NJ Sikh American community advised not to answer questions related to immigration status Carteret, New Jersey – The Carteret, NJ city Board of Education at a meeting on August 24, 2006, agreed to review the school re-registration form for the Carteret public school system after representatives of the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF) and local community raised concerns about questions related to immigration status listed in the re-registration form. The Board of Education stated that it will revise the form in consultation with SALDEF. In early August, the Board of Education mailed a letter and re-registration form stating that all children attending the Carteret public school system need to re-register. The stated purpose of the re-registration is to ensure proof of residency, but the means by which the Board has undertaken to ensure residency are troubling and potentially discriminatory against immigrant communities. Parents and guardians were asked to provide birthplace information to the school if their child was not born in the United States, and asked to provide four forms of documentary evidence to prove they lived in the area. SALDEF believes these requests to be improper, intrusive and extremely burdensome. The request for four pieces of documentation to prove residency is an undue burden on families. SALDEF advises both the Sikh American and to the greater immigrant community of Carteret to not to answer any questions relating to the birth place of you or your child or when your family immigrated to the United States. These are listed at the end of page 5 of the re-registration form. “The information being requested by the Carteret Board of Education is not only unnecessary but can be used to determine who is a naturalized citizen or legal immigrant and who is not,” said SALDEF President Mirin Kaur Phool. “The request by the school board is highly intrusive and forces us to ask if there is some further insidious reason for asking these specific questions of all registering students.” It is disconcerting to the immigrant community, which make’s up a considerable population of the Carteret community, given that the Board is not legally entitled to ask information regarding immigration status. During the Board of Education meeting last week, the Board conceded that the immigration and citizenship information was optional — though the forms themselves make no mention of this explicitly. It must be noted that the failure by the Board of Education to admit students whose parents refuse to answer questions on national origin would clearly violate both NJ state and federal laws. In New Jersey, discrimination in public schools on the basis of national origin is prohibited by the New Jersey Statutes Annotated 10:1-1, which is the New Jersey Constitution Article 1, par. 5 and by New Jersey Statutes Annotated 18A: 36-20.
