Among the countless victims of the unending tide of illegal immigration unleashed by the Biden-Harris administration’s open borders policies are American schoolchildren. Illegal immigrants have brought between 500,000 and a million of their children into the United States, crowding schools, stifling learning, straining budgets, and eroding the level of education provided to American children.

“More than half a million school-age migrant children have arrived in the U.S. since 2022,” reported Reuters earlier this month, citing records collected by Syracuse University. But immigration expert Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies crunched the numbers and said that may understate the figures by as much as half. “The actual number is somewhere between 700,000 and one million brand new migrant children who have entered the United States since 2022 just over the southwest border,” said Arthur on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Tuesday. He got the number by counting the 325,000 unaccompanied alien children (UACs) and some fraction of the 1.646 million minors arrested in family units (FMUs).

“The influx of migrants has overwhelmed many local school districts,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “This is a crisis in the making.”

Taken together, the number of illegal immigrant children in American public schools may exceed the total students enrolled in any of America’s largest school districts: New York City (984,000), Los Angeles Unified (633,000), or the Chicago Public Schools (378,000).

Their presence is placing massive strain on every aspect of America’s physical and social infrastructure, including the public school system. School districts on the receiving end of migrant inflows “have to hire English as a Second Language” (ESL) teachers, said Arthur. “They have to find textbooks that are in these kids’ languages. They have to make special accommodations for these children, and they have to expand their physical plant just so that they have desks for these kids to sit at.”

Part of the issue is cost. American schools spent an average of $15,633 per pupil during fiscal year 2022, the most recent year for which the Census Bureau has data — but new immigrants learning English cost more yet. “When you talk about English as a Second Language learners, you can add about 20% to that, or $3,000, for a total of $18,000 per student,” said Arthur. “Most of that funding comes from ad valorem taxes — property taxes that all of us who own property in the United States pay. We know that about $800 billion in local tax money is paid for public schools nationwide annually. … Some of those school districts receive state money. But nearly all of the costs of these migrant children are being foisted by Washington onto the states and localities.”

The Heritage Foundation released a report in February which found educating illegal immigrants’ children in just four states — California, Texas, New York, and Arizona — ran up a bill of nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars. Specifically, researchers found that the states’ combined 36,853 unaccompanied alien children cost taxpayers $666,233,197. It further inflates costs for Christian parents, who pay taxes for public schools in addition to paying tuition a second time to send their children to parochial schools or to purchase a curriculum for homeschool.

“This is a significant impediment that we’re placing on our schools and on our school children. And it’s one that Washington, D.C., and the Biden administration seems to be blithely uninterested in addressing,” Arthur told Perkins.

The strain has been showing nationwide. Teachers in the Austin Independent School District objected that they had to teach in hallways or conference rooms, due to an additional 400 Central American students enrolled in the district in April 2022. Last year, New York City had nearly 20,000 children of illegal immigrants in its schools. The influx has so increased the Big Apple’s diversity that “we can’t always find someone in the exact language that a student was raised in,” said New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D). It has also bloated the five boroughs’ budget. Each new illegal immigrant student has cost NYC taxpayers approximately $30,000 a year, local officials have testified.

The Chicago Public Schols have enrolled 17,000 illegal immigrant children over the last three years, according to the Illinois Board of Education. Last year, the Denver Public School enrolled 4,741 children newly arrived in the country — 632% higher than their usual levels of 750 such children each year before the Biden-Harris administration. Once thought of as an “urban problem,” the Biden-Harris administration has rapidly imported tens of thousands of immigrants into small and mid-sized cities such as Springfield, Ohio.

“We certainly have been hearing from systems of very different sizes — New York being huge to small rural places — that are just receiving far more newcomers than they ever have,” Julie Sugarman, an associate director of research at the pro-amnesty Migration Policy Institute, told Education Week.

Illegal immigration also impacts schools trying to forecast their budgetary needs. Budget “planning is generally done a year, two years, five years into the future,” noted Arthur. “There’s no way for school districts in this country to anticipate that next year they’re going to get another 200 migrant children, because the Biden administration really isn’t very forthcoming” about its policy of resettling enormous numbers of illegal immigrants in communities around the country.

