The populist outrage machine has found its latest target in Texas: the 1982 Supreme Court ruling in Plyler v. Doe. Stephen Miller and his cohort of nationalist accountants are currently peddling a seductive lie. They claim that if Texas stops paying to educate undocumented children, the state suddenly enters a fiscal utopia. It sounds like simple math. Remove the students, remove the cost, keep the tax dollars.
It is a fantasy. It’s the kind of spreadsheet-driven delusion that ignores how an actual economy breathes.
If you want to bankrupt a state’s future, the fastest way to do it is to create a permanent, uneducated underclass. We aren't talking about "fairness" or "compassion"—those are soft terms for people who can't handle a balance sheet. We are talking about the cold, hard reality of human capital and the inevitable tax bills of tomorrow.
The Accounting Error of the Century
The argument for defunding the education of undocumented children rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of how Texas collects revenue. Texas doesn’t have a state income tax. It lives and dies by sales tax and property tax.
When an undocumented family rents an apartment in Houston, they pay the property tax through their rent. When they buy groceries or a pair of work boots at a Dallas Walmart, they pay the sales tax. They are already paying into the system. To suggest they are "freeloading" on a school system while simultaneously funding it is a logical failure that would get an entry-level analyst fired in any serious firm.
Beyond that, consider the Dependency Ratio. This is the ratio of non-working age people (children and retirees) to the working-age population. Texas, like the rest of the West, is aging.
$$Dependency\ Ratio = \frac{(Number\ of\ Children + Number\ of\ Retirees)}{Number\ of\ Working\ Age\ Adults} \times 100$$
As the Baby Boomer generation transitions into full-time Medicare and Social Security consumption, Texas needs a massive, skilled workforce to keep the lights on. If you intentionally sabotage the education of a significant portion of your future workforce, you are intentionally shrinking your future tax base. You are choosing to have a smaller pool of high earners and a larger pool of people who will eventually require state-funded emergency services because they lack the literacy to hold anything but the most precarious jobs.
The Hidden Cost of "Saving" Money
Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine Texas successfully bans 100,000 undocumented children from schools tomorrow. The immediate "saving" is roughly $10,000 per student in state and local funding. That’s $1 billion.
Where do those children go? They don't disappear. They don't magically teleport back across a border. They stay in the neighborhoods. But now, instead of being in a supervised environment learning English, math, and social norms from 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM, they are on the street.
I’ve spent years looking at the downstream effects of educational neglect in urban centers. When you remove a child from a structured environment, you don't save money; you just move the line item from the "Education" budget to the "Department of Public Safety" and "Texas Juvenile Justice" budgets.
Incarceration in Texas costs roughly $25,000 to $30,000 per year per person. Education is a bargain at $10,000. If even 15% of those unschooled children end up in the justice system or requiring intensive social intervention because they are unemployable, your "savings" are wiped out.
[Image comparing the annual cost of education vs. the annual cost of incarceration in the United States]
Dismantling the "Magnet" Fallacy
The loudest argument from the Miller camp is that free education acts as a "magnet" for illegal immigration. This is a classic case of confusing a secondary benefit with a primary driver.
People do not trek 2,000 miles through cartel-controlled territory because they heard the 4th-grade curriculum in San Antonio is excellent. They come for the $15-an-hour construction jobs and the $12-an-hour kitchen shifts that Texas businesses are desperate to fill.
The magnet isn't the schoolhouse; it's the job site. If Texas truly wanted to stop the flow, they would go after the CEOs and homeowners who hire undocumented labor. But they won't. It’s much easier to pick on a 7-year-old with a backpack than it is to fine a billionaire developer. Targeting education is theater. It’s a performance for a base that wants to feel like "something is being done" without actually disrupting the cheap labor supply that fuels the Texas miracle.
The Competitiveness Trap
Texas is currently in an arms race with Florida, California, and North Carolina for the "high-tech" crown. Companies like Tesla and Samsung aren't moving to Texas because they want a low-skill, uneducated populace. They move here for the talent.
When you create a bifurcated society where a massive chunk of the population is functionally illiterate, you create a drag on the entire regional economy. Every business in Texas—from the local dry cleaner to the massive tech hub—relies on a surrounding ecosystem of competent workers.
If your neighbors can't read a manual or calculate a basic percentage, your property value drops. Your insurance premiums rise. Your local economy stagnates.
The Plyler v. Doe ruling wasn't just some "liberal" judicial activism. It was a pragmatic realization that having hundreds of thousands of uneducated people living within your borders is a national security risk and an economic death sentence. Justice William Brennan noted that denying these children a basic education would contribute to the "existence of a stagnant underclass of illiterate persons." He was right then, and the data proves he is right now.
The Productivity Gap
Consider the Labor Force Participation Rate. In an era of declining birth rates, every human being within your borders is a potential unit of productivity.
$$Productivity = \frac{Total\ Output}{Total\ Input}$$
By educating these children, you are increasing the "Total Output" side of the equation for the next 40 years. By denying it, you are ensuring they remain in the "Total Input" (cost) side forever.
People who argue for the exclusion of these students are essentially arguing for a lower state GDP. They are arguing for a weaker Texas. They are letting their cultural grievances override their fiscal sense.
I’ve seen this before in corporate turnarounds. A CEO tries to save a failing company by cutting the R&D budget. It looks great on the quarterly report. The stock might even tick up. But two years later, the company is dead because they stopped investing in the product. These children are the "product" of the future Texas economy. Cutting their education is the ultimate "R&D" cut.
The Real Question Nobody Asks
The media asks: "Can we afford to teach them?"
The real question is: "Can we afford the consequences of not teaching them?"
If you choose the latter, you are voting for higher crime, lower property values, and a workforce that can't compete with the rest of the world. You are choosing to turn Texas into a place where you have to build walls around your own neighborhoods to protect yourself from the social decay you personally funded by "saving" money on schools.
Stop looking at education as a gift you give to people you like. Start looking at it as a defensive investment in the stability of your own zip code.
The nationalist accountants want you to be angry about the $10,000 spent today. They want you to ignore the $100,000 you’ll pay tomorrow in policing, healthcare, and lost economic growth. Don't be that easy to fool.
If you want to protect Texas, you put the kids in the classroom. You give them the tools to be taxpayers. You turn them into contributors before they become liabilities. Anything else is just expensive posturing by people who aren't half as good at math as they claim to be.
Texas isn't paying to teach "their" children. It's paying to protect its own future. Get over the politics and look at the ledger.
Stop trying to "save" the state into a recession.
