Educating Immigrant Students

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Recent Studies
In the past decade since The New Americans study was released, and especially now that the immigration issue is once again at the forefront of public policy debate, there have been several studies, all of them smaller in scope, that look at the effect immigrants are having in various arenas throughout the country. One of them examines the economic impact that a burgeoning Hispanic population is having in North Carolina, a state that is among the new destinations for immigrants coming to the U.S.

Until the early 1990s, immigrants typically went to places like California, Texas, Florida and New York, but in recent years they’ve been opting, in unprecedented numbers, for places like Michigan, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Nevada. “It’s now a fifty-state phenomenon,” says Michael Fix, vice president and director of studies of the Migration Policy Institute.

In North Carolina, the change has been dramatic. Between 1990 and 2005, the immigrant growth rate was nearly 400 percent, the highest in the nation. According to a report by two researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, most of the immigrant newcomers—or an estimated 76 percent—were undocumented. Commissioned by the North Carolina Bankers Association, the 2006 report, entitled, The Economic Impact of the Hispanic Population on the State of North Carolina, looks at the economic impact of the state’s Hispanic community, which primarily comprises Mexican immigrants. The state spent an estimated $467 million on educating their children—some 100,000 plus students—in the 2004-2005 school year. In addition, Hispanics drained the state budget of $350 million in health care and corrections costs, bringing the total tax burden to $817 million. At the same time, they contributed roughly $756 million in tax payments, so in very strict apples-to-apples terms, they represented a net loss of $61 million. But in terms of economic output, they represented $9.2 billion in revenues. That figure, the report said, could reach $18 billion by the year 2009. “When you look at the broader economic impact, it clearly outweighs the cost,” says James H. Johnson, Jr., William Rand Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Management at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a co-author of the report, who calls any investment in the education of the state’s Hispanic population “a form of enlightened self-interest.”

“It’s a competitive issue for me,” Johnson says. “We are going to need the talent and the skills of the immigrant population in order to compete in the years ahead.” Not to educate them, he adds, “is just a mistake.”

The average annual income for Hispanic households in North Carolina is nearly $14,000 less than it is for non-Hispanic households, and more than half the Hispanic population has less than an eighth grade education. Given that the native-born population of the United States is aging, and the demand for labor in the years to come is going to be “tremendous,” Johnson says, it only makes sense to educate the state’s immigrant children. He goes on to say that if this group is currently contributing $9.2 billion to the state’s economy, if their net cost in terms of tax dollars amounts to $102 per person, and their median education is eight years, then consider what the multiplier effect would be if they received high school diplomas and college degrees. “It becomes substantial,” he points out. “If you can contribute $9.2 billion now, what could you do if you were well-educated?”

Another study, Civic Contributions: Taxes Paid by Immigrants in the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area (Urban Institute, 2006), came to a similar conclusion by analyzing tax contributions made by the nearly 1.2 million immigrants who live in the Washington, D.C. area. It found a direct correlation between income, tax payments and four key factors—citizenship, legal status, English-speaking ability and education. The report further noted that citizens pay more than non-citizens, documented residents pay more than the undocumented, immigrants with high school diplomas and college degrees pay more than those who do not finish high school, and those who speak English pay more than those who do not.

At the high end, immigrants from India, the Middle East and Europe pay more taxes on average than U.S.-born residents. At the low end are immigrants from Mexico, Central America and Sub-Saharan Africa, with households headed by undocumented immigrants paying the least. When the high and low ends are combined, the report found, immigrant tax payments are roughly the same as those of the native born.

In terms of education, there was a similar pattern. Households headed by immigrants with a college degree have an average annual income of $103,000 and an average tax bill of $36,000. Households headed by immigrants who did not complete high school have an average annual income of $47,000 and an average tax bill of $12,000.

The report concludes that ultimately, for the undocumented population, any extension of legal work authorization “would give a substantial boost in tax revenue to jurisdictions across the Washington metropolitan area.” It predicted that increasing educational attainment and English language skills would do the same.

The Dream Act
In keeping with the times and the needs of a more highly skilled workforce, the current battle over the education of undocumented immigrants is now taking place at the college level. At the national level, efforts have been made in Congress to enact a so-called DREAM Act, which would allow undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition if they meet certain criteria—if, for example, they entered the U.S. before age 16 and completed at least two years of college or served at least two years in the military.

Despite several attempts, the DREAM Act has failed to make its way through Congress. At the local level, however, ten states have either passed laws or enacted regulations that allow undocumented high school graduates to pay in-state tuition. In two of those states—Kansas and California—the laws are being challenged. In the remaining 40 states—including North Carolina—undocumented immigrants must pay out-of-state tuition.

That was the case with Eusebio Montoya, who was born in Mexico, came to the U.S. in the fourth grade, and spent the majority of his childhood in the eastern part of North Carolina. By the time he finished high school, he was an honors student who spoke English better than Spanish. Known as Sabs by his friends and family, he was also a stellar soccer player and ultimately received an athletic scholarship from a small university in Florida, but he was unable to attend college in his adopted Tar Heel home.

His mentor throughout high school, an English teacher and soccer coach named Chris Embler, lobbied hard to get Sabs admitted into several North Carolina colleges, but to no avail. Embler also stood by Sabs when in the middle of his senior year, at a time when his college-bound dreams seemed to fade, he abandoned the work ethic he’d adhered to for years, and his 3.8 grade point average started to slide. Sabs was able to snap out of it and persevere, finally receiving the scholarship that allowed him to start his freshman year of college on time. But he is one of the lucky few.

A study by the Migration Policy Institute says there are 360,000 unauthorized high school graduates between the ages of 18 and 24. Of those, an estimated 50,000 are currently enrolled in college. In the next several years, the report says, an additional 715,000 undocumented youngsters will graduate from high school. If, however, they do not have college-bound options, attorney Peter Roos, who specializes in the education of immigrant children, predicts they will be inclined to drop out, and that can have an enormous impact on the rest of the family. “If there is one predictor of this population going to college,” he says, “it’s that there was somebody else in the family who went to college, a brother or sister who did succeed.”

It can also have an impact on other immigrant students in the same school, more than likely an impoverished, underperforming school where postsecondary aspirations are tenuous at best. In such schools, says Roos, it’s not unusual for high-achieving kids “to start acting out because a wall has been created and it influences other kids in the school who also turn off.”

Without some semblance of a DREAM Act in place, Roos says, students are, in a sense, being “automatically dropped out, and they are going to be a drain on society because uneducated people, for a range of reasons, are not going to be contributors. They are going to be takers. You lose the tax benefits of having educated them and the leadership benefits of having an educated population.”

Roos has been representing undocumented immigrant children in the courtroom for at least three decades. He’s the lead attorney for “DREAM Act” advocates in Kansas, and he was the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in Plyler v. Doe, first in Judge William Wayne Justice’s court, then in the court of appeals, and in the Supreme Court.

Roos agrees wholeheartedly with what Justice Brennan wrote in 1982, that the “stigma” of illiteracy would mark undocumented immigrant children for the rest of their lives and that by denying them an education, “we deny them the ability to live within the structure of our civic institutions, and foreclose any realistic possibility that they will contribute in even the smallest way to the progress of our Nation.”

Roos believes that idea is just as true today as it was then. “We certainly argued, and the Supreme Court noted, that most of these people are going to become permanent residents and ultimately, citizens, and you are shooting yourself in the foot by cutting them off from education.” In that regard, though the national debate about immigration rages on, nothing has changed: children are still lining up at the schoolhouse door. How far it will swing open for immigrant students remains to be seen.

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