After more than 40 years, the federal right to free education for immigrant students finds itself in the crosshairs of conservatives

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Tara Sonenshine, Tufts University

(THE CONVERSATION) Texas once had a law that allowed public schools to charge tuition for undocumented immigrant families to send their children to school. The rationale was that taxpayer dollars should not be spent educating children whose families were not in the U.S. legally.

When the Supreme Court struck down the law in 1982, it held that young people have a constitutional right to access education. In its 5-4 decision in Plyler v. Doe, the court stated that any resources that might be saved by excluding undocumented children from public school would be outweighed by the societal harms – increased unemployment, welfare and crime – of denying a young person an education.

The Supreme Court also recognized that education is the primary vehicle for “transmitting the values on which our society rests.”

All children, regardless of immigrant status, have enjoyed the right to a free public education ever since.

But with the growing number of those foreign born without permanent legal status or entering the United States, some politicians are raising concerns about how their children...