Forsyth County Georgia Board of Education - Jere Krischel - 04/15/2025

We are a nation of immigrants, a tradition that stretches back 15,000 years ago when the first colonizers came over the Bering Strait from Asia.

The creation of this nation, based on ideas rather than bloodline, has been a major factor in our greatness across nearly every measure possible throughout all history.

That being said, immigration has not always been easy. Anti-asian sentiment, as far back as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, still echoes in our modern era, with BLM activist attacks on innocent eldery Chinese. My own grandmother, who came here after working for the US occupation in Japan after World War 2, had to wait years before it was legal for her to naturalize. Before the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, only Japanese born in the United States, like my grandfather in Hawaii, were allowed to become US citizens.

And our struggles continue today. Biden's open border policy, which has facilitated the sex trafficking of children, has been particularly difficult to bear. And while it is good that this horrific policy is over, undoing the damage is going to take time, effort, and no small bit of pain, in almost every community.

There are good people who have come into our country illegally. This includes children who were trafficked illegally by their actual parents, rather than sex slavers. But if we want a system that does not reward human trafficking, we cannot apply blanket forgiveness to these cases.

As enforcement efforts ramp up, every single illegal immigrant in the United States is going to be faced with a choice - do we leave before or after we're caught. And this, sadly, is going to include many children and families who are a part of our school district.

Public schools have generally been prohibited from checking immigration status as a prerequisite to enrolling children, ever since the 1982 ruling in Plyler v. Doe. This puts our schools in a difficult position, where our compassion for children means that we're indirectly incentivizing an illegal network of human trafficking.

I would like to propose that in order to address this dilemma, we add to our compassion, rather than subtract from it. It is compassionate to provide schooling to illegal immigrant children who are here through no decision of their own. And it is also compassionate to provide information and services to the families of those illegal immigrants on how to access the necessary help to return to their countries of origin, and re-enter the United States legally.

I would humbly ask the Board to develop a plan for providing information and support to illegal immigrant families with children enrolled in our school district, on how to comply with the Alien Registration Act, use the CBP Home App, safely return to their countries of origin, and then begin the legal process of immigration. I would also ask the Board to make an assessment of how many illegal immigrant children are currently enrolled at all of our various schools, while complying with any federal data collection laws, so that we can accurately understand the potential impact to our system if all of them find their way back to their countries of origin within the next 4 years.

And so on that note, thank you very much for your time, and again, I'd love to buy lunch for anyone who disagrees with me.