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Texas School District Solves Immigration Problem

As I said yesterday, what this country needs today is less partisan bickering and more people willing to find creative, goal oriented solutions to real problems. Today, my friend Ed Morrissey brings to light a group of educators in Texas who are doing just that. In a move sure to draw praise from immigration reform advocates around the nation, one Dallas school district has solved the problem of illegal immigration. The solution is so staggeringly simple in concept that most of you will be slapping your heads in one of those “why didn’t I think of that” moments. You simply take the illegal alien in question and issue them a fresh, new Social Security number. Problem solved.

Over a period of several years, a Dallas school district fraudulently issued Social Security numbers in order to employ bilingual teachers. Despite previous warnings, the DISD continued this practice until a tipster alerted investigators to the practice.

Is teaching a job Americans won’t do? Are there no bilingual educators in the US? Or was DISD just unwilling to pay a competitive rate for those instructors and conspired to get cheaper labor through fraud?

If we could get hold of roughly 20 million forms to assign new Social Security numbers to people we would have one less partisan issue to wrangle over. Well done, Dallas!

  • pacatrue
    I imagine that bilingual teachers are in fact hard to find. Heck, the Spanish teacher in the town I grew up in (we only had one) didn't speak Spanish very well.

    That said, issuing fake SSN is perhaps not the best idea.
  • Hah! I had hoped that someone had actually solved the immigration problem. Silly me.
  • I like your setup--"The solution is so staggeringly simple in concept that most of you will be slapping your heads in one of those “why didn’t I think of that” moments."
  • roro80
    Bilingual teachers are hard to find; there's a lot that goes into why good teachers often don't take those jobs. First, it's a very weird place to be politically -- when it comes down to it, a lot of people don't like the kids they teach ('if you can't speak english, get outta my country!"), don't necessarily think of them as people deserving of an education. This attitude is from not only the general white public, but often the school boards, principals, and even the other teachers; needless to say, this does not create a cozy work environment, as most bilingual teachers DO think of their students as people deserving of an education. Also, since most of these children come from low-education and low-income households, in many cases with parents who aren't in the country legally, there's rarely enough parental involvement, which translates to poor resources for the students and the teachers -- books, field trips, pencils, etc, seem to be allocated most heavily to those classrooms where parents raise a fuss. For the same reasons, the kids don't have help with their homework, often don't get proper nutrition, come from rough neighborhoods, and likely don't speak English in the home. And now, with NCLB and its only-this-test-counts approach, it's hard to teach your *ss off, getting your kids from barely speaking in sentences to writing full 5-paragraph structured essays in a year, while being told that you're not doing a good job because their test scores are lower than those of the rich, white kids.

    (full disclosure: I was a bilingual teacher in a public school)

    But falsifying federal documents is a bad answer to this set of problems, of course.
  • EEllis
    One this is Texas, Spanish speakers are not that hard to find. Also they didn't send any of these numbers to the feds. These were placekeeper numbers to use so the teachers could start getting paid while getting their SSN. The TEA has a system in place where they give temp ID numbers to teachers in that situation but for some reasion Dallis decided to go there own way using numbers that could easily be mistaken for SSN's. The problem is the added grief that it tkes later to straighten it out and how it looks not that anyone from the district was trying to issue fake SSN's. Of course Dallas also had teachers that spoke only spanish teaching ESL classes so they have so manny issues this screw up is small time.
  • DLS
    If I commit a crime, can I "amazingly solve" this problem by illegitimately getting a new identity, too? I'd like to evade taxes while I'm at it, and don't forget to register me as often as you like as a Democrat, too!
  • rjjrdq
    Hey roro, the race issue is dead. Obama won. Let it go, let it go...
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