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Vol. 4/No. 2
Spring 2007
The Lost (and Found) Voters of Hurricane Katrina
At the Heart of South Africa, a Constitution and a Court
A Timeless University Trains Teachers for a New Era
Philanthropy Now: Diversity and Creativity for Changing Times
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Educating Immigrant Students
Economic Impact
Since Plyler v. Doe, there have been numerous studies that look
at the socioeconomic impact of immigrants. The most comprehensive was
commissioned by the Congressional Commission on Immigration Reform in
the mid-1990s and published in the aforementioned report, The New
Americans. It looked at immigrant wages, their skill level, their
place in the labor market, their tax payments, and their reliance on public
services, including education and healthcare, both nationwide and at the
state level, in the short term and the long term. Among the report’s
findings were that “immigrants and their children do not draw more
heavily on benefits than the general population.” It also found
that the immigrant contribution is a net economic gain for the United
States that ranges between $1 billion and $10 billion a year.
One of the biggest expenses—in addition to health care—is education. Last year, the total cost of educating the nearly 50 million students enrolled in the nation’s 15,440 public school districts was $439.5 billion. Expenditures for immigrant education, however, are unknown. The New Americans study put the additional cost of bilingual education at $5.8 billion, but that was ten years ago. At the time, the authors of the report concluded that over a lifetime, the difference balances out. As they complete their schooling and enter the workforce, immigrants begin to repay their debt, and the extent to which they are able to do that plays out the same way it does with native-born Americans.
As young Michael Valerio’s math assignment noted, those with a college degree earn more than those with a high school diploma, and those who drop out earn much less and run a much greater risk of becoming a burden to society. Valerio’s numbers were somewhat dated, but the same holds true today. For someone with an advanced degree, the average yearly income is $78,093; for a bachelor’s degree, it is $51,554; for a high school diploma, $28,645; and for a high school dropout, $19,169.
Many Americans’ perception of immigrants, especially those who are undocumented, tends to be that of the uneducated man or woman laying bricks, waiting tables, cleaning floors, and taking care of other peoples’ children. In reality, immigrants fit into all educational categories. In general, they are better educated than they were when the current immigration wave began in the early 1970s.
| Hispanic Resident Costs and Benefits to State, 2004 | |
| Total Estimated Major Public Costs | $816,559,000 |
| Total Estimated Taxes Contributed | $755,520,000 |
| Net Cost to State ($102 per Hispanic resident) |
$61,039,000 |
Broader Economic
Benefits: $9.2 billion
in total NC Business Revenue 89,000
additional jobs $1.9 billion
in overall statewide private-sector wage savings (1.4% of NC’s
private sector wage bill) Increased
labor output for NC industries |
|
| Reprinted from The Economic Impact of the Hispanic Population on the State of North Carolina (January 2006); used with permission of the authors and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. | |
Each decade since, the educational attainment of immigrants has improved. Asian and European immigrant adults are more likely than native-born Americans to have a college education. But the educational attainment of Americans has also improved, and large numbers of recent immigrants have not completed high school, leading to a persistent gap in both education and wages between the native born and the foreign born.
“Immigrant children are more likely than ever before in the history of our country to end up at Harvard University,” says Suarez-Orozco. “They are also more likely than ever before in the history of our country to come under the supervision of the criminal justice system.”
It costs about $24,000 a year to incarcerate someone in the United States. It costs about $9,000 annually to provide them with a high school diploma. The average per-pupil expenditure varies widely from state to state. In California, which by far has more English-language learners in its school system than any other state, the figure is—at $8,205—below the national average. Arizona also has a high percentage of English-language learners, yet the state’s per-pupil expenditure of $5,585 is the lowest in the nation. Washington, D.C. tops the list at $15,864.
There are heated debates in state houses around the nation about how to pay for public schools—whether the money should come from property taxes, income taxes, lottery revenue or vouchers—and what exactly it costs to provide a child with an adequate education. State governments and highly paid consultants have come up with all kinds of dollar figures to address the educational needs of English-language learners and immigrant students. But most of them, says Margie McHugh of the National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, are arbitrary.
It’s analogous to the immigration debate itself, she says, in which politicians are “crudely guessing” at numbers related to what the country needs in terms of visas, immigrant labor and the nation’s workforce. They are angling for numbers “the country will tolerate and that advocacy groups will settle for,” she suggests. “Let’s at least try to figure out what we think the needs are state by state, what the skill sets are that we need, and how we can start to bring in workers that are a match for that.”
The same can be said for education policy. “Politically, it’s contested ground,” McHugh points out, “but it’s not really contested in the education world. You need, at minimum, English-as-a-second-language classes…and all the teacher training and preparation that goes with that, along with the work to align the curriculum, and the like.”
To merely tweak the current system, experts say, is not enough. To assume that the large costs associated with public education—teacher salaries and either the construction or maintenance of facilities—will stay more or less the same regardless of the immigrant student population is misguided.
“That’s business as usual,” Suarez-Orozco says, and “the result is that half the Latino kids overwhelmingly of immigrant origin homes are not going to graduate…Those are the buildings and the teachers who are failing huge numbers of children at a time when the U.S. economy has really no space for kids without the entire order of cognitive and meta-cognitive skills that are demanded in a global economy and a global society.”
Rich, advanced, post-industrial democracies like the United States, Suarez-Orozco says, cannot have it both ways. “They can’t have economies that are, let’s say, addicted to immigrant labor without the cost that is associated with large-scale immigration. And by far, the single most important cost associated with large-scale immigration today worldwide is the education of children.”
Education is important for many reasons, of course, but in this context, one of its most critical functions is helping to prepare both citizens and residents of the United States for a competitive world economy that is more reliant on highly skilled labor than ever before. But it’s also important for what it teaches children about living in a democratic society. Whether immigrants end up staying in the United States or returning to their home countries, says Claire Sylvan, of the Internationals Network for Public Schools, what they learn while they’re here about their own rights and the kinds of civic responsibilities that enable a democracy to function is invaluable. “It’s a huge question for the survival of democracy in our country and around the world,” she says, and it’s a process that works both ways. As she points out, “America is very dynamic and always has been, and that’s what makes it as rich as it has always been. Every group of immigrants who have come to America and have contributed their ideas, their insights and their intellectual capital has made America stronger. It’s not a one-way street.”
For Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, providing immigrant students with access to education is a “no-brainer.” Referring to those who drop out and do poorly in school, he says, “It’s not that they fail to graduate or that you barely teach them what they need to be taught to survive in today’s economy, but you also marginalize them politically and civically.”