Month: March 2023

Schools Struggle to Accommodate Migrant Students

By Joe Guzzardi

Regardless of how bitter the immigration argument – and the debate routinely sinks to new hostility lows – both enforcement advocates and expansionists should agree that open borders must not be allowed to disrupt public education. If an individual’s station in life prevents him from enrolling his children in private schools, then a solid public education is essential. Without proper education in the basics, the nation’s children will have a long climb toward success in adulthood.

No one can argue persuasively that the border surge, which includes hundreds of thousands of K-12 age youths, will do anything except further drag down the nation’s failing public school system. Everything in America’s public schools reflects crisis mode.

For public schools, the trend is headed in the wrong direction and tumbling freefall-style further into the abyss. Enrollment is down, and chronic absenteeism is up. Shortages abound – teachers, substitutes, bus drivers and maintenance personnel. School board meetings are battle zones that often require security to prevent fisticuffs. For 9-year-olds, math and reading test scores have plummeted to their lowest levels in decades. This is a key age for creating a strong academic foundation. Black and Hispanic students fell further behind white students. Reliance on mental health services has become more common. Violence, including shootings and sexual assaults against teachers, has escalated.

Into this chaotic cauldron, waves of migrant children have entered the U.S. from more than 100 nations, and they speak dozens of different languages and dialects in our K-12 schools. Some have never attended school, and others possess only a rudimentary understanding of how a classroom functions. Enrollments occur on a rolling basis throughout the school year. No matter how disruptive migrant enrollment is to the existing student body and to the teachers, the process is a constitutional imperative.

In June 1982, the Supreme Court issued Plyler v. Doe, a landmark decision which held that that states cannot constitutionally deny students a free public education based on their illegal immigrant status. By a 5-4 vote, the Court ruled that any fiscal resources which could be saved by excluding illegal immigrant children from public schools were far outweighed by societal harms that might be created from denying an education to unlawfully present children.

The Supreme Court has ruled, but the teachers and school administrators are the ones who must somehow impart a quality education despite the challenges that the migrants represent. And with teachers now coping with the ongoing enrollment of non-English speaking students, citizen children are at a disadvantage. When polled, a plurality of working-class, blue-collar Americans said that illegal immigration has made their local school systems worse off, a new study revealed.

The latest Rasmussen Reports survey showed that 40 percent of Americans who earn less than $30,000 felt that illegal immigration made their local schools less effective, while 41 percent of those who earned $30,000 to $50,000 reached the same conclusion.

Among working class, middle class and upper-middle class Americans, less than 10 percent say illegal immigration has made their local schools better, while 34 to 45 percent say there has not been much of an impact. In his House Judiciary Committee testimony earlier this year, U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) stated the obvious: public schools packed with non-English speakers are a disadvantage to citizen children eager to learn and advance. “What the Democrats have never explained is how our schools are made better by packing classrooms with non-English speaking students,” McClintock said.

Nationally, the English language learner (ELL) student population will continue to grow rapidly, the predictable consequence of an open border. The projected number of school-age immigrant children increased from 12.3 million in 2005 to 17.9 million in 2020, a total which accounted for most of the school-age population growth during the period. Most of today’s immigrant children will require ELL services.

During the 1950s, California’s public schools ranked among the nation’s best. But decades later after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, California drifted toward the bottom of the heap. One reason for the steep decline: California’s K-12 ELL enrollment is 1.1 million students. Attending to immigrant children’s special academic needs, including developing language skills, detracts from teacher time that would otherwise be allotted to citizen children. After two years of remote instruction, children need every moment to catch up and shouldn’t be required to share valuable classroom time with illegal immigrants.

Schools Struggle to Accommodate Migrant Students

Senate Again Introduces E-Verify

By Joe Guzzardi

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) reintroduced legislation to help businesses comply with immigration laws by certifying that their employees are legally authorized to work in the United States. The “Accountability Through Electronic Verification Act” would permanently authorize and expand the E-Verify program, an internet-based program. The bill requires employers to use the program within one year of enactment to determine workers’ eligibility. Employers must terminate workers that E-Verify cannot confirm as legally work-authorized, and those employers are subject to increased penalties.

Grassley said that businesses nationwide use E-Verify to help them comply with our immigration laws, reduce illegal immigration incentives, and provide Americans and other legal workers job safeguards. Expanding the system to every workplace, Grassley added, will improve all businesses’ accountability “and take an important step toward putting American workers first.”

In addition to the most obvious E-Verify advantage – protecting U.S. jobs – the program has countless other indirect benefits. Illegal border crossings and visa overstays would be dramatically reduced or eliminated once unscrupulous employers could no longer hire illegal aliens.

Because E-Verify would eliminate the jobs magnet, Customs and Border Protection agents, as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would be, in large part, relieved of the headaches of asking for identification from non-English speaking foreign nationals. Freed from the tedium of dealing with job seekers, law enforcement personnel could, assuming the White House and the Department of Homeland Security allow them to carry out their duties, including pursuing and arresting cartel criminals and human traffickers. With E-Verify in place at work sites, people who can’t get jobs will move home voluntarily. Family separation would become a thing of the past.

A Carnegie Mellon University study confirmed that Arizona’s mandatory E-Verify law played an important role in self-deportation among illegal immigrants coming from and returning to Mexico. The study noted that, after E-Verify was mandated, the average return migration rate to Mexican states nearly quadrupled over the time period observed. Mexican states like Sonora, where roughly 50 percent of migrants had previously settled in Arizona, experienced 30 percent larger growth in its return migration rate compared to a state with weaker connections to Arizona.

Another E-Verify advantage is that implementing the program would help end identity theft, a huge problem which in 2020 created losses to unsuspecting consumers that totaled $56 billion. Employee information taken from an I-9 form, the paper-based employee eligibility verification form used for all new hires, is compared against existing Social Security Administration and DHS databases. If the data doesn’t match, then the probability is that the SSN doesn’t belong to the applicant. Nancy Berryhill, in 2018 an Acting Commissioner of Social Security, testified to the House Subcommittee on Social Security. She concluded: “Mandatory use of EVerify by employers would help reduce the incidence of fraudulent use of SSNs.”

With the protections that E-Verify offers for American workers, and the deterrent that creates against illegal immigration, the wonder is why past bills, similar in most respects and dating back more than three decades, haven’t received congressional traction. The harsh, but inescapable, truth is that the donor class wants cheap labor, and Congress’ objective is to keep donors happy, U.S. workers be damned.

Senate Again Introduces E-Verify