate the 14th Amendment and burden school districts and police. 

Kraus said the bill is related to legislation he introduced last year that asked Missouri's attorney general Chris Koster to sue the federal government for the cost of illegal immigration to Missouri taxpayers in a Jan. 10 written statement. But the proposed lawsuit ran into obstacles because most state agencies don't know how much they spend on illegal immigrants compared to citizens. 

SB 590 is designed to aid Kraus' attempt to sue the federal government for its failure to crack down on illegal immigrants by collecting data about the impact and cost of illegal immigrants to Missouri, according to the statement. 

At the bill's first hearing Tuesday before the General Laws Committee, Gary Wiegert, lobbyist for the St. Louis Tea Party, was the sole person to testify in support of the bill.

Weigert said the St. Louis Tea Party supports Kraus' bill because illegal immigrants are a burden to Missouri's taxpayers, schools and police. 

"The trouble is we're not obeying the rule of law — people are coming here illegally to work and live," he said. "It's a burden on local schools to educate kids that should be educated in other countries."

But opponents like Vanessa Crawford, Missouri Immigrant and Refugee Advocates executive director, argued at the hearing that making SB 590 law actually puts a greater burden on communities. 

"It is a major unfunded mandate on police and schools because you're asking for new training and supervision and a new program of reporting," she said. 

It will be expensive and time-consuming for schools and police to comply with the law, Crawford said.

"This bill is turning schools and police officers into immigration agents, which just fosters this atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion between officers and the community," she said. 

Crawford also said it's irresponsible to pass a bill that inevitably will be challenged in courts.  Every provision in the bill is similar to laws that have been blocked in court in another states, including Arizona and Alabama, because it's unconstitutional, she said.

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. 

If the bill does make its way through the legislature, the governor and the courts to become a law, it wouldn't change much for the Kirksville school district, which already checks students' immigration status before enrollment, said Pat Williams, Kirksville R-III school district superintendant.

During at least the last five years, there hasn't been a situation in which someone could not produce documents, he said, and overall there is not a big immigrant population in the Kirksville school district. 

Part of the bill addresses the cost of English Language Learner programs to public schools. Williams said Kirksville R-III provides remedial English courses to about 25 students, or about 1 percent of the student body.  Among ELL students, Spanish is the most common first language but there also are students who speak Chinese, Vietnamese and Ethiopian, he said. 

About 30 miles west of Kirksville, the Milan school district has a much greater immigrant population, said Axel Fuentes, a field organizer for the civil rights group Center for New Community in the town. 

He said that when he learned about the bill, he spoke with several illegal immigrants living in Milan who said they likely would pull their children from school if the bill became law to avoid the risk of appearing on a list of illegal immigrants. 

Fewer students in the classrooms would mean less funding for the school district because state appropriations to the school are based on enrollment, he said.