74 Investigation Lays Bare Schools’ Scarcity Mindset Toward Immigrant Students
In refusing to enroll a 19-year-old newcomer, hundreds of schools cling to a wrongheaded notion that immigrants are a drain on the nation.
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In an era when partisan echo chambers have produced polarized public discourse and a politically aligned unwillingness to entertain inconvenient facts, clear investigative journalism is among the highest forms of public service. It’s also increasingly rare, with many media outlets struggling to find their footing in an era of financial, political and technological instability.
More now than ever, we, the public, desperately need the facts about our collective challenges. It’s particularly urgent for K–12 schools, which have, of late, simultaneously faced less public oversight and more political pressure, hosting determined partisan efforts to distort the teaching of history and science. Truth is not in fashion in a country where motivated reasoning has become a core feature of mass politics.
That backdrop makes the recent investigation into schools’ enrollment rules for newcomer students by my 74 colleague Jo Napolitano especially valuable. In case you missed it — and if you did, click here — Jo called 630 U.S. schools posing as the aunt of a fictional 19-year-old Venezuelan immigrant student named Hector Guerrero, and asked each how she could enroll him at the campus. Just 209 agreed to register him, even though he had a clear legal right to attend in most states based on his age — and still could have been admitted in the others.
It’s a valuable, revelatory piece of journalism that ought to prompt soul searching from educators and officials on the other 421 campuses, as well as districts around the country.
Thanks to Jo’s work, it’s clear that one of our most persistent national misunderstandings around immigration and demographics holds firm sway in U.S. K–12 schools. Namely, too many Americans are stuck viewing immigration through a scarcity lens, as though the arrival of immigrants and their families somehow subtracts from resources and opportunities available to non-immigrants in the U.S.
Many school officials seemed to be translating that misunderstanding into enrollment decisions for Hector. Admitting him would be too difficult for their school, they warned. Hector might take up scarce resources or might cause their school’s graduation rate to drop, they fretted. And didn’t his family realize how hard English-only school might be for him? When Napolitano pressed, some officials responded with civil rights violations masquerading as deterrents — sure, some said, Hector could maybe enroll, but he wouldn’t be placed in core academic classes or wouldn’t be permitted to participate in extracurriculars. Others were more actively dissuasive, asking about his citizenship status or hinting that he might need to pay tuition (both of these questions are irrelevant, bordering on illegal).
It’s stunning to read the callousness of quotes from officials around the country, including in Rust Belt communities like my hometown, places that are struggling to retain and grow their populations. K–12 education budgets are expected to dwindle in coming years, in part because of widespread enrollment declines. In this moment, against this backdrop, how can these administrators turn down a potential student?
And yet, neither our national immigration misunderstanding nor any of its local iterations have much factual grounding. There is ample evidence that the U.S. economy benefits immensely from the country’s ability to attract immigrants at all socioeconomic and educational levels. Immigrants boost our labor markets and grow the U.S. tax base. This includes all immigrants — regardless of their particular legal status in the U.S. immigration and labor systems. The Congressional Budget Office updated its multi-year fiscal projections for the country last month to reflect higher than anticipated immigrant arrivals in recent years. Its analysts estimate that increased numbers of immigrants arriving without official legal status or work authorizations since 2021 (and continuing through at least 2026) will increase U.S. GDP by $8.9 trillion in the next decade — and reduce federal deficits by $900 billion. As the CBO put it, nearly all of these economic benefits come from “expanding the labor force and boosting economic output.”
Today’s immigrants are also filling in a U.S. demographic gulf, providing the country with more students and workers at a time when the country’s birth rates are falling. Researchers have known for some time that “immigrants and their children will shape many aspects of American society and will provide virtually all the growth in the U.S. labor force over the next forty years.”
Think of it like this: if you are a near-retiree planning to rely on Social Security and Medicare in your golden years, you need enough younger workers to earn enough income and pay enough taxes to keep these programs maximally solvent. If you’re planning on selling your house and downsizing to make your retirement more comfortable, you need enough young workers to accumulate enough wealth to keep the housing market hot and buy it from you at a good price. Today’s immigrant workers help with this now and their children are the workers of tomorrow.
But you — and we, the country, all of us — don’t just need these children to grow up. To maximize our collective benefits from this burgeoning demographic boon, we need these children to be educated as well as possible so that they can do as well as possible in their careers. The better they do, the better the economy does, the better our public ledgers look, and the better off the United States will be in the long run.
As one immigration policy expert tells Jo: “There’s nothing that exemplifies the American dream and the American spirit more than a public education — and the right to receive that public education. These kids are here. They’re going to either be productive citizens or they’re not.”
The real narrative around immigrants and immigrant kids is a story of surplus, enrichment, and national abundance. Frustratingly, Jo’s extraordinary reporting shows that too many of our schools aren’t yet recognizing and acting upon these facts. Here’s hoping it breaks through.
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Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. Previously, Williams was the founding director of New America's Dual Language Learners National Work Group. He began his career as a first-grade teacher in Brooklyn. He holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University, a master’s in science for teachers from Pace University, and a B.A. in government and Spanish from Bowdoin College.
