School Officials Complain as Trump’s Migration Reforms Redirect Funds to American Children

An article in a Nashville newspaper about public schools “straining at the seams” chronicled an [English Language Learner] ELL student who maintained a B grade point average but lacked the ability to read or write English. In one [Limited English Proficiency] LEP class, 35 students spoke 16 languages and displayed skills ranging from illiterate to high functioning, which made it “that much harder to tailor lesson plans.” Several graduates of John Overton High School in Nashville returned to tell the principal that “they went out in to the world, only to find they lacked the English skills they should have gotten” in school. The mayor of Lynn, Massachusetts, admitted that adult illegal aliens are enrolled in city high schools, that illegal immigrant students often repeat grades and that an influx of immigrants is straining the school system and other city services.

The impact on children of blue-collar and white-collar Americans is caused, in part, by the funding diverted to educate migrant children who do not speak English, and who received little education in their home countries. FAIR reported:

Adding to the burden, the number of [Limited English Proficiency] LEP students in public schools jumped from around 3.5 million in 1998 to 4.93 million in 2013. To educate 4.9 million LEP students nationwide, there are 346,776 LEP-certified or trained teachers (as of 2013). These programs come at a substantial cost. Hempstead, New York, for example, specifically dedicates almost 33 percent of all budgeted teacher salaries to ELL-certified educators, not counting benefits, which FAIR estimates to cost just under a third of salaries. In addition to requiring a tremendous amount of money in new teacher hires, or providing existing teachers with ELL training when possible, LEP programs place additional stress on already overworked teachers, hampering their ability to distribute time and resources to as many pupils as possible. At the end of the 2011 school year, for example, 1,817,842 teachers (58.6 percent of the total) taught at least one LEP student, even though as many as 1,471,066 teachers lack the certification or training to teach this population.

Only nine percent of the children in the Baltimore elementary school are proficient in math or English, according to state data displayed by the greatschools.org website. PublicSchoolReview.com reports:

The percentage of students achieving proficiency in Math is 9% (which is lower than the Maryland state average of 42%) for the 2015-16 school year. The percentage of students achieving proficiency in Reading/Language Arts is 10% (which is lower than the Maryland state average of 44%) for the 2015-16 school year.

…

Minority enrollment is 81% of the student body (majority Hispanic), which is higher than the Maryland state average of 61%.

Many wealthy parents insulate their children from the diversity chaos by moving into expensive districts with few migrants or by sending their children to private schools. So far, there has been no movement by wealthy parents urging the transfer of migrants’ children from poor schools to the schools in affluent neighborhoods.

The NYT report showcases one of the many welfare programs that go to migrant families, often via Americans’ taxpayer-funded public schools. Advocates for migration deny that migrants are eligible for welfare but sidestep the variety of aid programs that are indirectly delivered to migrants, often via their foreign-born and U.S.-born children.

Immigration Numbers:

Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.

But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers — and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.

The government also prints more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.

This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.

This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations. It also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.

Story cited here.

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