Plyler v. Doe

Majority reasoning

The majority, led by Justice Brennan, held that the Fourteenth Amendment's phrase "within its jurisdiction" applies to anyone physically present in a state and subject to its laws, regardless of immigration status, based on the text, historical usage, and congressional debate surrounding the Amendment's adoption. The Court declined to treat unauthorized immigrants as a suspect class or education as a fundamental right, but held that denying a discrete class of innocent children a basic education imposes a lifelong hardship unrelated to their own conduct, since children cannot control their parents' decision to enter unlawfully. Given the severe and lasting harm of an educational deprivation, and education's unique role in sustaining democratic institutions and individual opportunity, the Court required Texas to show its law substantially furthers a legitimate state goal rather than merely surviving ordinary rational-basis review. Examining the record, the majority found Texas's asserted interests—protecting against an influx of immigrants, preserving educational quality, and predicting which children would remain in the state—were not factually supported and that excluding these children would not meaningfully advance any of them, while imposing severe costs on the children and society by creating a permanent underclass of illiterate residents. The majority also directly responded to the dissent's objection that this analysis is inconsistent with San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, explaining that Rodriguez addressed relative funding disparities between districts, not a total denial of any education to an entire group of children.

Dissent reasoning

Chief Justice Burger, joined by Justices White, Rehnquist, and O'Connor, argued that while unauthorized immigrant children are indeed protected by the Equal Protection Clause, the Court should have applied ordinary rational-basis review since it agreed unauthorized immigrants are not a suspect class and education is not a fundamental right. The dissent argued that Texas's fiscal interest in preserving state resources for lawful residents, and its interest in deterring unlawful immigration, are legitimate goals that a state may rationally pursue by declining to extend free schooling to those whose presence violates federal law, just as the federal government excludes unauthorized immigrants from programs like food stamps and Medicaid. The dissent characterized the majority's combination of "quasi-suspect-class" and "quasi-fundamental-right" reasoning as an improvised, result-driven framework crafted to reach a particular outcome in these cases rather than a coherent application of settled equal protection doctrine. The dissent contended that the Court was improperly substituting its own social policy judgment for that of the political branches, effectively trying to compensate for Congress's failure to address the broader problem of unlawful immigration, and that this exceeded the judiciary's constitutional role by not deferring the matter to elected lawmakers.