Education and the Respect for Law

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Education should teach respect for the law. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “A child’s education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.”  Once education and respect for law were together. But this has increasingly been ignored to make education politically correct and support civil disobedience for what many esteem to be more worthy goals such as public education of illegal immigrants.

Arizona’s SB 2010, passed and signed by Gov. Jan Brewer, has been strongly condemned by many. It gave the enforcement agency the ability to check citizenship of anyone for violation of any law. Steve King of Iowa, ranking Republican on the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, citizenship, refugees, border security and international law defended the bill, saying Arizona and other states are being forced to “step up and fill the void” left by the failure of the Obama administration and Department of Homeland Security to secure the nation’s borders. He said, “I commend Arizona for standing up for the rule of law.”

The Los Angeles Times wrote that Arizona was in turmoil, inundated by at least a half million illegal immigrants and torn apart by ways to handle these new residents. Social services expenses were wrecking the economy. However, since the passage and implementation of SB 2010, vast numbers of illegal immigrants have left the state to go to sanctuary cities in other states or return to Central America. One teacher said, “It is great not to have to teach English as a second language.” But Hispanic leaders are calling for a nationwide boycott of Arizona.

An average of 10,000 illegal aliens daily cross the border, over 3 million a year. A third will be caught and many immediately will try again. Arizona has been a basic entry point. About half of those remaining will become permanent U.S. residents (3,500 per day). This has put a great strain on the social services in every state!

According to a report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an estimated 1,880,000 American workers are displaced from employment annually by immigration; the cost for providing welfare and assistance to these Americans is over US$15 billion a year. The National Research Council, part of the National Academy of Sciences, found in 1997 that the average immigrant without a high school education imposes a net fiscal burden on public coffers of US$89,000 during their  her lifetime. The average immigrant with only a high school education creates a lifetime fiscal burden of US$31,000 on the U.S. economy.

Then there is the question of civil disobedience. The Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) chose to do this through the sanctuary movement, which dates back to 1983 when the General Assembly of the PCUSA declared that it would support by every means possible congregations and individuals that would provide advocacy to those seeking asylum from Central America.  The 1984 General Assembly commended those Presbyterian churches that “at risk to themselves, have declared their congregations as place of sanctuary for Salvadorian and Guatemalan refugees.”  This Assembly chose to oppose as illegal and immoral the policy of the federal administration to deny safe haven to Central American refugees in the United States, and the 2010 General Assembly, a quarter century later, also has called a boycott of Arizona.

Many Presbyterians, including myself, stood against this. We were not opposed to helping the oppressed, but we felt that we should not do it in violation of the laws of our nation that forbid illegal immigration. I Peter 2:13-14 states:  “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well.”   We felt there were multiple ways we could help the oppressed from these lands without flaunting the laws of our nation. Yes, without question, in retrospect, the sanctuary movement greatly encouraged illegal immigration!

But according to the Los Angeles Times Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Roman Catholic Church said that Arizona’s proposed illegal immigration crackdown is akin to Nazi tactics, calling it “the country’s most retrogressive, mean-spirited and useless anti-immigrant law.”

The United Church of Christ (UCC)’s leader for “Justice and Witness Ministries” stated, “It is now legal for Arizona’s law enforcement to single people out because of the color of their skin, the language of their ancestors, their place of, or even the way they dress.”  She further stated, “When racism raises its ugly head and our nation’s core justice values are at stake, fear cannot be an excuse to remain silent.”

The PCUSA, the Roman Catholic Church, the UCC, and many other old mainline denominations have encouraged in various ways the flood of illegal immigrants into America, which without question has created great problems in many areas, including public education.

A 29 May 2010 article in the Aquila Report titled “‘Ger’ – The immigrant in the Hebrew Bible,”  written by Hebrew Scholar Tom Hobson, includes information appropriate to this article. Dr. Hobson noted that:

“Much of the substance of this debate hangs on the meaning of the verb in the command ‘oppress’ in the command not to ‘oppress’ the ger. The pro-illegal-immigration crowd wants to define oppression as broadly as possible. But the language, in context, does not permit us to equate oppression with enforcement of legitimate laws. While it is true that many immigrants in ancient Israel may have been fugitives from punishment elsewhere, the only non-extradition clause found in the Torah is for runaway slaves (Deut 23:15-16), not for murderers or even for political refugees. There is no obligation in the Torah to protect any immigrant other than runaway slaves from being deported to their country of origin for crimes they have committed.”

Hobson noted  that, “This is a far cry from claiming that ‘oppression’ means enforcing modern immigration law. To claim (as implied by recent statements from the PCUSA Stated Clerk (http://bit.ly/arUJwa) that illegal immigrants have an inalienable right to be here in America, based on Scripture, is a stretch far beyond what the meaning of ger will allow.”

Another observation the scholar pointed out was that, “Those who appeal to Joseph and Mary’s story forget why they ever went to Bethlehem: they were obeying an inconvenient law they could have easily blown off. And they fled to Egypt for reasons already permitted under current immigration law, that is, to escape the murder of their child. Joseph and Mary are models of the law-abiding immigrant, not the illegal immigrant.”

The Aquila Report article well brought out that, “The truth is that our immigration laws are already far more generous than those of other countries who criticize us. If you want to talk about injustice, try letting illegal aliens cut in line in front of those who have gone to the effort to enter our country legally.”

However, the U.S. Census Bureau released 2008 figures showing the national average total of per-pupil funding from all revenue sources was US$12,028. Most illegal-immigrant children attend public school. Therefore, if one multiplies US$12,028 by the roughly 3.7 million students with illegal-immigrant parents, then one gets a national total funding cost of US$44.5 billion a year. This is a terrible cost for the price of civil disobedience, and can you wonder why civil, educational, and religious leaders would condemn Arizona and their attempt to support the law?

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by Joe Renfro, Ed.D., Radio Evangelist, Retired Teacher and Pastor, Box 751, Lavonia, Georgia 30553, 706-356-4173, joerenfro@windstream.net