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Thursday, October 4, 2007
Fearing deportation, immigrant parents pull their kids from school in Dallas suburb
The superintendent of the Irving school district said some immigrant parents have pulled their children from school over fears that they or their families will be deported, the Associated Press reported Thursday.
Jack Singley (pictured) said about 90 children have withdrawn from 33,000-student public school district in the last week, the AP said.
The Mexican Consulate has advised people to avoid driving through the Dallas suburb in response to the Irving Police Department’s participation in a program with federal immigration authorities to identify illegal immigrants who have been arrested and deport them.
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Bush’s SCHIP veto could hurt GOP with Latino voters
President Bush’s veto of a children’s insurance measure could hurt many poor Hispanics and further erode Latino support for the GOP, political experts and liberal activicts said.
The legislation would have expanded the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, by $35 billion over five years. The program serves thousands of Latino children who lack private health insurance.
Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said Bush’s veto is enormously unpopular with almost every group in the country, including Hispanics.
“The veto, especially if sustained in the House by Republicans, is bound to further weaken Republican support among Latinos,” he said.
John Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College in California, said that Democrats will surely run Spanish language ads on the issue during the 2008 election cycle.
“Republicans have a reasonable policy argument against the measure, but it sounds complex and abstract,” Pitney said. “The Democratic argument is simple and strong: ‘We want to help kids but Bush and his friends do not.’”
In addition, Pitney said that Republicans will have to explain why they are suddenly showing fiscal restraint after spending money “like drunken sailors.”
“Democrats will ask why the GOP is suddenly sobering up when facing a program that helps poor Hispanic kids,” he said.
The impact could be less than expected, however, because some Latino groups did not embrace the measure since it would have barred thousands of legal immigrant children from participating in the insurance program.
President Bush contends that expanding the program’s eligibility limits would encourage middle-class families to drop their private insurance and cover their children under the taxpayer-supported plan. The White House has also said that the measure “goes too far toward federalizing health care.”
In a memo, the White House said that the bill passed by Congress would enable SCHIP to cover children in some households with incomes up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, or $83,000 per year.
Despite the potential benefit for many Latino children, some Hispanic groups don’t like the SCHIP bill.
They are upset that congressional negotiators stripped a provision that would have lifted a ban on legal immigrant children who have been in the United States less than five years from participating in the SCHIP program.
Jennifer Ngandu, a senior health policy analyst at the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic civil rights group, said the move effectively denied health care to about 400,000 Latino children who are in the United States legally.
“While this bill would have extended coverage to Latino children, Congress cannot say with conviction that they removed all the barriers for Latino children, as they chose to leave a significant part of the population behind,” she said.