Immigration and Education
The Education Sector’s Kevin Carey debunks some myths about how immigration is affecting our schools:
But discussions about the education of immigrants are too often boiled down to simplistic narratives alleging that schools are being overwhelmed by a wave of primarily Mexican and often-undocumented immigrants who are difficult to teach because they can’t speak English. A 2005 Urban Institute study finds that those ideas are at best over-simplified and at worse incorrect.
As Carey explains:
- First, most foreign-born students aren’t Mexican.
- Second, the large majority of school-age children of immigrants aren’t undocumented.
- Third, most children of immigrants are proficient in English.
- Fourth, most Limited English Proficient (LEP) students aren’t foreign-born.
