Letters: Immigration, school suspensions – Knoxville News Sentinel

Knoxville News Sentinel 4:01 p.m. ET May 1, 2017

Lets set the record straight on how Democrats feel about immigration, to counter cartoon caricatures like Democrats want open borders. Democrats' feelings can be summarized as Much Ado and Weve Seen This Movie Before.

Much Ado refers to the puzzlement that Democrats feel about the enormous noise that President Donald Trump and his supporters make about people who are non-compliant with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Agency regulations, which usually happens from overstaying a visa.

Such infractions fall in a broad class of commonplace, low-punishment transgressions like traffic violations and in-home smoking of marijuana, where total enforcement is wildly impractical because of cost and disruption. Consider the enormous investment that would be required to catch and prosecute every speeder or every puff of marijuana. Imagine the disruption to daily life total enforcement would entail, and the affront it would present to our constitutional liberties. Any politician demanding the investment required for total enforcement would be laughed out of the room, yet thats exactly the level of immigration enforcement that Trump has promised and his supporters demand.

Catching every speeder or arresting every pot smoker would produce no real benefit to justify the enormous expense and disruption. Like immigration infractions, these are essentially victimless crimes. Indeed, it can be argued that speeders put others in far greater peril than those here pursuing the American dream.

This leads to Weve Seen This Movie Before. How to account for the visceral hatred shown by Trump supporters to the undocumented in comparison to speeders, puffersor other low-level offenders? One can only observe that similar attitudes were expressed towards other newcomers, whether Irish, Germans, Italians, Jews, Poles, Chinese, Japanese, Puerto Ricans,and the list goes on and on. And that brings us to one final saying:If It Quacks Like a Duck ...

Laurence J. Best,Lenoir City

In your article Knox churches seek action in schools, jails on April 24, I was disappointed at the Knox County Board of Educations lack of involvement in the efforts that Justice Knox and city officials are putting toward reducing school suspensions. As the article mentions, these suspensions result in a disproportionate number of minority and disabled students being removed from classrooms. As a graduate social work student at the University of Tennesseewith a focus on organizational leadership, I find Justice Knoxs community organizing efforts to be a welcomeapproach to addressing this issue. I would like to see members of the school board embracing this solution-focused approach to meeting the needs of our children.

The school-to-prison pipeline is a very real problem, andearnest efforts must be made toward eliminating it. The American Civil Liberties Union (www.aclu.org/issues/juvenile-justice/school-prison-pipeline) informs us of the direct correlation between being suspended or expelled from school and being incarcerated as an adult. When students who are removed from school are largely part of at-risk populations, why would school board members not want to be involved in efforts to change these disturbing statistics?

Policies that push students out of the classroom negatively affect those who could most benefit from having an education for a better chance at a promising future. I urge the Board of Education to collaborate with Justice Knox and remember that their mission is "to advocate Excellence for All Children,which includes children who are part of a minority or face a disability.

Amy Grimes, Maryville

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Letters: Immigration, school suspensions - Knoxville News Sentinel