Who Should Pay? Governor Abbott Taking Aim at Education for Children of Illegal Aliens

& Day to Day Policing Efforts Create their own Linguistic Shorthand

Good Morning friends,

Here at the Dispatch, we try and focus on things that haven’t gotten wide publication yet. Sometimes it’s obviously something that just hasn’t been getting covered. Other times, it’s one of those things we have to hustle on, before other folks latch onto it.

This is one of those things. Watch for big headlines and extensive coverage elsewhere in the next few days as reporters and others catch up to the latest moves being considered by Texas Governor Gregg Abbott.

Speaking this week on talk radio, the Governor seemed to air the possibility of revisiting the landmark Supreme Court case that requires states to pay for the education of the children of illegal immigrants. It’s called Plyler v. Doe, and it was decided by the courts back in 1982.

Governor Greg Abbott, R - TX, at a recent event, Image Courtesy: Getty Images

Since then, the Governor’s had a chance to expand on those comments at a Houston political rally.

The Texas Tribune isn’t where we first found this news— we read about it somewhere else but failed to save that article. Oh well— here’s the Tribune’s typically thorough and up-to-date take.

The Governor appears to be ready to argue that the federal government should be footing the bill for educating the children of illegal aliens. Logically, this makes a certain sense. Opponents to Operation Lone Star like to argue that the State of Texas should have nothing to do whatsoever with policing illegal immigration.

If that’s the case— why should Texans alone pay the education costs related to illegal immigration? If all things illegal immigration related are sacrosanct and enshrined and reserved for the federal government, it would seem that Plyler v. Doe is a glaring oversight— not only that— it would seem to be a hugely unfair burden on Texas taxpayers that should instead be shared with the nation-at-large.

Weird.

Critics of Operation Lone Star like to point to this perceived enshrinement of immigration as a federal concern in the Constitution in their lawsuits against OLS. But, as the Governor and the Tribune point out, the federal government can’t commandeer a state employee or a budget to enact federal policy.

One big concern does occur to us, however. Let’s say everything the Governor wants to do here happens, and a huge pile of federal money gets dumped on Texas Schools. Will the contributions coming from Texas taxpayers shrink a corresponding amount, or will schools begin putting espresso bars in the cafeterias, trying to find new avenues to blow cash?

Let’s face it— school budgets around the State and Country are already bigger than ever, and the kids do not seem to be performing at commensurate levels of academic excellence.

More money isn’t the solution there.

Meanwhile, local taxpayers in all kinds of towns and cities are sweating and straining under property taxes that seem to be leaping far beyond the pace of any cost of living adjustments or other typical year-to-year raises.

Anyone living in Austin knows that. But it’s no different here in Kinney County with relatively poor local residents seeing their rates jump and jump and jump, as the State demands higher and higher valuations.

Property taxes are probably a topic we should save for another day— but quickly lets just say it: The system seems like a Rube Goldberg contraption— but in many ways it’s performing perfectly, if the goal is to scrape up money and confound the citizen.

Complain to your tax board— they tell you they have nothing to do with it— you need to talk to the school board, or some other taxing entity.

Complain to your school board or city council or county commission and they’ll point you right back to the tax office, who on the second go ‘round might point you back to Austin.

Part of what’s screwing taxpayers in Kinney County, we are told, is that the State of Texas is comparing property values here to other Counties that benefit greatly from oil and gas— a source of tax base that Kinney County utterly lacks. One suspects based on the way things have gone, that some tax troll or bureaucratic gnome in Austin has a chart or table somewhere that explains why that’s not actually what’s happening— and that our imaginary complainer needs to go back to his local taxing entities and demand cuts.

It’s a bureaucratic ouroboros made of frustration and apathetic fingerpointing, almost entirely opaque to the average local taxpayer. Surely this is no accident.

Texas does not track the citizenship status of students. Therefore, it is unclear how many undocumented students are enrolled or what the financial impact on Texas public schools is. Texas spends a minimum of $6,160 per student, which lags behind the national average of $12,600 in 2018.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund sued Tyler ISD Superintendent James Plyler on behalf of four families in the district after the state passed a law allowing schools to charge tuition to undocumented students. In a statement Thursday, the legal organization slammed Abbott’s suggestion to relitigate Plyler.

“[W]hile the Supreme Court split on the constitutionality of the Texas statute challenged in Plyler, all of the justices, including then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist, agreed that the Texas law seeking to exclude undocumented children from school was bad public policy,” said Thomas Saenz, MALDEF president and general counsel. “All justices recognized the folly in excluding certain kids from school; ubiquitous truancy laws embody this well-supported notion. Abbott now seeks to inflict by intention the harms that nine justices agreed should be avoided 40 years ago.”

