illegal immigration: Preview
I am planning to do an in-depth posting on illegal immigration here in the United States. In the meantime, after watching a politician begging for more money to better educate non-English speaking students, I had to ask the question “What percentage of non-English speaking students ‘legal US citizens?’” The following article does not answer that question directly, but it does give us a good idea of what that number could be.
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Education Taxed By Non-English Speaking Kids
FoxNews.com
Betty Maldanado’s neighborhood school is Lowell Elementary in Orange County, Calif. She attended that school, as did her mother, brothers and sisters. But her daughter Alena will not, because most students who attend the school now are children of Mexican immigrants who don’t speak English. So she’s sending Alena to private school.
“It makes it difficult, because you have the kids that aren’t speaking English regularly at home, aren’t speaking regularly even with their friends,” Maldanado said. “They only speak Spanish which makes it very difficult for them to keep up in the classroom setting.”
By law, citizens and immigrants  legal or not  can be educated in U.S. public schools.
One group of angry parents showed a video showing dozens of Mexican kids coming over the border to wait for a San Diego school bus. Another video shows more students from another district taking the trolley back to the Mexican border after school.
>>WHAAAAAAT?
>>Now THAT’S bold y’all.
The article continues…
Many say the influx has led to overcrowded classrooms, drained school budgets and a slowed learning process.
“There is nothing I can say that is more outrageous than to see this kind of theft, because that is what it is,” said parent Al Sides.
School administrators say kids on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder are most disadvantaged when schools become overwhelmed by large numbers of non-English speaking students. One University of Southern California study shows that 94 percent of students in the Los Angeles Unified School District learn English as a second language.
One in six students in California are children of illegal immigrants though many are born in the United States and therefore are U.S. citizens. Education for children of illegal immigrants costs Golden State taxpayers almost $8 billion a year. The state ranks 48th in student achievement; nearly 50 percent can’t read at grade level, 40 percent underperform in math and 30 percent drop out. Schools that repeatedly fail state proficiency tests lose millions of dollars in state and federal aid. (link)
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What I would love to do with this posting is to pack it with enough information so that it could be used as a resource for blacks in cyberspace. It disturbs me that the only way this issue is really being discussed in much of black cyberspace is primarily from a racial angle. We need to also understand how this issue is affecting our communities, our local schools, economy, etc. If you have any information that you would like to share on this topic, please feel free to do so. At some point I would like to compile everything gathered in this mini project and make it into a .pdf file (keeping my brothas and sistahs who are currently enrolled in school in mind).
Stay tuned!!
January 25th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
I look forward to the finished product.
It’s interesting that you say black cyberspace takes on the issue primarily from a racial angle.
As you know I happen to be white and if I make metion of illegal immigration (which I do often) I am accused of being a racist.
Recently I was given a threat (via email) because of something I wrote about immigration. I was called a racist and a Nazi among other names.
However someone I know who was born and raised in America but whoes parents came from Mexico is a ‘race-trader’ because he is also against illegal immigration.