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By J.F., The Economist
Thomas Perez - Department of Justice
ON TUESDAY Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil-rights division, sent a letter to the superintendents of Alabama’s school districts. HB56, Alabama’s harsh immigration law, requires “public schools to determine the citizenship and immigration status of students enrolling.” Supporters insist that this information will only be used to compile statistics. Latinos in Alabama, you will not be surprised to hear, are not convinced: school districts seem to be losing Hispanic students. Mr Perez wrote that HB56 “may chill or discourage student participation in, or lead to the exclusion of school-age children from, public education programmes based on their parents’ race, national origin, or actual or perceived immigration status… In Plyler v Doe, the Supreme Court held that a state may not deny a child equal access to public education based on his or her immigration status.” Mr Perez has asked for a list of all students enrolled in the state’s public schools on September 27th (the day before a federal judge in Birmingham allowed most of the law to take effect), and all students who have withdrawn or had at least one unexplained absence since that date. He has asked for the information to be delivered by November 14th, and then by the 15th of every month thereafter. So score one for all lovers of list collection, government bureaucracy and vigorous federal oversight.
As it happens, the lessons of Plyler are not restricted to the intersection of immigration and education. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that school districts could not deny a free public education to children in the United States unlawfully, meaning they could neither exclude them nor charge them tuition that they did not charge other students. They justified this decision using the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that states cannot “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Attorneys for the Texas school district in question tried to argue that illegal immigrants were not “persons within the jurisdiction of the State of Texas”; the Court rightly scoffed at that (one suspects that illegal immigrants who committed a crime would swiftly find out what jurisdiction they were in). The court pointed out that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections are explicitly not limited to citizens. Precedent established in an 1886 case (Yick Wo v Hopkins) held that the promises of equal protection “are universal in their application, to all persons within the territorial jurisdiction without regard to any differences of race, of colour, or of nationality; and the equal protection of the laws is a pledge of the protection of equal laws.” In other words, the Fourteenth Amendment—and, extrapolating from the final clause of the above sentences, the constitution itself—is not a just set of rights granted to American citizens; it is at its heart a set of limits imposed upon governments, states as well as federal.
From Elizabeth Green in the New York Times Magazine:
Always stunk at video games? Perhaps you’ve been cursed with a small striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning and memory. Researchers have found that college students with relatively large striatums learned how to play a challenging video game faster than their small-striatum peers. Large-striatum individuals were also better at shifting priorities from, say, shooting a target to outrunning an enemy–abilities that could translate to the real world.