Illegal Alien Children in Public Schools: HB138

Do you readers have any feelings about illegal aliens, as an entire group? Virginia House Bill #138 would, if enacted, require our public schools to take time to contact every child's parents and identify the illegal aliens. Full text is online here:

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?121+ful+HB138

How expensive would this be? How dangerous would verifying that it had been done be to the children, whose birth certificates would presumably be copied and filed somewhere, and somebody would probably want to transmit the copies electronically...

Do illegal aliens really cost us that much?

Doesn't every effort to track down illegal aliens have the effect of making stolen identities of U.S. citizens more valuable and less secure?

If the aliens' presence in the community, as distinct from their employment or access to specific places or information, is really illegal, wouldn't everyone who knows about it be responsible for stopping it?

I'm inclined to think it will be more effective, in the long run, to stick to policies of "People are innocent until proven guilty" and "Live and let live." Yes, sensitive information--including identity information--should be protected from most people at most times. Yes, certain privileges of U.S. citizenship should be available only to U.S. citizens, and certain privileges should be restricted to U.S. citizens with security clearance.

However, before this mania for trading on identities rather than actually exchanging goods and services got out of hand, the United States got by without much bother about where people came from and what their business here was. For more than a hundred years, we got by without photo ID or any other kind of formal identification documents. And when we were forced (by not having elaborate ID technology) to take people as we found them, as a nation we did have more xenophobia, more small towns with an unofficial policy of "If you're not from here you'd better be out before the sun goes down," but we did not have more crime, espionage, or sabotage. In fact we had less of all three.

I tend to favor a simpler policy. If children and their parents are quietly minding their own business, we don't ask where the parents were born and where else they've lived, since at last report the children of non-welfare families were providing a net financial profit to the public schools that received funds on a per-pupil-per-day system. If the families are asking for special benefits such as subsidized meals or college scholarships, then the people in charge of managing such things are already responsible for verifying their citizenship and their claims on the benefits of citizenship.

If some member of the family is not quietly minding his or her own business, and there's reason to suspect that s/he is not only here illegally but here for illegal purposes, we could certainly afford to streamline the process of checking and deporting that person. I know that when I was being harassed by an illegal alien, I reported several things to several county, state, and federal employees, and what I got was a run-around--"This is such an unusual, complicated case, it must be Someone Else's Problem!" We could afford to wrap our minds around the idea that an illegal alien who is actually committing crimes is everybody's problem.

But can we really afford to add this burden of investigating every child's parents to the existing expense of operating the public schools?