A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

     FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                            Contact: Rick Miller      June 10, 1996                                             (202) 401-3026

Statement by U.S. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley Regarding the Gallegly Amendment to the Immigration Bill

As House and Senate conferees work to craft a bipartisan immigration bill, I urge them to follow the Senate's lead and leave out the destructive "Gallegly Amendment" contained in the House version of the legislation.

I oppose this provision because it is fundamentally wrong to punish innocent children for the mistakes of their parents by depriving them of an education and an opportunity to become self-sufficient. It is also shortsighted: we don't help solve the illegal immigration problem by creating a new class of illiterate children in America, pushing them out of the schoolhouse and into the streets.

This provision would attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court's 1982 decision in Plyler v. Doe and authorize States to exclude undocumented children from public elementary and secondary schools.

Children prohibited from attending school are much more likely to wind up victimized by gangs, engaging in unlawful activity or otherwise burdening their communities. As the National President of the Fraternal Order of Police recently wrote, "[p]utting hundreds of thousands of additional children on some of the toughest streets in our country translates into a windfall of potential new victims for the predators who work the streets." This concern is so great that the Attorney General and I recently wrote leading senators pledging that we would recommend a presidential veto if the bill contains this "poison pill" amendment.

Any policy that requires schools to exclude undocumented children would also force teachers and principals to serve as immigration officials -- a burdensome task for which they are not suited or prepared. Excluding undocumented children from public schools would also create a climate of mistrust and division. Parents could be forced to prove that their children are not undocumented, potentially burdening all families and estranging those legal immigrant and citizen students and families who may be uncertain of their rights or fear stigmatization. And in some families, children born in the U.S. -- citizens -- might be eligible to attend school while their undocumented siblings could not.

Excluding undocumented children would penalize children, harm communities, burden teachers and principals, and frustrate attempts to increase family involvement in education without reducing illegal immigration. For all of these reasons, I strongly urge the Conferees to drop the Gallegly Amendment.

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