The issue impacts a large and growing segment of young children. Some 47.8 million U.S. residents are immigrants, legal or otherwise — five times as many as in 1970. Roughly 15% of the U.S. population is now foreign-born, and one in four schoolchildren (25.6%) have at least one foreign-born parent. That means children often enter public schools without the ability to speak English. The Department of Education reported that more than 10% of U.S. schoolchildren lacked English proficiency and spoke another language at home — in 2005. By 2021, 22.1% of school children spoke a language other than English at home, and the federal government said 5% struggled with English. “It’s doubtful that many of them have any fluency in English at all,” said Arthur.

Mainstreaming non-proficient English speakers into classrooms may slow the education of American students, some theorize. They say bilingual education could cut the rate of instruction roughly in half, as teachers must teach the lessons twice, once in English and once in Spanish. “Students who enroll in bilingual education classrooms learn English less quickly” than those immersed in English, found a 2010 study.

In New York, the schools kept some bilingual education students in the Limited English Proficiency program more than six years, instead of the usual three years. Adding more languages adds new layers of complexity and subtracts hours of instruction time. But segregating non-proficient English speakers from the rest of students also presents problems by locking children into a Spanish-speaking silo and effectively barring them from assimilating with other students their age.

But English is not the only subject where illegal immigrants’ children lag behind. “Most of them have suffered from poor levels of education prior to the point that they’ve gotten to the United States,” said Arthur. “There’s a lot of remedial education that takes place trying to mainstream these students into the system … which means that there’s going to be less time paid to legal resident kids who speak English.”

In all, less than half of ESL students graduate high school in four years. “The bottom line is these kids are being robbed of their futures,” said Sister Kathy Maire, a Roman Catholic nun who worked with Brooklyn’s bilingual community, in in the 1990s. “I just kept hearing from parents that their children were not learning to speak English in bilingual education.”

The policy costs all U.S. taxpayers, thanks to Great Society-era legislation. Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 forces taxpayers to underwrite some of the costs associated with local schools hiring ESL teachers. Title III funding amounted to roughly $890 million in the last fiscal year; some House Republicans aimed to eliminate that funding, which is managed by the Education Department’s Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA). The pro-amnesty group UnidosUS (formerly the National Council of La Raza, or “the race” in English) has called for Title III budget to swell to $2 billion.

The radical group’s political arm, UnidosUS Action Fund, endorsed Kamala Harris in July after endorsing Joe Biden in May.

But some struggling school districts may have a small incentive to maximize the number of such children to claw back some federal funding. “[C]hildren who speak a language other than English at home, live in poverty, or have disabilities requiring an individualized education program, or IEP, come with extra federal and state dollars attached,” reports the Oklahoma-based NPR station, KOSU. “For districts like Santa Fe South” in Oklahoma, where 76% of students are non-English speakers, “that can mean the difference between existing or not.”

The federal government restricts Title III funds, which cannot be used for testing, nor state and local mandates. “People have looked at the question of whether the federal government should really foot the bill for the whole amount of money to serve these kids, because they are coming in based on federal policy,” said Sugarman. Alternately, the federal government could enhance border security, stop the flow of illegal immigrants, and enforce current law by deporting anyone illegally present in the United States.

“It is our citizen students who miss out on a high-quality public education as funds are shifted away from classroom learning” to accommodate students in this country illegally, testified Mari Barke, a member of the Orange County (California) Board of Education, at a June 4 hearing of the House Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education Subcommittee on “The Consequences of Biden’s Border Chaos for K-12 Schools.”

Advocates for American children say little can be done until the Supreme Court overturns a 40-year-old activist ruling that locks this system into place.

A Supreme Error?

The Supreme Court decision at the heart of the issue, Plyler v. Doe (1982), was a controversial, 5-4 decision written by Justice William Brennan Jr. The landmark case scrutinized a 1975 Texas law allowing the Tyler Independent School District to charge the children of illegal immigrants $1,000 annual tuition to attend U.S. schools. The Carter administration’s Justice Department opposed the law and called it unconstitutional, a position the DOJ abandoned under President Ronald Reagan. The outcome hinged on the 14th Amendment’s definition of personhood, which Brennan affirmed for illegal immigrants even as he denied it to unborn U.S. citizens as one of the seven justices who supported the Roe v. Wade opinion a decade earlier. An illegal “alien is a ‘person’ in any ordinary sense of that term,” opined Brennan.

