Week 5 Persuasive Essay: Undocumented Immigrants

Assignment Model
Week X: Are Undocumented Immigrants Entitled to Equal Education?
Assignment: Identifying Fallacious Arguments and Rhetorical Ploys
Educational Issue: Are Undocumented Immigrants Entitled to Equal Education?
Educational Expert Position
Yes: William Brennan
No: Warren Barger
Summary of Author’s Position:
Education provides individuals with the fundamental tools that are necessary to lead lives that are economically productive (Brennan, 1982). This means that education plays an important role in maintaining some level of decorum. Education is also highly valued in our society since it helps in producing skilled individuals who are capable of maintaining basic institutions. Individuals require education to take part in the practices that form the core of our society, including politics, which requires individuals to have specific values that guide them through such systems. Educating immigrants might be an expensive process that will require huge funding; however, the author believes that failing to educate such individuals would be more costly. The continuous increase in undocumented immigrants makes it impossible to avoid the group of individuals since they are bound to have a significant effect on the country’s economy.
Rhetorical Fallacies and Ploys Used by the Author:
Quotations and Rhetorical Ploys
Part 1: Quotations
“Paradoxically, by depriving the children of any disfavored group of an education, we foreclose the means by which that group might raise the level of esteem in which it is held by the majority. But more directly, education prepares individuals to be self-reliant and self-sufficient participants in society. Illiteracy is an enduring disability. The inability to read and write will handicap the individual deprived of a basic education each and every day of his life. The inestimable toll of that deprivation on social, economic, intellectual, and psychological well-being of the individual, and the obstacle it poses to individual achievement, make it most difficult to reconcile the cost or the principle of a status-based denial of basic education with the framework of equality embodied in the equal protection clause.” (Brennan, 1982, p. 177)
“Yet by patching together bits and pieces of...