—Reporter Kate McGee, The Texas Tribune

What’s right and what’s wrong in this matter will have to be decided by the great and good, one supposes.

In these times where austerity seems to be beckoning on the horizon, however, it seems entirely possible that the weight of cost will have much more to say on the subject than it might’ve in the past.

Nothing much major to report in Kinney County, expect word that a Chief Deputy is being hired, and will be taking on many of the day-to-day administrative tasks that have been keeping Sheriff Brad Coe deskbound.

DPS Brush Teams suggest their efforts are bearing fruit— placing cameras on certain ranches, they say they’ve been pushing the foot traffic further south and east. But, the highways remain something of a free-for-all, with high speed pursuits becoming so commonplace Deputies have begun adopting a short-hand patois when referring to them.

“I had a 1 and 4 yesterday.” “A 2 and 16 this morning.”

A 1 and 4 refers to 1 smuggler and 4 illegal aliens. The phrase also tells you that it probably involved a sedan of some sort, given the small number of illegal aliens. A 2 and 16 by contrast suggests a truck.

We’re not sure where the shorthand comes from— it may be an old Border Patrol thing.

One member of the Galveston Crew did relate a tale of catching a driver heading West. That’s somewhat unique— most law enforcement, we are told, focus on traffic heading East, as that’s where most illegal aliens want to go— East to San Antonio and I-35. In this case, however, the deputy pulled over two men in a car, one with a criminal history of human smuggling and trafficking. After questioning, it became apparent, he’d interrupted the second leg of a Coyote’s journey— the driver was returning him to Mexico to pick up and guide another load of illegals.

The idea of the ouroboros, which we mentioned earlier is lingering as we fumble about for something… some kind of a thoughtful expression or summation of what we’ve been seeing and feeling lately. A way to tie all this rambling together.

As an ancient symbol of immortality and renewal— the ouroboros actually encompasses far more than the idea of an infinite bureaucracy that we linked it to before. Indeed, we could be reliably accused of misusing it in so petty a fashion as complaining about the property tax bureaucracy of Texas.

Earliest references to the symbol are largely considered to be Egyptian, but there are possibly older ones in ancient chinese cave paintings, as well as ancient vedic and other far-eastern references.

The concept has even been linked to nordic thoughts and traditions. Given the widespread nature of the reference in so many cultures, it is perhaps no surprise that Carl Jung considered it a sort of universal archetype, a kind of self-referential expression of knowledge and identity that exists because it exists.

Consider the nordic saga of Odin, hanging from the world tree in a quest for knowledge. A sacrifice of himself, to himself. Pierced in the side, by his own spear, seeking a higher realm of information that eventually led to the sort of wisdom that the sagas say made him and the rest of Asgard superior to the Jotuns and Vanir.

Sounds a little like some pagan blasphemy, doesn’t it? Replace Odin with the Lord on the Cross and the spear Gungnir with the lance of Longinus, and the wisdom and glory that came with the resurrection if you want to talk about parallels.

Weird!

In any event, Odin hung from the world tree for days— lost in a delirium as his wound bled until visions of the runes and other knowledge came to him. For further wisdom, we are told of how Odin later sacrifices his own eye at the Well of Mimir.

Now, check out the account of one August Kekule— an organic chemist from Germany, who came up with the chemical structure for benzene sometime around 1865.

I was sitting, writing at my text-book; but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation: long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis.

—August Kekule, Organic Chemist, as quoted in Wikipedia

Benzene is a hydrocarbon, found in crude oil. It’s highly toxic and finds limited use in consumer goods, but is widely used in industrial applications. Its atomic structure is a circular thing, featuring bonded carbon and hydrogen.

So, what’s the point of all of this? Not sure, really. Just something cool we stumbled onto and wanted to share. What many take from the Poetic Eddas and the stories about Odin’s eye and his time hanging on the world tree, is the need for self-sacrifice.

One can sit in class all day long. An unwilling participant in the process— a juvenile captive of the schools, placed there by the treacherous collusion of parents and the state. Money will be spent. Adults will devote their time and effort.

But without self-sacrifice on the part of the student, there is no true knowledge— no true wisdom. One must bleed in order to grasp knowledge, and while taxpayers may bleed with the seizure of their income, very little of that sacrifice seems to make it to the students or teachers themselves in any way that actually brings results.

Instead, a school builds more facilities. Buys more property. Hires more administrators, and the snake keeps eating its tail.

And on that note, we’ll call it a morning. We’ll see you again some time soon, as circumstances warrant.

Have a great day, and a better weekend!

As always, this newsletter is a product produced as separately as possible from our day job with the Kinney County Sheriff’s Office, and any errors, opinions and other misdeeds are entirely our own and should not be construed as statements of Kinney County policy.