Anyone interested in this should check out Radiolab's episode on the state of collegiate debate:<p><a href="http://www.radiolab.org/story/debatable/" rel="nofollow">http://www.radiolab.org/story/debatable/</a>
>The three inmates, Carl Snyder, Dyjuan Tatro and Carlos Polanco, were tasked with arguing that public schools should be allowed to turn away students whose parents entered the US illegally.<p>>The inmates impressed the judges by suggesting that if public schools turned the students away, non-governmental organisations or wealthier schools could step in and provide better education to the children in any case.<p>That's a weak argument, in my view.<p>The illegal immigrants wouldn't be able to afford private education as it is too expensive even for Americans. Non-gov orgs wouldn't be able to reach to illegal immigrants. Home- and Internet-schooling would be better arguments, but still bad.<p>Integrating the children of illegal immigrants into public schooling would bring greater benefits not only to them and their parents but to society as a whole.<p><i>One can argue that, in the US, European cultural values predominate ("white" is not a synonym for the Caucasian ethnicity but simply an identity that means "holds European cultural values"), and that African-Americans don't have significantly different cultural values from European culture, (ie, they are "white" save for superficial differences like music, food and places of worship, and so on), and that a Syrian Caucasian is not "white" (because they don't hold European cultural values) but an African-American descendant of the people from the Sahara region is a dark-skinned "white".</i><p>And therefore African-Americans being dark-skinned "whites" (even if they try to superficially distinguish themselves with the US "black" cultural identity) is an example of the power of assimilation of our public schooling. It would convert, say, a child of Syrian parents with Middle-Eastern values into someone who holds European cultural values and who would work, or rebel, within the cultural rules of the European system.<p>The children of illegal immigrants should be allowed into public schools not just to neutralize the threat of cultural invaders, but to give us more soft power over a wider portion of the world.<p>Discuss? ;)
I think you underestimate the type of "spin" (for lack of better term) that goes on in the street? At least here in the Bronx, some of these people find ingenious arguments to get out of situations. Who is going to be better than understanding argument and the law, than someone who personally went through the process?<p>These people find ingenious short-term "quick-fix" arguments, a lot of that advantage can go away in the long term.