Jasper Packard: “One, it is better that the children of illegals not go to gangs, better to have them in the classroom. The last thing…”

“One, it is better that the children of illegals not go to gangs, better to have them in the classroom. The last thing that illegal children want to do is to be picked up and arrested, because they will be sent home and they do not want that. The vast majority of the gangs in this country are made up of citizen youth, not illegals. Second, we ought to educate them so that they will be qualified to get a job. Illegals cannot legally work in this country. If we educate them, they still cannot work legally here in this country. We have school buses going to the border in San Diego to pick up children that walk across the border and get on the buses to fill the classrooms. We already have classrooms that are overcrowded, oversized. We cannot get new textbooks. We cannot build new classrooms for those that are here legally. Gov. Pete Wilson points out that the largest single fiscal burden to the California taxpayers is the mandate that States provide a public education to illegal children. Over 355,000 of them are educated in our schools at a cost of almost $2 billion. If we could put that into lowering classroom sizes and buying better and more modern textbooks and building facilities for our citizen children, then we would have less gangs from citizen children and we would not have to worry about the illegals. I strongly support the Gallegly amendment and urge my colleagues to vote for it.”