ESOL For Illegal Aliens

Left overlooked in the debate over illegal immigration is the degree to which it makes an already dysfunctional public school system even more chaotic. “Our budget for English as a Second Language has gone from $500 a year to $1.145 million since 2000,” Hazleton, Pa. Mayor Louis Barletta said at a press conference here last week.

Mayor Barletta introduced an ordinance in Hazleton that makes English the official language of the city and penalizes landlords who rent to and employers who hire illegal aliens. One hundred cities and communities are considering some form of the Hazleton ordinance, Mayor Barletta said.

For its part, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is challenging every one of these proposals, according to Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. Judicial Watch sponsored the press conference that Mayor Barletta spoke at.

Beaufort City Councilwoman Starletta Hairston faced a similar math problem in her South Carolina community. “We get two million dollars in the state for English as a Second Language,” Hairston told the crowd at the National Press Club. “Beaufort County alone spends $22 million.”

That figure, moreover, has gone up from about two million dollars during the recent decade in which Hairston was in office. But then, so has everything else, including the Hispanic population in the county public schools.

“Fifty-three percent of the students enrolled in early education are Hispanic,” Hairston said. “Forty-three percent of the students in the student learning center are Hispanic.” And both South Carolina and Pennsylvania are far from Arizona, let alone Mexico.

“How can a city that is two thousand miles from the southern border have an illegal immigration problem?” Mayor Barletta said. “That is a question I often ask myself.”

He has good reason to ponder the answer. The influx has proven to be deadly, particularly for Hispanics already in Hazleton.

“Hazleton had a population of 30,000 and maybe one murder every seven years,” Mayor Barletta noted. Currently, “Off the top of my head, we’ve had at least three murders in the past 18 months.”

Until it became an odd locale in the struggle over American borders, the old Pennsylvania coal town was known mostly as the summer residence of actor Jack Palance who was born in the area. Unfortunately, the more recent drama in the region has been unscripted and live.
“A 14-year-old was arrested for firing a gun at Hispanic children in the Pine Street playground,” Mayor Barletta related. “He had no family here but he had his lawyer on speed dial on his cell phone.”

Such incidents strain the city’s resources in many ways. “We used half of our yearly budget for overtime on one murder,” Mayor Barletta calculated. “Police worked 36 straight hours to find one killer.”

But Hazleton, where coal is no longer mined, has become a focal point in the litigation explosion in America. “Twenty-five lawyers are suing Hazleton from groups with names like the ACLU and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund,” Mayor Barletta recounted. “Many of the plaintiffs are illegal aliens going by names like ‘John and Jane Doe.’”

Nonetheless, the ban Mayor Barletta introduced has proven effective, he concludes. “We saw people leaving overnight,” the mayor observed.

He likes to point to a poll done by a firm in the state’s capital of Harrisburg that shows public support for the Hazleton ordinance by a ratio of three to one. The initiative itself was based on one that was introduced in San Bernadino, California that did not pass.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.