Should the government provide free public education to children of illegal immigrants - Essay Example

Illegal immigrants in the USA generally belong to the lowest socioeconomic status among all classes of people in the USA and increase the poverty in the country. They also cause violence to get money and things because they cannot get employed in the legal way. The government should not provide free public education to children of illegal immigrants because this not only encourages illegal immigrants to come to the USA but also increases the challenges for the indigenous population and legal migrants.

Providing the children of illegal immigrants with free public education essentially means encouraging more people to immigrate to the USA illegally. “The prevailing image of undocumented workers in the United States is that of a population with low levels of educational attainment, employed in sectors supplying low-skilled jobs” (Rivera-Batiz, 2001, p. 2). People want better education and better employment opportunities. They do not care whether they are legal or illegal in the country as long as being illegal does not deprive them of the rights that the legal residents of the country enjoy.

If the government starts providing free public education to the children of illegal immigrants, the population of illegal immigrants in the USA would increase manifolds. Along with the increase in population, the challenges for the government as well as the native population would be maximized. The government would have to arrange food, and provide for the needs of a larger population of citizens than what it does now. This would increase the economic burden on the USA and the country’s economy would be affected in a negative way.

Providing the children of illegal immigrants with free education in public schools is ethically wrong because this means funding their education with the money of the tax-paying legal residents. In the USA, the cost of living is very high. In a vast majority of families, both husband and wife work to manage the expenses of the whole family. Many people in the USA do more than one job to make enough money to live a happy life. People work so much that there is very little time for recreation. A significant portion of their hard earned money goes to the government in the form of taxes.

Having worked so hard to make this money, the legal residents of the USA deserve to have their tax-money used by the government in such ways that would benefit them in the long run. If the government uses the money collected from the taxes on funding the education of children of illegal immigrants in schools, this might occur as a compromise upon the quality of education of the children of the legal residents. Many public schools in the USA in which the children of legal residents are gaining education require more funds to raise the quality of education.

Spending money on such schools for better education of the children of legal residents would be a much better use of money than spending them on the education of the children of illegal immigrants. Critics may argue that if the government bans free education to the children of illegal immigrants in the public schools in the USA, the illegal immigrants would never be able to upgrade their standard of living and would continue to live in poverty for generations. The answer to this counterargument is simple; illegal immigrants are not the problem of the government of the USA because their legal status in the country is nil.

An individual is only entitled to have benefits in a country when his/her legal status