However, for the sake of attempting to steelman the pro-illegal immigration position, my wife and I have considered the various aspect which are due any human person regardless of immigration status: the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.  There is an aspect of which, regardless of immigration status, if people need food, water, clothing, shelter, it is ethical to exercise charity and provide those necessities.  Granted, there are prudential limits on this (staples vs filet mignon, a small apartment vs a 4 bedroom, 3 bath house), but this seems straightforward enough.

As a next step, it would be preferable, and in line with the dignity of human beings, for illegals to be employed in some limited fashion so as to earn their keep until such a time as the legal processes dictating their deportation run their course.  However, this employment itself has to be understood as a form of charity and should not be at the expense of needed employment by legal members of the community, nor undermine, without the express permission of legal members of the community, the economics of legal businesses. 

So it seems important, with both Christian charity and the law of the land, to help out illegal immigrants who are in need, without impeding the due process resulting from their illegal status.  This does not require believing that the illegal immigrants have the right to remain, but out of respect for their dignity as human beings, assisting them and perhaps even encouraging them towards legal status. 

There are still other aspects my wife and I have not delved into, such as whether we could steel man any of the “good illegal immigrant” cases where some illegals have been working for years in a community, established deep ties around them, and seem – other than their immigration status – to be upright citizens.  This one seems to run into the intractable problem of essentially continuing to perpetuate a crime every day these illegals remain in the country.  Maybe some day we’ll have some great insight to share on that problem.

Where the conversation turned interesting was when my wife brought up the details of school financing, and how illegal immigration impacts that.

As I mentioned, my wife is concerned with the financial injustice illegal immigration causes, and schools have become a particular passion for her.  This is not to gloss over identity theft, fraud, burdens on the medical systems, and numerous other financial concerns, but because she’s so in tune with how schools are funded (because we homeschool, and because funding keeps becoming an issue when anyone decides maybe some of that funding should help students to AVOID public schools, but that’s another discussion) she had a lot to say on the issue. 

In many of the states that we know about, schools receive a great deal of funding based upon student headcount.  In Wyoming, schools receive funding from local property tax to support the fixed costs of a school, but then receive money from the state for each student signed up for the school to the tune of (with a bit of simplification) $14,000-17,000 a head. 

In examining the expenses of a school, the facility largely is a fixed cost.  The cost of hiring a teacher is more or less a fixed cost, but that’s where there’s some of the “play” involved.  If you have to have a first-grade teacher, the cost of that teacher is going to be roughly the same whether she’s teaching one student or thirty students.  So to a certain extent, a school is incentivized to keep increasing the student head count up to the limits of what a teacher can handle, because once the facilities are established and the teacher is hired, each additional student is just net money.  Of course, there are saturation points.  Once you’ve added so many students, you might not have room in classrooms or have to hire teacher aides or additional teachers.  If the students you bring in have special needs, you have to hire special educators, but it seems that there is clear incentive for schools to want the children of illegal immigrants. 

As a note, there are national laws requiring schools to take children regardless of immigration status, so schools have their hands tied in this regard.  What we determined was that this financial incentive to keep the schools pack naturally leads schools and teachers unions to oppose any effort to staunch the flow of illegal immigrants.  Moreover, schools and teachers unions can hide behind the national law to keep these incentives out of public discourse. 

Accepting illegal immigrants also allows the schools to continue to demand more money from the state.  When students don’t speak English at home, translators and ESL teachers are required by law because not speaking English is considered a special need.  This increases reading intervention as well.  Also, free and reduced lunch programs as well as other special needs programs have more students who need more help, which has the schools clamoring for more money.  Even assuming that illegal immigrants’ kids have no higher rate of needing this help than the norm, there are more kids, which increases the number of children who need the aid.  So it would seem that teachers’ unions would be incentivized to support illegal immigration because it increases the demand for special education teachers, which in turn increases the demand for teachers overall. 

So the general conclusion is that just regarding schools, illegal immigrants incur a lot of taxpayer costs, and the schools and teachers unions have incentive to support illegal immigration because it supplements their finances, which otherwise would be greatly flagging.

An objection at this point would note that the same costs would incur were all these children of legal status, but every other condition remained the same.  More legal students at a school will require more teachers, more teacher aides, more classrooms, more special-needs instructors, and so on.  That is all true.  Our point mainly focuses on the incentive for schools and teachers to support increased illegal immigration.  We don’t make any case that schools and teachers actively support increased illegal immigration, though there is plenty of evidence that teachers unions do.  This was, to us at least, an interesting observation that adds to our understanding of how complex the issue of illegal immigration really is.