With that, American public schools had to serve any child who showed up in their district. “The Supreme Court said … we’re obligated to educate every child on planet Earth so long as they can break into our country, and that seems to be not very fair to our people,” said Newsmax host Chris Salcedo on Thursday. The judicial activist opinion paved the way for our country’s transition into a post-American nation, say some conservatives. “The decision in Plyler effectively abstracted the Constitution so as to cover every sentient biped with a prefrontal cortex, exploding the preambular statement that restricted it ‘to ourselves and our posterity’ — to America and Americans,” wrote Pedro Gonzalez in The American Conservative. The decision “raises the question of whether nations are homes that owe something to their people or merely boarding houses and bordellos for a never-ending flow of strangers.”

Furnishing those in the country illegally with “free” schooling paved the way for an ever-expanding vista of taxpayer-funded welfare benefits for illegal immigrants and/or their children. Ever since, politicians at every level of government have tried to reinstate policies that put America first.

States Fighting for American Children’s Education

President Donald Trump has vowed to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” if elected. He has also promised to abolish the Department of Education, a promise originally made by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980 campaign and renewed periodically ever since. 

Thirty years ago, the citizens of California passed Proposition 187, which would have limited public schools and other welfare benefits to U.S. citizens. The measure, which passed with 59% of the vote, was struck down by the late U.S. District Court Judge Mariana R. Pfaelzer, a Jimmy Carter appointee.

In 2011, Alabama passed H.B. 56 into law, asking public school administrators to count the number of illegal immigrant children enrolled in the state’s schools. The Obama-Biden administration promptly sued, forcing a settlement that eliminated the requirement to keep accurate school records in 2013. The Obama DOJ was joined by a constellation of left-wing legal groups including the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC); the National Immigration Law Center; the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and its state affiliate; the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF); LatinoJustice PRLDEF; Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC); and private attorneys Brian Spears, Freddy Rubio, and Ben Bruner. A decade later, the SPLC still condemned the law’s “cruel legacy” (although, it noted, “not one constituent has enforced it”).

But in the last year, states have seemed to find new courage to tackle the issue. In August, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters said he would issue a guidance to assure “accurate and effective accounting about the costs and burden that illegal immigration has not only on their schools, but the taxpayers of the state of Oklahoma.”

Walters’s spokesman, Dan Isett, explained, “Thanks to Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Democrats, we have faced an unprecedented years-long surge of illegal immigration that has had a significant impact on our schools and our students. Superintendent Walters is dedicated to gathering more hard data regarding the impact of illegal immigration in order to protect students and Oklahoma taxpayers.”

Amnesty advocates feel outraged that the plan might require counting the number of students unlawfully present in their schools. Legal Advisor for the American Immigration Council (AIC) Michelle Lapointe said that schools and teachers act as “the bedrock for these [illegal] students and their families and protect them in so many ways.”

Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) has also drawn attention to the topic. Texas State Senator Drew Springer (R-30) introduced a bill (SB 923) which would direct the state to “seek to enter into an agreement with the United States government for the United States government to pay the cost of educating” illegal immigrants, or demand reimbursement from the federal government for the full cost of educating illegal immigrants’ children. The bill further specifies that “a student who is not a citizen or national of the United States or an alien lawfully present in the United States is not entitled to the benefits” of public education due to legal residents’ children.

Tennessee State Representative Bruce Griffey (R-75) introduced a similar bill (H.B. 1648) in 2021.

Even in deep-blue Massachusetts, school officials have taken action to protect American students’ access to a quality education. After the share of one Boston-area school district’s English learners soared to one in three, the Saugus Public School Committee Chairman enacted a new policy last August requiring enrolled pupils to be “legal residents whose actual residence is in Saugus” — and residents apparently approve. “The policy has been in place for over a year, and we have received no complaints,” said committee chairman Vincent Serino this summer. Although Serino said the policy aims only to bar entry to people living outside the city limits and that no student “will be denied access to school due to immigration status,” his community has received a legal warning from a group called Lawyers for Civil Rights.

Heritage Foundation scholars hope a lawsuit over one of these laws will cause the Supreme Court, which has been hailed as the most constitutional court in nearly 90 years, to reconsider Plyler v. Doe — a position shared broadly among conservatives.

“Overturning Plyler wouldn’t fix everything overnight,” concluded Gonzalez, “but it would be a big step in the right direction after so many wrong turns.”